Mentioned in TechCrunch and MacRumors!
by JenThis morning, my friend sent me an article by MacRumors about how Apple is now allowing exports of transactions from Apple Card.
"Cool', I thought. That means Apple Card users on Lunch Money will be able to use our CSV import feature to get their transactions in! That's a nice thing to wake up to.
Well, I opened the article to read more about it, and holy crap.
The first sentence reads:
"When Apple Card launched last year, it didn't support importing transactions into various budgeting apps, which was a major negative for customers who use Quicken, YNAB, Lunch Money, Mint, and more."
WHAT?!?! How the heck did Lunch Money, my tiny bootstrapped start-up with less than 200 users get squished in between big names like Quicken, YNAB and Mint?! I was flabbergasted.
I followed the thread and found a TechCrunch article that also mentions Lunch Money!
Things were starting to piece together. What happened was the editor of TechCrunch tweeted a week or so ago asking for alternatives to Mint. Two of our users responded and mentioned Lunch Money. That probably put us on the author's radar and he gave us a shoutout (and a juicy backlink to boot!). MacRumors likely picked up on the TechCrunch article and out of sheer luck chose Lunch Money as an example budgeting app. Loving this combination word-of-mouth marketing!
It was surreal to see Lunch Money mentioned alongside much bigger players in the game! I was in disbelief for much of this morning. 😅
Learnings:
- Even though our Twitter account only has ~70 followers, so many of our users are on Twitter and are mentioning us! (Surprisingly, most of our traffic comes from Twitter according to GA.) Furthermore, by jumping in to these conversations when you're being mentioned to offer a free trial or just to show that you're responsive is always well-received!
- Word of mouth marketing is so effective but hard to plan for. I think the best thing you can do is treat your users very well, especially your first few hundred. They will be your champions!
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Congrats Happy for you!!
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Awesome job!
@harrydry has written about SEO so you might want to make a page with a title like lunchmoney.com/alternative-to-mint and show how your product is different/better :) https://marketingexamples.com/seo/competitor-comparison
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Hey thanks @petecodes and @harrydry for the kind words and advice. I actually already have these pages and have been diligently tracking related keywords for movement! https://lunchmoney.app/compare/mint-alternative and https://lunchmoney.app/compare/ynab-alternative
I'm a big fan of marketingexamples, been definitely picking up things from there here and there :)
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Oh awesome. Nice page :)
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That's dope! Congrats
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That's pretty cool. Amazing what a small fan audience can accomplish.
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Congrats, I am so happy for you!
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Congrats. Now to see what Lunch Money is all about. :D
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Congrats and keep soaring higher
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That's the BIG leagues, Jen!
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Congratulations. WOM marketing is hard to engineer, takes very long, but is extremely effective.
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Great story! :)
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Very cool! Congrats :)
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Congrats! Totally agree with you. You better have 100 users that are addicted to your product rather than 1000 users that are not really active. Did you handpick your first 200 users [Linkedin, Reddit, etc] ?
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Thanks! For sure, and I think that's why having a paid subscription model over a freemium model is advantageous. You can be more confident that your (paying) users are very much into your product. To answer your question, my first 100 paying users came from a Show HN post!
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Such a cool story!
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Awesome! Also love the look of the product! Wonderful design.
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Thanks for the kind words!
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Well done. It's these small moments we need to stop and appreciate how the world works. I wanted to also say thanks for writing your article about your journey to Japan. Keep up the great work 👋
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Hey, thanks for the readership– really appreciate it! :)
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That’s amazing, Jen! 🙌 Congrats, and really happy to see you and this news on IndieHackers! I think you’ve built a product that truly lives up to its headline (delightfully simple budgeting), and it’s awesome that your users are vouching for you. Have you thought about implementing a referral program to reward people who invite others to try out LunchMoney/also to encourage more people to spread the word? Not sure if you need it, but just an idea!
Keep up the awesome work, and excited to see you grow!
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Hey Amy, thanks for the kind words! We do have a referral program but I haven't been pushing for it as much so I may start doing that again, thanks for the idea :) Looking forward to tracking your journey as well on IH. Cheers!
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That's awesome! Such love for your app — doesn't it just make your day? Sometimes I think I'd do it for just the positive feedback...
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Thanks! Haha, it definitely feels good but can't let it be a distraction from progress!
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That’s awesome! From a marketing point of view you now have bragging rights - “as mentioned in macrumours “. Maybe a good time to outreach to big tech blogs too.
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That's a good point! Thanks!
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Congratulations! You picked a great name for an app like this. Seeing your dive into the chain of events is awesome too, gives me more fuel for what I'm doing with opportunistic social monitoring for brands!
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Hey thanks! Funny enough, originally Lunch Money was just a temporary working name until I could come up with something better.... but then I never did! Which is great because I really love the name now!
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Congrats! Awesome work. One slight user experience problem: I was stuck on the Pricing page for a fat minute or so trying to see if the two tier boxes or any of the text was clickable. It didn't don on me that I was supposed to just register my email with the section below the tier descriptions to get started! I guess I was looking for a link that could get me to some sign-up page? Just something I noticed!
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Great point! I just checked Hotjar and I'm seeing that lots of other visitors are doing the same. I'll work on improving that experience. Thank you for taking the time to let me know!
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Excited for you!
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Congrats! looked at the product page, no wonder why it got mentioned at TechCrunch and MacRumors. I might steal some of the page presentation ideas (if you don't mind). Cheers
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Hey, thanks for the kind words! Happy to hear you're inspired by my designs :) I've been starting to post more on dribbble (https://dribbble.com/lunchbag) so feel free to follow me there!
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Will check it out! Cheers
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Congrats!
Btw: the link to security on "Your data in Lunch Money is encrypted at rest" is wrong. Other than that your site looks good :)-
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Thanks for the heads up! Just fixed it!
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Heyy, congratulations! Any tips for a successful launch for a fellow Torontonian
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Hey, thanks! One tip I would have is to not put so much pressure on yourself for that imminent launch. My first planned launch totally flopped and it felt terrible! Then one day I decided for no good reason to post on Show HN not thinking it would lead to anything, and it ended up on the front page for almost the entire day. Things won't always go the way you expect, but just keep going at it, get feedback from users and continuously iterate! Cheers and good luck!
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Thank you. You’re an awesome person. Just hope you know that.
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Congrats! One of your emails recently got featured in Really Good Emails as well, it looks great.
https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/your-status-in-lunch-money/-
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Woo! Good eye! Very happy to be featured on RGE :D
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Congrats! That's super exciting, it's great that your customers are so happy that they're doing your PR for you.
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Thanks! For sure, that's the dream! 😄
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This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
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Thank you for the kind words!
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This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
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Thanks!
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