WritePhobia

For writephobia I really want to get PPC and inbound working well. So I was thinking more about the types of users the app appeals to, and as I was listening to the "Writing Excuses" podcast I realized that listeners of this particular podcast are exactly my target market.

One feature of the Writing Excuses podcast is that every episode has a writing exercise or prompt at the end. Google Ads keyword research told me that "writing prompts" gets a small but respectable number of searches per month.

So first I went out to see if I could easily and quickly get a big list of writing prompts. I used octoparse to grab the top-of-all-time on /r/writingprompts, and then all the writing prompts from the writing excuses website. I quickly generated a list of 1500 solid writing prompts.

Then I built a landing page on writephobia.com/writing-prompts, set up a google ad campaign, and finally actually built the writing prompt generator into the app.

I won't get a ton of clicks from these search ads, maybe 5-10 a day, but I'm hoping they will have good conversion rates. The assumption is that people who want writing prompts will also want an app that keeps them writing.

We'll see though. My google ads are still pending approval. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Either way, I think this is a good example of looking for a niche and using it to inform both marketing and product feature development.

WritePhobia now has a couple of active users with credit card information, and today I billed them for the first time! An entire $3!

Oh, BTW, did you know that if you give a user an account credit in Stripe that it only applies to invoices? It doesn't apply to payment intents. So I tried to set up these users with some beta-tester credits, assuming that when I did charge them it would come out of their credit balance. But no. Stripe charged their cards. So I'll need to figure out a way to set up comped accounts outside of Stripe. Vaguely annoying.

WritePhobia just got its second real user. The first user came in from a Reddit comment section, and the second user came in from the 100 users in 100 days networking group. There's a third user, but they didn't enter their credit card or verify their email. I'm still struggling to find the right marketing channel!