
Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it? - VvdHout
Hi everybody!<p>Early testing and working with MVP&#x27;s is super important but I am struggling figuring out how to get some traffic to the website that can be converted to feedback.<p>What are your thoughts? Any methods or mediums that have worked for your particularly well?<p>I appreciate all the help.<p>Take care,<p>Valentijn
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codingdave
You should have at least a few interested parties who you can ask directly for
feedback on your MVP. If you don't have that, how do you even know you are
writing a product people want?

Once you have made those few people/groups happy, ask them to tell other
people. You should be able to get a couple dozen initial consumers that way.
Again, if not, you might not have written the correct product.

After you get that far, you start marketing and growing traffic when you are
ready to scale up.

~~~
VvdHout
Hi!

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I had found a few that gave me some feedback but they are not exactly the
target audience. Also, the MVP is like really, really minimal so it is just
for testing the initial assumption(s). Hence, I am kind of starting from
scratch unfortunately. Any suggestions on the best way to go about it when you
just want to test sign ups and conversions on a landing page?

Thanks again!

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pascalxus
I've posted on hacker news (avg 5-15 page views), Reddit (avg 2-5 page views)
and Quora (no pages views that can be tracked anyway). Most of my Product hunt
launches are completely dead, getting almost 0 traffic, although there was 1
that got 200 upvotes and nearly 400 page views).

It's darn near impossible to get a steady stream of traffic unless Google
decides to give it to you. It seems like, Most success stories I've heard on
indiehackers typically are due to Google giving them a steady stream of
traffic in the hundreds or thousands per day.

~~~
Data_Junkie
So no matter what you do, your success is entirely in Google's hands ? Is that
what you're saying ?

~~~
pascalxus
it depends on the business model of course. if you're product makes more than
5000$ per month per customer you have other options available to you.

And, virality is not unheard of, even this day and age, but incredibly rare.
I'm just saying, in many indiehacker success cases I've read, they're getting
significant traffic from Google.

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147
I help B2B SaaS companies scale their marketing. I can't really directly help
you without knowing what your product is. I'm going to assume it's
[https://courseroot.com/](https://courseroot.com/) since it was a recent
submission by you. In this case, it's a B2C product.

Upon landing on your site I immediately see typos / grammatical issues. I
suggest you get somebody that's strong in english to help you proofread.

There's a lot of suggestions in the comments to go to your target audience and
ask them. That's pretty solid advice but I don't think it's nuanced enough.
It's super important to also consider at what stage of the funnel a potential
user is at.

For instance, say I run a cloud CI service like Travis or Circle. You could
naively say that I should go talk to developers / engineering teams because
it's a tool for developers. While developers are the correct target
demographic, you have to think about the funnel.

Do these engineering teams even know what CI is?

    
    
                           |
                           v
    

Do these engineering teams currently researching different CI tools?

    
    
                           |
                           v
    

Do these teams already use a tool like Jenkins?

Marketing that targets people that don't even know they need a CI tool is far,
far, different than marketing that targets teams that are currently looking
for a solution and far, far, different than teams that have a solution in
place and have to go out of their way to switch.

Does that make sense?

So if we're talking about courseroot, I suggest you think about what stage
your ideal user is at.

Do they know that they have a problem? (e.g. Do they know that these online
courses can help them advance their careers?)

    
    
                          |
                          v
    

Do they know they want to take online courses?

    
    
                          |
                          v
    

Are the already taking online courses?

If I told you to talk to your target audience and you just talked to people
that are already taking online courses, already know what set of courses they
plan on taking, it might be hard to extract useful feedback. But if you talked
to the same demographic but they know they already have a problem (need to
find online courses), that's where you'll get the most useful feedback right
this moment.

~~~
VvdHout
Hi! Thanks for the elaborate reply. It's actually for a different idea that I
am playing around with and am just trying to see if I can find people to talk
to to get a lay of the land and or throw a landing page in front of them. But
you feedback is still very valuable; the principles translate also outside of
Courseroot (and it's good to have feedback on Courseroot as well haha). I'll
see how I can use this for both projects.

Thanks again!

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raviojha
A bit of a cliche answer, but I'll still go with this: depends on the target
audience. Find out who can most benefit our of your product? Developers?
Sales? Marketing? General netizen?

Next, figure out where they spend their time on. For eg: to target devs, post
on communities like HN (as Show HN). Reach out to community driven blogs and
be an author subtly marketing the product. In fact, an interesting story on
what you went through during the product building phase, that challenges you
solved is exciting enough to intrigue a developer.

General netizen? Share on platforms like reddit (specific subreddit), twitter
(would be good if one of your users which high reach can volunteer for this).

Is it a B2B product? Offer the product at a discounted rate to initial users
and in return, you can ask for promotion through their site/social media (a
bit like testimonials). For eg: I got to know about mixpanel by seeing the
badge on the footer of certain website I used.

~~~
raviojha
I read this again now, and I see way too many typos, can't edit it anymore
though. Please excuse the messed up grammar and totally unrelated words in
between.

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muzani
Who are you building for? You should already have a market asking for the
thing you're building.

They wouldn't lie around waiting for you to do something. They've already
hacked a solution together by now.

All you have to do is go to the people who built those solutions and tell them
about your MVP.

~~~
VvdHout
Hi Muzani,

So I do not even want to get to building at this stage. I just want to get a
landingpage in front of the right folks, collect some emails, and see if I can
talk to them. I have some broad ideas on products I'd like to work on but have
made the mistake in the past many a times before where I just start building
something people do not really care about. So right now I am trying to figure
out the best way to just get in touch with these people. I have done some
AdWords (freaking expensive in the market I am in) and going through
subreddits which seem to help. Next stop is trying to find some people on
Quora that seem to experience the problem.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!

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seanwilson
For [https://www.checkbot.io/](https://www.checkbot.io/), I got started via
posts on Reddit, Hacker News and Product Hunt.

~~~
world32
Nice site & product. Can I ask how successful these posts were in driving
traffic to your site?

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VvdHout
Addition:

I have been working with AdWords for some targeted traffic, although it is
quite expensive. Maybe it is still the go to option but would love to hear
your thoughts and experience.

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pryelluw
This question is too broad and you provide absolutely no context.

What is the product?

What is the target market?

~~~
aiyodev
Wouldn’t you know what the product and target market were? It’s your product.

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xenospn
Who is this product for? Find that person and ask them to use it.

