How #buildinpublic Brought the First 10 Customers for Screen Studio and Later Became the Main Marketing Challenge

Context & the Product

I’m Adam, Founder of screen.studio. I created my first website when I was 11 and still do it 20 years later.

Screen Studio allows you to create beautiful screen recordings in minutes.

The main problem we try to solve: allow you to quickly show your product (or tutorial, help material, etc.) in a beautiful way without any video editing skills needed.

Getting the first 10 customers by building in public

I started to build in public and found some satisfaction in showing my progress daily, even though I usually had 0-2 likes on my tweets. But it was a good way to close the day.

I needed to test my payment flow, so I put it on our not-ready website. I decided to put a banner on top of the website saying “This website is not ready yet” to avoid confusion.

A quite well-known CEO liked one of my Tweets, and it started going viral a bit (~1000 likes). To my huge surprise, I got 3 sales this way from people who wanted to support it.

So in a way, my product launched itself instead of me launching it.

I was so excited I had the most intense work day in my life. I sat on my chair in the morning, and at 4 PM I moved my butt on it and realized this was the first time during the entire day I moved my butt.

I launched the product after a few days and started getting at least a few new customers daily.

Current Stats

We started in October 2022 and now have over 8000 customers.

The growth has been rather linear in the last few months, with a very slight growth trend.

The Main Marketing Challenge

The main challenge is that marketing of Screen Studio is very closely tied to my personal profile.

I see a clear correlation between the count and popularity of my tweets and sales. Also, Twitter is still by far the biggest source of traffic (except direct traffic). It sometimes creates uncomfortable pressure to keep tweeting.

Plan to solve it: Invest way more in organic channels such as SEO and content marketing. We’re currently learning it, so we don’t have precise plans yet.

P.S. That's a part of my weekly newsletter. I share Case Studies with marketing case studies from profitable Indie Founders.

You can subscribe for Free and get them straight to your inbox every Monday 💌 https://makerbox.ck.page/marketingbay