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45 Comments

If you had $1000 to spend on growth, how would you spend it?

Thinking of investing in growth more to speed things up. Ideally things that would supercharger growth today rather than longer game tactics.

Any thoughts or successful experiences?

Edit: my project is tiiny.host

posted to Icon for group Growth
Growth
on May 15, 2020
  1. 8

    Content Marketing. Pay a writer/researcher and a great illustrator to produce 5 high quality pieces of content.

    1. 4

      Is this really doable? I'm an engineer and seriously doubt I can find anyone knowledgable the way I require my posts to be.

      1. 7

        For you, probably not. But the question was for me. You'll have a totally different answer. And honestly content lasts for a very very long time.

        Depends on how you want to interact with your users and potential users.
        Your content might be a side project. maybe it's videos.

        Maybe you need to hire an editor instead of a writer. Maybe you hire specifically a copywriter. Or a technical writer.

        If you had $1,000 perhaps you could hire a youtuber to make killer videos for you.
        if you make a highly technical side project, maybe hire a designer and illustrator to make it look great and shareable.

        Maybe you write a piece and hire a social media marketer to seed it.

        for me. I'm happy to make more content of my potential users. No need to push that money into ads.

    2. 2

      What about marketing your marketing material? That's a bit difficult too and essential otherwise your great content is lost

      1. 2

        Great content can be seeded to existing communities. No need to pay for ads if that's what you mean.

        You absolutely can pay for ads. but you don't need to.

    3. 2

      What's the best place to find content writers for project work?

      1. 2

        Found a good one posting on reddits r/ForHire you just post your website and how much you're looking to pay and people apply.

    4. 1

      where do you find those writers to write the articles for you for $200 each?

      1. 1

        All over. Expats in SEA (craigslist, FB Groups), Freelance writers who you enjoy their work. Usually writers have examples. Find guest writers on publications that take inquiries. Reach out to them.

    5. 1

      For $200 each? High quality content?

      Most B2B content writers charge more than that for 1/2 a day. That doesn't include distribution (as there is no existing social following, no site domain authority), or illustration.

      1. 1

        You should have some domain experience and be able to relate an idea in some way. At times you can just hire an illustrator or designer. Sometimes you'll need to hire a researcher for $5 an hour on upwork. And you should write to your audience.

        Distribution is easy if you know where your audience already goes to for information. You don't need existing twitter audience or any social.

        I for sure would pay more than $200 for a day's work of technical writing and researching.

        A writer or an editor should be shape your work and information into a coherent b2b writing.

        Make it easy on them. Record loom videos on the topic and have them editorialize.

        Record audio on quicktime what you want. Outline it for them and provide them resources of where they get the info.

        A writer shouldn't have to research and a researcher might not be able to write.

        You may only be able to pay $5 for an illustration on one article, but want an infographic for $100 on another one. And an infographic should be some basic copywriting. something you can do if you only have $1,000.

        1. 1

          My point was, almost without fail, you do not get high quality content for $200.

          Can you give me an example of a piece of content marketing that drove referral or social reach that cost $200?

          1. 2

            In 2018 I hired a writer for Influence 100. Cost less than $200 actually. Doubled my subscriber count in 2 weeks. (around 300 subscribers, Mostly execs at marketing agencies)

            I spent under $200 for the illustration on Influence 100. Drove 700 subscribers in 2019 to my newsletter for business in the influencer marketing industry.

            NOTE: If you're placing all of your researching and writing and distribution into one person's workload. It's not going to do well.

            If you bring your own expertise and experience to the table, you can find editors and writers who can mold your work way more than can write it originally for you.

            I wrote a book on instagram growth years ago. Here's how I did it:

            1. I outlined what i wanted to write.
            2. I hired writers to interview me.
            3. They'd listen to me for 30 minutes, record it, and then ask 10 questions.
            4. We did a couple of follow up 30 minute calls.
            5. They added in any responses
            6. I'd get a well written version of the talk. I could edit as I needed.

            I did that 12 times and there was 12 chapters of a book.
            Each chapter took me about 4 hours in total. The writers took about 4-5 hours total. I paid them $100 each.

            For $1,200 I had a book written.

            Each chapter was released as a stand alone essay. and cost $100 each.

            You do this for free: Record a loom video. upload it to descript. get a transcription made in descript. Edit that.

            1. 1

              That's a good approach, if you're happy to pay people less than $20 an hour for writing, and $5 for an illustration. To me it sounds like you hired people to transcribe not write. That's one difference.

              There's also significant expense in your own time - both the interviews, recruiting of writers, reviewing, publishing and in the cases you detail - the work to distribute it which seems like a significant amount of time spent engaging an already hard-won network of industry contacts.

              As you've not mentioned any paid cost here, I'm assuming you did some outreach, and social posts.

              In fact you mentioned 700 subscribes on the second piece of content. If we work on a 1/10 conversion rate on that content piece (extremely high), where exactly did the 7,000 organic people come from?

              If you included your own hourly rate here, what are we then talking?

              I am not suggesting what you're saying isn't smart and it is interesting and inspiring as a format.

              But big audiences don't just arrive on content produced by others for $200 and stuck online.

    6. 1

      This comment was deleted 5 years ago.

  2. 5

    I would spend on fb ads in interavals. $50, then tweak the site. $50 check conversion. Ideally It would be an iterative process to increase conversion rate and then test with more ads

  3. 2

    I have to say, most of the "advice" you're getting here isn't great.

    Before spending any money, you need to establish product market fit. (Google it if you're not sure what this is).

    Also you definitely should NOT spend any money until your product is making money.

    Assuming you DO have product market fit, and you are charging for your product though, it would make sense to run tests across different platforms to see what converts the best. Ultimately you need to figure out what your CAC (customer acquisition cost) is across these platforms, and make sure that you're making more money off each customer then you're spending.

    1. 1

      I appreciate the honest thoughts. I think you're right, it doesn't make sense to spend money on ads. I have a handful of paying users and some steady traffic but I really want to supercharge that.

      Whilst I definitely haven't hit product market fit, I am sure that if I've found a few users whom are willing subscribe to the service then there are 100s of them out there who would too (without needing any changes to the app). It's a big market.

      I am also working on this part time so don't have a lot of time to do continuous outreach and marketing. I think some sort of part time marketing person may be a good idea. But the question is what type and where would I go to find one?

      1. 1

        Well that's the thing, you can't super charge your product growth with ads until you've proven definitively that this something that people want.

        For instance, say you get 100 people to use your product, if 100 of them abandon the product within 30 days, then you can assume that the product wasn't a fit for any of these users.

        If you buy ads at this stage, you'll be throwing money away, because even if you do get customers to sign up, there's a low probability that they'll convert to paying customers with an LTV to justify the initial ad spend.

        You'll want to refine the product until you do notice some stickiness.

        For instance, say that 30 people of the 100 you're testing with stick, and continue to use the product, month over month. That'll give you an idea of what percentage of new users you can expect to stick around... and you can start to figure out how much it's costing you to capture a real user (i.e. a user that actually sticks around and becomes a paying customer).

        If you want to pay for these initial users to figure this out, I think that's fine. But honestly, I think you're better off trying to network with others, and get real feedback.

        Once you do have product market fit, you can buy ads, and you'll be certain to get a good ROI. At that point it's kind of like pouring gasoline on a fire.

        ---

        Also, I wouldn't hire anyone for this. Most of us are working on our stuff part time.

        Every expert I've heard or talked to has emphasized the importance of the CEO being the primary sales person. You need to be the one to get into the trenches and figure out how to get people to care about the product.

        Hopefully this is all somewhat helpful! Best of luck.

        J

  4. 2

    Pls be careful how you spend it. It comes down to growth vs profitability. Most startups fail because they invest in growth and cost of getting a new customer becomes > customer lifetime value of that customer. You can blow through 10's of millions this way.

    Bill Gates said that if he was down to his last 100$ or so he'd spend it on PR. The trouble with PPC marketing is its linear. One prospect per click. Influencers are possibly exponential.

    Know your customers. Spend 10x money on the customers with the highest CLV. Save money on the marketing by highly targeting.

    1. 1

      That's a great point! Do you follow any strategy to identity and reach out to influencers?

      1. 1

        Personalize your correspondence. Don't use cut and paste templates off the internet. They've seen them 100's of times before.

        Use soft touches. Follow them on all their social media channels. Add them to your twitter list. Do this over time. No excuse for reaching out cold. Too easy to connect on SM first.

        Go after micro influencers that you can afford. Remember everyone listens to the same channel WIIFM (what's in it for me).

        Ask them for permission to link to their social media / website from yours.

        Use buzzsumo or sparktoro.

        Interview them. Write about them. Evangelise them.

        Build relationships by helping them achieve their goals.

        Hope this helps

        1. 1

          Wow amazing practical tips! Thank you so much 🙌

  5. 2

    I would pay some influencers in my audience to post some promotional content on their twitter.

    This has many advantages compared to marketing via ads:

    • more trust from the influencer followers
    • you create a relationship with the influencer, making him an advocate of your product (if he likes it)
    • automatically create instant social proof for your landing page
    • possibility that the posted content becomes viral

    The most successful dev products use this approach, look at hasura, Vercel, Netlify, etc

    1. 1

      Great idea. Any advice on how to best find them and reach out?

  6. 2

    I would spend my first 50$ on google adwords (worldwide campaing) + install wordpress on your site to check how people is using it.

  7. 2

    It's hard to give good advice on this without knowing more about your business. Every company is unique.

    I'd be happy to start a conversation and help you do a bit of brainstorming if you'd like. My email address is in my bio.

  8. 2

    Depending on the stage of business, I would either go a content route and play the long game with quality SEO content.

    Or I would go with a facebook campaign of some kind.

    1. 1

      Good points thanks. Long game should definitely be ticking away but I was looking for more supercharger routes. Ads is worth considering but it feel like you need to know what you're doing otherwise you'll just waste money. Not sure if there any good guides out there (there's a lot of noise around this too).

      1. 2

        spend $50 a day and learn. Let the ad algorithms tell you what works. produce 100 formats of ads. one of them will work.

      2. 2

        If you don't know, spend it on a digital marketer course in ads? Then use the rest as your budget? https://www.digitalmarketer.com/

  9. 1

    Maybe the best way of spending on growth would be to find someone from the field I care about and paying him to teach me everything there is. It might be something akward at first but I think it might be what I need to grow. I've been looking up mentors on https://getapy.com/catalogue, seems worth it.

  10. 1

    Ads, Ads, Ads and a couple of launch days to match!

  11. 1

    My answer is biased because I wrote and follow the methodology at http://pregrowth.guide

    I would use up to $500 to recruit potential customers to interview. With that budget, you can safely recruit 5-10 customers and nail your messaging and positioning to convert a cold audience.

    Use interviews to get crystal on three things:

    • Your target market and the channels to reach them
    • The problems they really care about solving (rather than something you imagined) and what they've tried in the past to solve those problems
    • How to frame your solution so it speaks directly to the problems your target customer is trying to solve

    (Hint: the findings always surprise founders when they hear directly from potential customers. Also, avoid talking to people you know; they'll care about your feelings too much.)

    The open guide linked above shows you exactly how to do this from A to Z.

    Then, AFTER I have created positioning and messaging that will resonate with a cold audience from my customer interviews, I would focus on building awareness and trust with that audience.

    No matter how amazing your product is or how much money it can save your customer, no one will buy from you if they don't know or trust you.

    Using the knowledge I have gained through interviews, I would focus on specific communities/social platforms to create value for my market and build my brand/familiarity.

    This can take many forms. It could mean creating original content, helping out with a small service, connecting people, etc. It fully depends on your product/market and what you found through your interviews.

    And if needed, I'd spend the remaining $500 on editing/copywriting/design to make sure anything I create to build awareness and trust has a high quality bar.

  12. 1

    I'd spend $500 to do some user testing on my landing page/site to make sure people understand what the heck I'm selling. After I've run some tests and made some tweaks and know that people "get it" and I wouldn't be throwing money away, I'd spend the rest experimenting with Facebook ads.

    I'm planning on doing this once I've finished the copy for my site. Hopefully it goes well :-)

  13. 1

    I would define my objective and work back from there.

    'Growth' is a a nebulous terms and could mean lots of things.

  14. 1

    I would ask your users what they want :) Pick something you can't do yourself and spend the cash on that. Or contact Carrd users and ask what they miss now.

    Content is a great way to get noticed but it usually tends not to be the fastest way to get noticed.

  15. 1

    I feel I don’t need money for growth atm. And probably a lot of other IHs need it either. Just keep iterating until you’ve found what works.

  16. 1

    content content content!!!

  17. 1

    I would spend it on books and courses to learn new valuable skills that you can use to generate lots of revenue for your business.

  18. 1

    Right now we need beta users. So I am surprising myself by saying Facebook ads or Google ads lol.

    1. 1

      If you need any help with it, I would love to be of assistance. Let me know.

  19. 1

    If my product was an iOS app, I would spend a fraction $250 on sending announcement of the app to journalists all over the world using iSpreadNews.com service, and would spend the rest on paying journalists for paid articles about it.

    1. 1

      How does iSpreadNews.com compare with issuing a press release? Did your app get picked up by review sites?

      1. 1

        What iSpreadNews.com is

        1. improving text of the announcement (or press-release)
        2. sending announcement to journalists via email
        3. sending announcement to journalists via contact forms
          So sending press-release is a part of tasks iSpreadNews.com does for you. They've collected a huge database of journalists from all over the world.

        They have "Our clients" page who used their service with some success.

        1. 1

          Sounds good. I might try them out, thanks!

  20. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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