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Engineering as Marketing is proving out to be the most effective channel.

We are a small (3 person small) A.I. startup so paid advertisement isn't the most viable option. What worked for us was creating small trivia apps(thedonaldtest.com & whatthefis.ml) to drive sign ups for our Beta release. The apps got featured on PH, generating 200+ conversions on our main website along with some press coverage (Side note: last week an Israeli newspaper wrote about us causing a spike in web traffic)

Here is my experience with different marketing channels:

1. Facebook Ads: Not much success on a small budget. Yesterday I ended an ad campaign for our early release prematurely because the CPC reached $2.2. I have to do more experiments with the ad creative and target audience before I can say for sure whether ads are effective or not.

2. Content Creation. Bleh. Good for SEO, yes, but with so much crap out there its really hard to make your voice heard. I did some experimentation with making the content more interactive (caspy.com/will-apps-like-prisma-replace-human-artists/) but still didnt get much love.

3. Contacting Journalist: After reaching out to 70+ journalist over email and twitter and not getting a single positive response, I am a bit cynical towards that strategy.

BTW, I strongly believe that optimization works. All you need to do is test different approaches and see what sticks.




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