How we got our first 500 users for free
I wrote an article sometime ago about how a comment I left on a Product Hunt launch led to my involvement in a new startup called Feedboard. You can read that one here.
Our arrangement was for me to handle some promotional strategies for Feedboard. When I joined the team, we were sitting at around 150 users and we've now crossed 500 users without a penny in ad spend and very little effort.
Our best performing strategies:
Newsletter submissions
We submitted our product and got featured on a lot of newsletters including:
Cross promos with a twist
Cross promos are great but we don't have a big enough audience to be able to cross promo with any meaningful audience. However, I own a few other newsletters with 10,000+ subscribers.
So, I'd reach out to newsletters of a similar size, setup a few cross promos, but instead of promoting my newsletter, they'd promote Feedboard. This way, we got Feedboard featured on several big newsletters for free. Quite proud of this one myself.
Lettergrowth was really useful for sorting out these promos.
Directories
We submitted Feedboard to BetaList and it became trending which gave us a good boost. We also submitted to 20+ other directories including:
Subreddits
We submitted a few posts asking for feedback on relevant subreddits. It didn't perform brilliantly but we definitely got some exposure. Here are some of the subreddits we used:
- r/AlphaandBetausers
- r/Entrepreneur
- r/EntrepreneurRideAlong
- r/IMadeThis
- r/IndieBiz
- r/InternetIsBeautiful
- r/microsaas
- r/NicheWebsites
- r/RoastMyStartup
- r/SideProject
- r/SmallBusiness
- r/Startups
- r/Startup_Ideas
BuildInPublic
Every time we shipped a new feature, learned something or reached a milestone, we Tweeted about it and shared our progress with our personal networks. Here's an example of a well performing Tweet.
Guest posting
The article you're reading right now falls within this category. I published a few articles like this on Indiehackers and other publications.
We also shipped a lot of new features and product improvements since then, including a weekly digest that's sent straight to your inbox.
We will soon do a stronger relaunch on Product Hunt as well but 6 months have to pass since our previous launch, so it's been postponed for now. Overall, our growth is steady now with no direct effort which is a massive win.
I hope you enjoyed this article and can take a thing or two away for your own projects. I'd love to hear your thoughts on our approach. Do you have any suggestions?
Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@arianadeliii)
What was the criteria of directories you choose?
My criteria for them or otherwise? My criteria was activity I suppose. I submitted to a lot of them and learned which worked best. On their end, they normally just require some basic information about your submission.
Love this! Imagine what you’d do with an advertising budget!
In due time we'll implement a budget too! Glad you enjoyed it!
Love this, growth strategies that don’t cost a penny are always the best.
Great read!
At the early stages, it's the best approach for sure. Especially for projects of this scale.
Thanks for sharing Arian! We also heavily ised directories for our launch including BetaList but didn’t have much success.
Dis you try a ProductHunt launch?
We have done so in the past. However, that was before I joined the the team. Cannot do an
Perfect, this helped me a lot.
I’m glad!
Paid customers?
No, the service is entirely free.
Thanks for the tips and good luck :)
Thanks a lot!
Thank you for sharing useful information.
Happy you liked it!
Thanks! Valuable for our venture as well.
Glad it's useful!
Sharing this type of post is also one type of marketing. I'm bookmarking all these types of marketing strategies like, roast my landing page, why my submit form is not working, Which copy of the website is written by AI.... etc
Absolutely! Best of luck to you as well!
Thanks a lot for this list Arian, bookmarking this gold ressource.
So glad you found it useful!
There are so many resources out there to post to, so it's nice to see a few that were useful to you!
Glad you liked the article!
thats amazing
Thanks a lot!
Great one , Thank you
Happy you liked it!
So insightful and great story. Thanks for sharing valuable information.
A pleasure! Glad you liked it!
@ArianAdeli Your product is amazing. Thank you for sharing your strategy for acquiring users for your product. I found it very insightful. I hope your product achieves great results.
Thanks a lot! Glad it helped!
great share, thanks pal
Happy you enjoyed it!
Sure did a lot of work! It's admirable. It's worth it anyway!
Thanks! Glad you liked it!
Adding users is great, and these seem like solid strategies for some wins. Which of these strategies has resulted in the most revenue?
Feedboard in particular is a free service at the moment, but I suppose the channel that drives the most users would also drive the most revenue.
That also depends but the most sustainable one for us is the cross promos, especially because we can expose our product to various audiences for free for as long as we want.
Ah, that's a good point. I couldn't tell from the landing page if there was a revenue model. You're probably right that "sustainability" is a good analogue in your situation. It's useful to know that the cross-promo category seems to perform best.
Thanks for the informative post, and for answering my question! Best of luck!
Hello Arian, thanks for sharing super useful resources.
How often do you make posts for X(Twitter) ?
Do you have some strategy or schedule for posting
I used to post daily, I’ve been really packed these past couple weeks so it’s been quite on and off.
I aim for daily but now I do it every couple days.
Love This.
Glad you liked it!
Thanks for sharing! I'll save the list for later
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great post! Thank you for the cross promo and for being featured in other newsletter tips. Such low-hanging fruits and haven't thought about it yet myself.
Glad you enjoyed it, happy to help!
Thank your for your inspirational article!
Happy you liked it!
Wow I will be doing trying these next week.Maybe I'll share my results.
Looking forward to it!
Extremely helpful.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thanks for sharing your insights and strategies for Feedboard's growth. Impressive approach with newsletters, cross promos, directories, and social media. Looking forward to your Product Hunt relaunch! Keep up the great work!
Thanks a lot, glad you enjoyed it!
amazing insights! which other publications? I'm looking for other places outside IH to post.
Not sure what to pick.
HackerNoon, Medium, Dev To, these are some places you could try.
Thanks for sharing. I would also like to add social media content creation. It made wonders for my startup zerobranded.com. I created a TikTok account and started posting content about our product one video got around 2300 views.
We use that for another product of ours. Our TikTok's getting millions of views per month which is a great marketing channel for sure. However, we run many projects and have to keep them lean. So, we decided to not create any socials for Feedboard.
This is profound. I think I'm going to try to newsletter cross-promotion with Lettergrowth to grow my SaaS newsletter, "EarlyNode." Congratulations.
Glad you liked it! Best of luck with EarlyNode.
Great!
Thanks!
Thanks, it's going to be very useful for my SaaS project "TapRefer". Let's see how it performs.
Best of luck!
Thanks for sharing. Pretty insightfull.
Glad you liked it!
Impressive growth!
Thanks!
This was such a great read, thank you for sharing. I'm curious about one thing - before you launched your MVP, did you utilize strategies like a waiting list? This is what I intent to do for my product. The main reason for me is that I'd love to talk to customers to reiterate on my product even before I launch it for the first time. I obviously I want to gauge the demand. But I am kind of struggling to find the best ways to promote a product that is still unfinished.
Founder Site by Lucas Rantzau is a great example of a product implementing this I think. However, we didn't do that. The initial launch was before I was involved anyway. Albeit Fabio Monzani (the founder) made the MVP, launched on Product Hunt and, shortly after, we partnered up.
Got it! And again - thanks so much for sharing!
Happy to help!
Didnt you have to pay to get featured on startups.fyi?
From what I know, there is an option to pay to skip the queue. We didn't.
Okay cool and did it take 6 months for you? Submitting now too
No but there is a relatively long waiting list.
Great info, honestly.
Glad you liked it!
Very cool idea would love to see it on prodpapa as well 🚀
Happy you liked it! Best of luck with your project!
Hey man, amazing read. Can you drop your email or WA, would love to get in contact. Also posted an article on how to farm your first users, lmk what u think: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-validate-your-product-through-a-fake-door-4df8c323fe
Thanks! I can’t drop my contacts here but feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @ arianadeliii. I’ll give the article a read as well now!
Hey man, I don't have Twitter but can do via email: ndrdbrv1@gmail.com
Thanks 👍
It makes sense that diversifying your promotional strategies speeds up the growing process. Thanks for sharing!
Glad you liked it!