I am halfway to my dream of having 1 million users!
- 4 years for 0 -> 25k
- 2 years for 25k -> 250k
- 6 months for 250k -> 500k users
Everything I did to get here
my marketing failures & successes 🧵:
1. Incubator Partnerships
Brought Unicorn into big incubators as a perk. Expected users to pour in. I got zero-paying ones.
2. Paid Ads on FB/Google/X
Dumped cash into ads. Got irrelevant clicks, no results.
I tried to hire experts. Same results.
I believe the best experts can do this well, but they are rare.
3. SEO
Skipped SEO until April 2023. Huge miss. Now I blend AI blogs (seobotai.com) with human work. It’s working. 30% of the signups coming from SEO.
4. Cross-Promo
Pushed for founder collabs. Most flopped..the ego problem. HuntedSpace (Dan’s) worked. Still open to deals.
5. Social Media
I hired and invested in building her brand, but a competitor headhunted her. I had to start from scratch myself, surprisingly reaching over 100k followers.
I thought I'd never pass 10k followers, but reached nearly 100 million views this year.
6. Influencers
Paid some. 90% fake. Real ones? Good ROI under $1k, but only work with niche-focused influencers.
7. Podcast
Spent $40k. I built the trust and got some traffic; however, I had to cancel cuz it was time-consuming.
8. Conferences
Pitched Unicorn at events. Spent lots of energy, time and money. Got no results. The worst ROI.
9. Sponsorships
Backed hackathons, educators, directories.
Worked pretty well. I'm doubling down on this, by building a tool that automates it. it can monetize your website traffic tinyadz.com or you can buy the traffic there.
10. Newsletter Ads
Big newsletters cost a lot and bring little traffic, e.g. Product Hunt.
Small newsletters deliver.
11. Cross-Promo Internal
10-20% of my traffic is a cross promo between my projects. An upside of having many projects.
12. Guest Posting
Wrote for Hackernoon, DevTo. Worked really well. Viral posts brought tons of traffic and backlinks.
13. Reddit
Traffic monster. But you can't place your links there. So be careful; don't "sell"; bring value.
14. LinkedIn
Boring bot-land, but top traffic and conversions. It works for b2b.
15. YouTube
Videos are really expensive to make timewise. I've tried and got nothing out of it. Seems like I need to try again, but focus on quality instead of quantity.
16. Insta/TikTok/FB
Useless for B2B no-code. Wrong audience. It brings a non-paying audience that's a pain in the *ss.
17. Cold Emails
Hired a pro. Zero return. Hired another pro, zero return again. Seems like a scam.
18. Directories
I launched 20+ directories, seeing good traffic on auto pilot. (How I do it: https://lnkd.in/dQ6BDuNa )
19. Directory Listings
Boring but effective (via listingbott.com )
20. Affiliates
Quick setup, 20-33% commissions work.
21. Campaigns
Giveaways flopped. LTDs tanked the brand. Never again.
That's it.
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