4 steps that took my startup from $0 to $35k in sales
Hey guys, I wanted to share our story in hopes it would be useful to others.
In December, we just graduated from the startup accelerator with our product JustBeepIt and neither had a marketing budget nor any sales.
So we made a list of all the free ways we can use to grow our visibility and sales:
- Product Hunt launch
- Reddit, Medium, Indiehackers posts
- AppSumo Select launch
- Being active on LinkedIn/Twitter
- We started with Product Hunt launch. Our goal was obviously to get the first spot.
We took this very seriously and started preparing 4 weeks in advance. Our strategy was to grow our mailing list to 3-4k people, who we would email/dm during the launch day. That strategy was successful and we got 1st spot. I wrote a separate post about it describing our strategy on Medium first previously.
- Writing posts on IndieHackers, Reddit and Medium.
I developed a strategy called "Infinite Marketing Glitch" for writing posts. The idea is simple, every time we have a success regardless whether it is small or big, I would make a post out of it. Examples: "Our first 100 users", "our first sale", "getting 1st spot on ProductHunt", etc. Many posts would go viral. I described this strategy in my medium post. It would even get me to the home page of IndieHackers.
- Being active on LinkedIn/Twitter
This is a simple strategy that many founders miss. Just post about your company. I post at least 5 posts in total every week about our product and its failures and success. It currently brings close to 40% of our overall traffic. LinkedIn is especially good if your product is B2B. Twitter is great for finding first-time users. By posting about our company, I didn't only bring thousands of people to our landing page but also grew my account from 100 to over 2k followers.
- AppSumo Select
This was the last step in our strategy. You are probably aware of AppSumo, but do you know about AppSumo Select? If you get into that program, they pay for your ads, so it was good for us since we had no marketing budget. But to get in there needs to be something unique about your product. The reason they accepted us is most likely due to our ProductHunt results and tons of good feedback.
With all that said, last month our product, JustBeepIt made $12k and reached $35k in total sales by doing the things I described here. If you have any questions, feel free to comment.
I share all the strategies that we try, both successful and failed ones on my twitter, follow me there to keep updated.
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I agree with the 3rd point in the sense that many founders just miss this, I did for the last couple of years and now I'm trying to stay active, at least on LinkedIn, I just realized the importance of making content in general and I think it would have helped to grow a lot faster than we did if I had realized sooner, but better later than never I guess! Nice post!
Being active on LinkedIn has had many interesting positive side effects. For example, we got featured in multiple media because journalists found my LinkedIn posts. Or investors would contact us after seeing my LinkedIn posts.
nice
Great insight! Very inspiring, I'll try to do my best to replicate it!
Great insights! Really appreciate it.
Great insights, Farid! As someone managing a tech-focused website, your strategies resonate well. The "Infinite Marketing Glitch" is a particularly brilliant approach for consistently engaging the audience. I’m keen to apply these tactics to drive more traffic and visibility. Thanks for sharing your journey!
Glad to hear that Jannet! I hope it will work well for you :) I have actually described it in depth in my video : https://youtu.be/VfBH7PiSaIE
Great strategy and inspiration to the new marketers.
Great post! Thank you for sharing.
very usefull, i can use in my projects. thanks.
Inspirational insights! Farid Shukurov's journey illustrates actionable steps crucial for startup success. Valuable lessons shared. Thanks for sharing!
How did you manage to collect the emails before launch any strategies you can share
We found people in multiple places:
We found people there, then dm-ed them and asked if they want to get notified when we launch. Here is the strategy we used: https://medium.com/@farid_plus/bulletproof-strategy-to-win-at-product-hunt-5da986f1a55f
3k to 4k email addresses from just DMs? That's impressive.
How did you manage to send emails to those people? As far as I know, no email automation platform allows you to add and send automated emails this way.
Either you didn't send them automated emails, or you asked people to subscribe through a landing page. Right?
To clarify, it was a list of over 3k people, but not all emails, many of them were their LinkedIn/Twitter profiles as well. If we reached out to them on LinkedIn initially, then we would just save their LinkedIn link and then on the launch day message them on LinkedIn. It was all manual work. We had two teammates whose goal was to message 100 people a day asking if they want to get notified when we launch. Then on the launch day we had the whole team 4 people dm-ing everyone from the list.
I got you. Thanks for the clerification @freds_gallery
Wooow thanks for sharing this valuable knowledge with us!
Antonio, CEO & Founder at Litlyx
Thanks for sharing Farid! interesting, I'm gonna have a look to your medium articles.
Thanks a lot for these hacks!
Where were you posting on Reddit? I found that posting about www.joinorderly.com on most subreddits quickly got me blocked by mods
That's Reddit policy, you cannot directly post or promote any content, you can only do it by earning karmas, so you need to start with answering relevant questions and then slowly you will get to post.
Thanks for the share Farid. Curious how you Dm'ed profiles in Linkedin did you have a paid sales navigator account?
Side note: Checked out your product, super impressive and a nifty tool to share feedback, loved it!
great share man! keep crushing!
Looks great. We might just add that to fabform.io
Thank you so much for sharing your insights! I've followed you on Twitter and look forward to reading more~!
Love this post. Super helpful. I'm curious about the LinkedIn outreach. Did you have a paid account? Did you just connect with a note? I know that LinkedIn puts a cap on how many people you can connect with unless you're on a paid account. Maybe this is why you said to use multiple accounts? Did you use any services like Apollo to get people's email addresses and just do cold outreach through email?
So interesting, I am following a similar strategy. Haven't considered Appsumo yet, but you made me think. Thanks for this!
Thank you for sharing your inspiring journey with JustBeepIt and the invaluable strategies you employed to achieve remarkable success without a marketing budget. Your proactive approach to leveraging platforms like Product Hunt, Reddit, Medium, and IndieHackers showcases the power of grassroots marketing and community engagement. The "Infinite Marketing Glitch" strategy is particularly ingenious, highlighting the importance of celebrating every milestone, no matter how small, to foster continuous growth and visibility. Your emphasis on active engagement on LinkedIn and Twitter underscores the significance of personal branding and consistent communication with your audience. Moreover, your experience with AppSumo Select highlights the importance of finding unique selling points to access valuable resources. Your story serves as a beacon of inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs, illustrating that with dedication and strategic thinking, significant milestones can be achieved. As someone passionate about empowering startups, I'm excited to follow your journey and glean insights for our own endeavors at swiftstart.
I wish fabform.io had those sales numbers
Your first link appears to be broken
thank you for letting me know, just fixed it. This is the link: https://www.justbeepit.com/
Wonderful post Farid! About being active on LinkedIn/Twitter, it's important to note that for many it's a 'pay to win' structure.
However, if you've got the means, you'll get your wins -worked for videofeedbackr with us :)
The biggest impact will only be made if your product is getting seen out there.
Thank you for your valuable advice. It's very educational for me. 😊
Love this story, @freds_gallery. Your Product Hunt experiment shows that you have to go all-in on something for it to work well. You can't just randomly post it one day and hope you get traction
exactly. Most people just post and wait for a miracle. Product Hunt is hard work. On the same day with us Midjourney V6 launched but we still beat them because they just launched without doing any marketing work. Obiously they don't need PH, but just wanted to show that even if you have amazing product it doesn't mean anything currently on PH.
Great job, but honestly I expected a lot more from AppSumo Select.
Usually people post around 6 figures for Select.
I think the ones who post about 6 figures, are probably the top stories. I have also seen similar stories. Unfortunately, we didn't get there, but I mainly think because we didn't get our landing page right, and also I am not sure how well our product fit into the typical AppSumo user.