Every step I made to get to 412k users:
My most difficult project to grow (just imagine the competition).
Despite the odds, I survived & have a clear plan how to get to 10mil users.
In 2022 I tried to growing via sales, partners, ads, podcast and other growth methods I knew back then from my VC startup background.
All these attempts had failed, and this is why:
The LTV for a website builder is so small (less than $500), the cost of a sale is obviously higher, if done by humans one by one.
So the ROI for this was terrible and I had to stop doing it after wasting so much money on it.
I tried cold emails, hired people who were "experts" with good reviews.
We got some clicks, but all those users either churned early or were pain in the ass, because they were so "cold" and had no respect for the brand or the founder.
Negative ROI. So I stopped.
I partnered up with startup incubators and other startup organizations.
It was a waste of time too. I got less than 100 users from this after 12 months. Again, maybe it makes sense if the LTV is $5k, but not when it's below $1k.
I had my own pod, hired people to run it.
It scored good number of views, but the after 12 months, I spent $50k on it but the growth numbers were just going down.
I felt lost. I didn't really know how to grow.
I spent 3 months on SEO, learned it all via chatgpt & managed to score traffic in 3mon.
Once I had a stable growth on SEO, I wanted to automate it, so I built seobotai.com, indexrusher.com & listingbott.com , for ai blog, indexing & backlinks.
I discovered that google was often showing directories on top of the search.
I listed unicorn on all those directories.
I built my own tool to automate this later ( listingbott.com ).
Once I automated the seo & directory traffic, I had more time for social media, so I started posting 5 tweets a day.
I tweeted typical "build in public" tweets and all my learnings about growth and more. It worked pretty well, X ended up bringing 30% of the traffic.
The aha moment happened on Nov 2023, when I launched allgpts directory right after the OpenAI Demo Day and launch of Custom Gpts.
I used unicorn platform to build the directory and it went super viral.
It led to huge unflow of the users building directories on unicorn.
Later, i replicated the success of allgpt few more times with new directories,
Eventually, I launched a Directory Guide ( https://lnkd.in/dQ6BDuNa ), to teach people everything I knew about directories. I started going to podcasts to promote the idea of building directories.
Greg invited me to his Startup Idea pod, I ideated and built a directory right on the pod, it went viral and it brought even more growth to unicorn platform.
https://lnkd.in/d7UrDAn2
Also:
- sponsored other directories and hackatons.
- sponsored tweets from influencers
- launched affiliate program
- posted on reddit
- improved the product
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