Mindset shift: if your product helps people, it is your moral duty to promote it
Do you recognize yourself in the following description:
- you pour your heart and soul into your product
- you listen to your users and keep improving your product to better match their needs, day by day
- you’ve got at least a few active users and people who told you they loved it
If that’s the case, then it's clear your product provides real value. Having people go out of their way to tell you is proof of that.
You might still be in beta and don't provide all the bells and whistles of your $1B+ competition. But for the people who choose to use your product, it doesn’t matter.
Maybe because you offer unique features, or because you listen to them and make updates quickly. Or maybe just because you’re a human-sized company and they prefer it.
In any case, it is an undeniable fact that your product brings them real value and makes a positive impact on their lives.
…
..
.
SO WHY AREN’T YOU PROMOTING IT TO MORE PEOPLE?!
You’ve managed to create something of value for the world, and have already changed a few people’s lives for the better. Yet you’re feeling shy about talking about it?
When you don’t promote your product to the world, you not only hurt yourself, you also hurt the people who desperately need your solution. They might be okay using one of your competitors, but if they knew you existed, they would be way better off.
If you have the opportunity to truly make someone’s life better, at no cost (and even at a benefit) to you, wouldn’t you say that it’s your moral duty to do so?
That’s exactly the position that you’re in right now. There are millions of people out there, and most of them have never heard of your product. If you reached out to them, they would feel insanely grateful that you did, because you'd make their lives better.
So go promote it in every way that you can! Go on reddit, go on twitter, go on producthunt, go on meetups...
Give people the gift of discovering your product, so that they can improve their lives. It is your moral duty to do so.
I've followed my own advice and started being less shy about logology lately. Started spreading the word on reddit and ph discussion boards. It's brought some very good results.
👇 Now it's your turn, tell us about your product below!
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This is a fantastic point! (hence why this post has gotten so many upvotes)
The thing I struggle with is trying not to sound spammy when talking about it. You mentioned posting on reddit and ph discussion boards... how do you find that balance of talking about it because it "helps people and it's your moral duty to promote it" and then also "stop spamming me with your product/service"?
That's the one thing that I see on here and other places -- people clearly blasting their link -- and to me that gets pretty annoying.
(Not posting my startup link here due to the point above hah)
Thank you Kyle!
I think it has a lot to do with the "fear of being spammy" more than being spammy.
Sure people who blast their links without any second thoughts are annoying, but there are some ways you can do it in a clean way.
A few things I've learned as I pushed myself to do this lately:
Beyond that, the big thing to realize is that there are people who would be super grateful to use your product, but right now they have no idea it exists. To reach them, there's no way around promoting yourself.
It's normal to feel uncomfortable at first, but if you keep trying and stay considerate of other people, you can get the word out in a way that's positive and not annoying.
If you look at the other comments in this post, a lot of them talk about their own product, but I don't think any of them could be seen as spam.
Now please tell us about your product 😄
Awesome insight, thanks!!
Since you asked... I'm working on Removaly which is a tool to remove your personal information from the internet :)
Awesome, removaly is really well done, looks like a finished product to me. did you already get some customers? There might be some interest in subreddits related to data privacy and cyber security.
I aggree with you @kylekrzeski. There is a very thin line there, between those two. And if you are a sensitive person not to even link in this comment, you are probably holding back much more than those who have crappy products but high voice.
Yup 100000% this mate
If you think your product is really beneficial to others and will improve their lives it is without a doubt your moral duty to promote it!
Been pumping https://smartwriter.ai for that reason!
Thanks for this
Your welcome Vaibhav! But I'm not seeing any mention of your product 🧐😀
Good catch! Updated!
Wow I’m really happy you did. The copy on your site is really good, very convincing. Saving it for when I cold outreach.
Thanks mate, keen to see you win if you use us!
Hi Dagobert. Its true what you said. So i dont want to wait more on my product https://aligly.com already I have wait of four year. Now I have launched it today publically. I always feel shy in public to launch it to think over it "what peple will say about it ". I acumulate some positive thought to launch it. Everything will be fine just launch it. I afraid because i failed may times in past years. But i learn lot.
It offers a lot - I like it but please have a copywriter go through it.
Thank you to identify that part. copywriter has update it.
Here's the thing. Even if you failed many times in the past, don't you think it could help at least some people?
When I look at your landing page, sure I think it might still be improvable. But it also looks professional and well thought out. So there's probably people out there who need to build advanced landing pages who would be super grateful to hear about it.
Maybe just do a round of feedback here on indiehackers, to polish the rough edges, and then start promoting it more heavily.
Definitly I will imrove it. Basically this aligly landing page is also built with from aligly builder tool.
Oh that's really good, you should mention that somewhere!
Thanks for your suggestion I mention it in aligly.
I'm growing more comfortable now, with the new website, but up until recently https://www.uclusion.com did not have the marketing to back up the product. You don't list that as a prerequisite but you should. No point in chatting up a product across social media if your website can't explain the value add.
BTW our value add is project management without meetings.
That's a good point. You do need a landing page with a basic value prop that people can understand. Not that easy to do I agree...
Uclusion looks really well thought out. Love that you have recorded videos to explain everything. It seems like it's ready to find its audience! (which I assume is technical project managers?)
We hope developers can be the entry point into our sale but that's not well tested either. Technical project managers seem to lean heavily towards meeting driven process; which is why we have so much meeting driven process. I'd hope to convince some of them to something new also but seems like easier to start with software developers.
Seems like a legitimate assumption, if you convince the software dev then they'll do the heavy lifting for you and convince the project manager.
BTW Logology is almost spooky in its ability to generate marketing. Here's what it says:
Uclusion is a reliable startup with an original voice.
As a business, Uclusion is trustworthy, safe and solid. People perceive it as unique and trendy.
Examples: Trello, Zendesk.
and then it generated this logo for me.
Respect!
Thank you so much David, I really appreciate it! We try to put as much care into it as we can, so it means a lot.
The branding you have right now for uclusion is already pretty good. The one you screenshoted does bring out a more ambitious and solid vibe though.
Have you tried to look into "communication" and "productivity" categories (you can change it at the bottom of your proposals page)? We have some logos that might be even better in there.
Exactly what I needed to hear at the moment, thanks for sharing this! 🤩
Gonna start right away with the promotion of snappify: https://snappify.io
It's a tool to create beautiful images of your code snippets and today we're going to release our Pro editor where we want to give our users a powerful tool to describe and share your code 🙌
This looks superb Dominik. The UI is a joy to use.
I'm curious to see what pro features you offer later today!
Ok! I am convinced! I always feel the stigma to promote my product for various reasons. Here I go …
If any of you need an easy to use hosted voice marketing platform for your cold-calling needs, give https://dandydialer.com a try.
This looks like you've poured a lot of work into this, seems really well thought out and complete. Do you know your target market, how you can reach them?
Thank you for your compliments.
We are trying to break into an already established market. Our target market is small organizations who have a need to reach audience using traditional phone networks. It could be a startup trying to advertise their business to a targeted community. Or could be a school administration broadcasting some annoucements to parents.
Right now, we are focusing our marketing efforts on PPC, but we also getting some sales through word of mouth.
Sounds like a solid start. best of luck to you 🎩
I'm working on a product for improving hiring in tech and the product is not even done yet but I have started some promotion here. Took me a lot of microconf talks to realise how important promotion is
Love it Faraaz, I just replied with my thoughts on your post. You should definitely get the word out, it's a problem a lot of us care about.
Thanks so much Dagobert! I just hope i can really solve this problem for people
Selling is service, if you truly believe in your business and the way it can help people. Great post!
I created two businesses last year to serve those in the creator economy. http://craftsmancreative.co is an online course platform by & for creators, and http://benchmark.app is a tool to help creators and indie hackers grow their businesses through data analytics.
Thanks again!
You're welcome Daren! These two offerings look very solid to me, it's definitely ripe to get the word out.
The courses especially look super well produced. I assume you already got quite a few sales for it?
Yeah! It's going well - I launched the site last April with two of my own courses, and we just crossed $45k in sales. We have two course creators who have done over $10k, and some big courses coming out in the next two weeks that I'm hoping to see some good numbers from.
The original goal was to reach 10k students by the time I turn 40 (Nov, 2023), but I think we'll actually hit that in the next 12 months... exciting times!
This is wonderful and impressive 😯 congratulations! Curious how you get people to it, running ads or social maybe?
My current goal is to reach ramen profitability this year (need to sell 2 logos a day). I've kind of lost hope honestly (been building it for 2+ years) but still feel like there's light at the end of the tunnel. Let's see how it goes 😅
Thank you!
I solved the traffic/awareness problem by partnering with course creators who already have an audience. Basically we're able to sell about 0.5% to 1% of their audience, so someone with 15k followers on instagram will sell ~150 students. That's the main strategy so far, since i have a much smaller network.
I'm actively building my twitter presence so that I can have a greater impact on the course sales when they launch, so that's a work in progress.
The biggest thing I think that contributes to it is ensuring that the landing page really works, that it clearly presents an irresistible offer to the right person, so that we have as high a conversion rate as possible. (Most on the site are around a 4% conversion rate right now).
Second is realizing that most people don't buy the first time they visit a site. Upwards of 85% of sales come within 90 days, but if you just let people go then you're missing out on a ton of potential revenue. Using email and retargeting/remarketing pixels has helped a ton, so we can get people to sign up for a free preview which gets us their email, and then we can send them more valuable content over a few weeks until they're in a better position to buy.
Some people are emotional buyers and will purchase that first time, but many people are logical buyers, so they need to look at their finances, justify the purchase, and understand all of the details before they buy, so you have to accommodate and be able to speak to both types.
Hope that helps!
Thank you for such a thorough answer Daren. It feels like you're basically coming from the future to tell me exactly what I should be doing.
I was starting to look at partnerships, retargeting ads on Facebook. I'm also deep into conversion rates optimization and I've also started growing my twitter for the past week or so 😅.
Let's keep in touch there, it's fascinating to see the different steps playout similarly across different projects.
I love your positivity, and I'm so glad it's working for ya.
But it's not always so rosy... I've tried reddit so many times - only to get my posts removed... PH won't work without a HUGE audience, twitter is so and so... Other forums can be beyond toxic...
I'm doing advertising, with more or less decent results, but I need to work a lot at it. Very likely my best bet will be cold emailing at first. And that, I will only probably start it 1 month from now, since I'm still developing features...
Haha I actually just cross posted this on r/startups and got banned for 2 weeks because I incited people to share links to their website 😅.
If it's for cinematic studio, I'd say that cold emailing is a good approach. It's gotta be fairly straightforward to list video studios / marketing agencies and then reach out to them directly.
About the organic discussions on social media, I guess I've had a bit more success by not forcing it too much. I try to keep my eyes out for opportunities and then slide a mention of logology when it makes sense. Just like on this post, where I added it as a footnote to illustrate my point. But it's more art than science.
For example, you could have slightly changed your comment to:
"I'm doing advertising for CinematicStudio (an video editor that simplifies complex tasks), with more or less decent results...". Of course it won't change your traffic numbers that much, but if you participate a lot it adds up. You can probably get a few dozen clicks every day like this.
All I'm trying to say is that by always having your eye out for a promotion opportunity, you get in the flow of things and sometimes you can score big. All without forcing it or making it look like annoying spam.
LOL, been there, done that😁
Yes, because google ads doesn't seem to work; at least I haven't managed to crack it yet.
Yeah, I'm very pessimistic when it comes to IH. Probably 99% of people are on Mac anyway, and my app is Windows only.
Again, I know what you mean, but I've given up on IH, for sure....
Yeah I hear you. Even for me, people from IH don't really have a lot of money to spend so it's always super hard to convert. Reddit seems a bit better.
Tried google ads too and it bombed ($250 spend, 0 sales). Also tried sponsoring newsletters and same result. So I'm back to organic while I improve the messaging and product.
Good luck with cold emailing. Been following this guy for a while who seems to be great at it, maybe his course can be helpful.
Yeah... Had no idea I'm not alone in feeling this... About Reddit: I'm doing advertising there, and once again, I'm still learning...
Right... I've been spending 4x as that on Google with no sales, but am getting roughly 25-30 signups/day. still, nothing converted into sales just yet...
Thanks! The course looks pretty cool! I'll certainly look into it...
Good motivational piece, nice perspective. Still need to do it everyday 😅
I’m working on a couple of projects. Presently stenos.io is in the marketing phase. It is an app that takes notes for you, for instance during a job interview or a contract negotiation.
Still searching for the exact customer groups and needs. Ideas very welcome.
The promise of stenos is very strong. If you can deliver than I can't imagine people wouldn't love it. I guess right now best thing to do is to launch it to the public and try to get the word out everywhere you can. That way you'll attract people and your first paid users. Then ask for their feedback to figure out the exact thing they love. This will tell you who /what to focus on next.
Good news: It is launched in parts of Northern Europe. Not yet in FR, partly because of the Loi Toubon. Haven’t achieved pmf, I’m still looking for the right users.
Best of luck 💪
This is so true... This was also my motivation when starting UnbundlingReddit - working on a product like this helps me/forces me to change my mindset. Thanks for recommending me the article through Twitter 🙏 I appreciate that.
Happy to, Ben! Super important to make the switch and stop seeing marketing as a dirty thing 🙏
Thank you Dagobert great article. You inspired me to create some posts on IH and Dev.to about my project. Now I will try to make them as a helpful resource following your tips. Don't want them to be just other annoying self promotion posts. I love smart self promotion like you suggested
This is great Lucian, I don't know how much this scales but this is a great first step for bootstrappers like us 🔥
I have been told the exact same thing numereous times when I was complaining about why I don’t like marketing as an analytical engineer who built super awesome Excel templates which make our customers really happy. I am really proud of our products but yes I am shy about stepping forward and talking about this. I don’t know why but maybe there is a hidden arrogance in this as well (“I shouldn’t be calling people, they should be already coming” kind of thing..)
You have pointed this out in a very nice way. “It’ your moral duty”. I like it. One of my friend told me that: “Yes I understand you don’t like promoting whatever you do. But just because of that, the people who would’ve been happy with your products way more than any of your competitor’s had to buy those mediocre products just because they were shouting out but you don’t like that and they don’t know you.”
But there is an issue here: Everybody shout out thinking that they have the best solution. So the world is full of promotion and voice crowd. This still holds me back unfortunately :/
I hear you so much 🙏
I have a similar thing where I resent people from needing me to do "marketing" to buy my product. I felt angry for a while when we started getting the word out, and realised people still didn't fly in to buy our product every day, and we had to start marketing it.
I think it's because of a bias towards building product. Since I've done my "job" of creating an awesome product, then I expect to be rewarded with sales. That's how it worked when I had a job. People asked me to build something, I did it and then was rewarded with money. Here it doesn't happen, even though I know I've done my best "job" ever, so it pisses me off.
About the issue of the world being already full of different voices:
Well explained mate.
Maybe the issue is not talking about what we do but the platform/place we do it. We want to be unique and special and don’t want to be the “just another shouter at the fruit bazaar”.
Finding a unique way and unique place to do this is also good idea (for example you have already applied a unique and smart way of doing this with this post. Clever! :-)
Another thing is: I am the builder. I am the creator. This motivates me a lot. But marketing feels like a “job” to me. I have zero motivation doing that but I know I have to. Devil is hidden at this point.
I think what can help is to try to find a place / community where you like to participate (like in here). Then gradually try to bring value, and then more and more talk about your product (in a subtle way, like I did here as you noticed).
I was a total marketing noob, but after writing a couple posts here last year, got some love and it got me started. Now I'm trying to build my twitter, and also am active on IH, Reddit...
I think you can't avoid it anyway, so might as well try to find a way to do it that you "hate" the least. Here's a good place to start. And in time you might end up enjoying it. Not a guarantee but that's your best bet 😅
“subtle” is the correct word here!
And You are right. If I can find a way which I enjoy doing itself, then it won’t feel like a “promotion job” to me. Nice point.
This is one of my favorite posts about marketing of all time. Thank you for sharing.
I easily fall into the trap of thinking about the results I want and tactics of achieving them - where do I post? What should I say to elicit desired responses? How do I optimize design? etc.
Refocusing on my "why" solves this. I want to help my customers get healthier, stronger, and live longer so they can love their families, build their communities, and make a positive impact on this world. When I remember that, I care less about tactics and, ironically, my messaging becomes genuine and I'll get the results I want better than if I spent my time over-planning the "how."
Best of luck and I'll be looking at logology for my next project.
🙏
Thank you so much karlso, I love that it helps you find your authentic voice.
That way you can feel genuine when you promote yourself, and people will see your sincerity and be open to your offer.
You can hit me up on the live chat on logology whenever you start looking into your next project’s branding, I’ll be glad to talk more.
Hi - great post and really hit home as I struggle on the best ways to promote my product. I created an app for my kids to help with their math facts, it's in the app store here and web material here.
It was a fun experience having my kids involved in helping design, telling me what they liked and didn't like. It was hard to be quiet while I watched them use it, but it was a great set of lessons on how to improve usability. I was also just a fun to add my personal views on what I would like to see as a parent.
But, the best side effect was while they were helping me with the app, they were secretly practicing math facts!
I've had some small success dealing with facebook posts, but like a lot of the comments, I am really cautious on being spammy. I also feel very apprehensive about approaching teachers for endorsements. Teachers are over-worked and underpaid and I hate to add to their workload.
This looks good Nathan, from the screens on the landing page it looks well thought out and designed. No wonder you're getting 5 star reviews.
I can see why you'd be apprehensive to "spam" teachers with it, but to be honest, I can't imagine them getting overwhelmed by such a small ask. You can just ask to check out the landing page and ask for their feedback, the landing page will do the rest.
As I said in my post, if it brings them value then they will thank you for it. Also maybe look into finding subreddits for teachers, where you can introduce the app to maybe a broader audience?
Wonderful point Dagobert. I need to adopt this mindset shift as soon as possible as I am ready for clients now. I remember being nervous on that first video call with you. I am still struggling with idea mentally and am putting it off.
Having paid for your service, you 100% have an obligation to make sure other people can benefit from it!
I need to believe the same is true of my service, too!
The shift in mindset can happen quite naturally. For us it started with having a few customers here and there who told us they loved it (like you). Then gradually get more and more testimonials, it built up our confidence.
To be honest, we’re still not profitable, and lots of people don’t understand our product. Our goals still seem far off. But at the same time, we managed to find SOME people who really get it, and that keeps us going.
A good first goal for you might be to find 5 delighted customers and get their testimonials. You need to just need to get out of your shell till you get there ;)
I agree!
I feel that there are lots of annoying ads in my life, though, and I'd feel bad if I were to contribute more of that feeling to others' lives.
How do you make sure that you don't annoy many people when promoting an awesome project?
Can you remember one ad that led you to try a product and eventually buy it? I suspect there might be at least one...
Sure most ads are annoying crap, but not all of them.
The key is to focus on the few ads that didn't annoy you and instead made you curious about something. If there's not any, then maybe think of recommendations instead of "ads", didn't anybody ever recommend something to you, leading to a positive experience?
That's marketing, and if you benefited from it, that's a good thing!
Hey thanks for the response
I do recall one or two ads that prompted me to buy something. For me this is rare, but if it's only uncommon for other people then that's useful to know. Thanks!
Receiving in-person recommendations has been more useful to me than online recommendations. I'm not exactly sure why; it might be because it's easier to have a longer discussion or it might be that the people often start with more familiarity with what I'm interested in.
Anyway, it sounds reasonable to me, thanks!
Also, if you like recommendations, you might be interested in ActivityRecommender. It's a machine learning app that reduces the amount of brainpower required to go about your day in an efficient manner, by making data-driven recommendations about how to be happy, motivated, and even efficient! It also provides a bunch of other features including experiments, lots of other analyses, lazily-organizing to-dos, and more.
It's free and open source: https://github.com/mathjeff/ActivityRecommender
and feedback is super appreciated if anybody is interested. Thanks!
I'm so glad that you decided to share it!
I got the iOS app and it seems a bit complex to me. It very overwhelming in terms of available options. Also, I tried to add an activity but couldn't "submit" it. So it never saved.
Overall it seems like something with a lot of potential though, and that just needs to be made more easily digestible for people to get it. (just my two cents)
Hey thanks for taking a look!
Thats very interesting. If you'd like to elaborate that would be super useful, if not, thanks for trying it out!
Yeah, making it as easily digestible for new users as possible would be really nice. If anybody has any suggestions about more efficient ways to discover what's commonly unintuitive to new users, that would be super cool.
I wonder if you were on the Add Another Activity To Choose From screen and I wonder if there was an error message saying "Parent Name is Required"
If that's the case, I wonder if the message would be better as 'Parent Name is Required: try "Activity" '.
Thanks!
My take is that the first time you get on the screen, it looks overwhelming as there are tons of choices, all on the same level. There is also no real visual hierarchy between elements.
I think it could be helpful to onboard users via a series of steps they are forced to take on the first use, so that it gives them a good starting point. Here I'm supposed to do everything myself and I don't know where to start.
That's useful, thanks!
@dagorenouf
I'm making some changes as a result of this feedback. Would you like to be in ActivityRecommender's crediits?
You can include a name (an arbitrary string) along with optionally an email and optionally a website.
If you're interested, feel free to reply to this post or email me at ActivityRecommender@gmail.com
Thanks!!!
that's very nice of you Math, just sent you an email :)
If you truly help - you don't annoy.
Anyway, seems like you care more what people think about you. Or I'm wrong?
Agreed that being helpful is not annoying!
I hope that among those that I don't manage to help, that I don't annoy or inconvenience too many of them.
I think that @dagorenouf says in the other thread that people may be accepting of being annoyed lots of times in exchange for learning about a few cool projects though.
I think it's just general business sense to promote a business as best as you can with what you have, being where/who you are. To say it's a moral duty is a bit pretentious, I think.
I can see how it could feel that way, that wasn't my intention. Mostly trying to help those of us who believe marketing is inherently bad.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
I agree this had to be said 🎩