Ask HN: $1k+ side projecters, what was the best thing you did to market it? - taphangum
======
csallen
Hi Tapha! I run Indie Hackers
([https://IndieHackers.com](https://IndieHackers.com)), a site where I
interview the founders of profitable business and side projects. I just passed
$1k revenue this month (you can follow along via my timeline here:
[https://IndieHackers.com/blog](https://IndieHackers.com/blog)).

My number one marketing approach _by far_ has been to tailor the site to the
HN audience.

I do this primarily by asking questions that people on HN always like to see
answered (how much money are you making? how did you come up with the idea?
what tech did you use? what are your best marketing channels? etc). Lots of
similar sites don't ask any of these questions, especially not the revenue
one.

I tend to share the most interesting interviews with the HN audience every
couple weeks or so, and they usually do pretty well!

~~~
mschwaig
Did you just answer a HN question on side projects with your side project
which aims to answer questions about side projects for the HN audience?

~~~
csallen
Yes.

~~~
cx42net
That's so meta :)

~~~
altuzar
Are you planning to auto-interview you? :p

Love ur website btw. Thanks a lot!

~~~
csallen
I think this was meant for me? No, I'm not planning to interview myself, but
you can read about my progress on the blog:
[https://www.indiehackers.com/blog](https://www.indiehackers.com/blog)

------
a12k
[https://destructible.io](https://destructible.io) for sharing files
temporarily with yourself across terminals, or others. I submitted to HN, got
a huge spike of subscribers. Submitted to Reddit, got another, smaller spike.

Eventually other people started submitting it in response to questions online
in forums like HN, where people would ask things like, "What's the Best
Productivity Tool You've Found" or, "What Secret Thing Do You Wish Everyone
Knew About." Started getting more spikes in users, then a regular base of
users, then paying customers, then enterprise customers! Pretty cool organic
spread.

It's definitely a side project, but making some money on it which is awesome.

Tried Google AdWords, total waste of (free up to coupon amount) money. Maybe
one new user with $250 spent.

So I would say: Build a good product and maybe if people will like it enough
you will get some organic growth.

edit to say: I'm still 1000% just doing this as a fun aide project that I
built to serve a need I specifically had, but am happy to answer specific
questions about what I stumbled through and did to kind of get off the ground
enough to pay monthly costs and make a little profit.

~~~
gjolund
Didn't realize destructible was a solo project. Great work!

------
lunaru
There are some flash-in-the-pan things and some that are evergreen.

When it comes to the former, getting HN front-paged, a Techcrunch write-up,
PH, etc tends to lead to a spike in traffic and eye balls, but very rarely do
you get your true base of customers from these things. (But hey, they don't
hurt!)

In the latter category you'll hear things like SEO, content marketing etc.
Those are all important and must-haves, but these days it's also table stakes
since it's what everyone is doing as well. When it comes to getting
differentiators that can take you from $1k to $2k or $2k to $4k you need a
distribution channel -- preferably a partner or a distribution platform where
you can narrowly focus on a small audience. Yes, this means you'll need to
reach out and talk to people with similar audiences and folks who are willing
to help. For those of us who prefer talking to computers (coding) more than
talking to humans (eww emails and phone calls) this can be unnatural but is
also extremely important.

I'm personally happy to chat with any part-timers looking to grow their
projects or even become full-time entrepreneurs. Just hit me up via my profile
here on HN.

My personal experience: I've started two businesses as side projects that went
on to be full-time ventures. Ronin
([https://www.roninapp.com](https://www.roninapp.com)) was started in 2008
(eventually went full-time, acquired, and then spun out). Later on Reamaze
([https://www.reamaze.com](https://www.reamaze.com)) was actually a side
project on a side project, but is now at full time with a small team and
growing very nicely.

~~~
sinhpham
Hey I'm working on a side project, looking to grow it and would love to talk
with someone who have done it before. However I couldn't find any contact
information in your profile.

~~~
lunaru
Sorry about that -- updated profile

------
streptomycin
Since my video game [https://basketball-gm.com/](https://basketball-gm.com/)
targets hard core basketball fans, I post to /r/nba on Reddit in the NBA
offseason. In the offseason, there's not much other content to compete against
so my posts do well. And the type of people reading /r/nba in the offseason
are exactly my target market.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1j1e6q/i_made_a_single...](https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1j1e6q/i_made_a_singleplayer_basketball_management/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/3enrzh/i_made_basketba...](https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/3enrzh/i_made_basketball_gm_a_basketball_management_sim/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/4tfaph/i_made_basketba...](https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/4tfaph/i_made_basketball_gm_a_free_basketball_management/)

~~~
theunixbeard
Didn't dig too deep, but how do you make money (or are you yet to monetize)?

The reddit posts all repeat "completely free (note: free does not mean
"freemium", it means totally fucking free)".

~~~
marxidad
Advertising

~~~
streptomycin
Yep, mostly Google Consumer Surveys, which is a good fit for my audience of
dedicated users eager to keep playing (although volume has been down this
year, sadly).

------
gexcolo
I run [https://box.cock.li/](https://box.cock.li/) , a VPS provider that
caters to shitposters and people that kind of like that eerie feeling that
your server could shut down at any moment.

I don't really have any idea what I'm doing, but I don't really know how to
run a mail server either but I seem to be doing okay with
[https://cock.li/](https://cock.li/) (this is where most of my customers are
from)

It's currently at about $2K total revenue, and once this transfer of IP space
finishes I can properly scale to about $1.8K MRR.

~~~
anexprogrammer
I love this. You've framed it perfectly to set low expectations, with name and
niche that won't expect fancy design, and "a server as bad as your email". Yet
make $2k a month.

I think you know exactly what you're doing :p

Why the max of 46 btw?

~~~
ZoF
Likely 46 is due to his IPv4 pool, hence waiting for the IP space assignment
before scaling up.

------
matt4077
I flipped the switch to take the website live, enabled google ads and went to
a friend's barbecue. We had the first customer before I was done with the
first glass of wine.

The effectiveness of ads has unfortunately dropped over the years, but in the
first 20 months or so built a roster of 10,000 customers or so who have stayed
very loyal and allowed us to expand to products with much higher volume.

~~~
shanecleveland
Would you say this strategy was a good way to go from zero customers to a
foundation on which you could then use more effective ways to continue to
grow? Can you offer some insight in why you think your early ad campaign was
effective and how to go about doing this? Thanks!

~~~
matt4077
Two things:

\- Starting in a niche, then expanding into really competitive markets worked
we'll for us

\- Try every that's cheap to try. In advertisement, you want to spend a few
dozen $ on everyone who's willing to take them, then invest heavily when ROI
is positive. There are many people who just do google and maybe Facebook. But
while that's 90% of their market, you sometimes get lucky and find a niche
that gets you as much revenue as the two combined.

------
sakopov
The product I'm working on helps businesses stay in compliance with financial
regulations. Not necessarily as cool as other Show HN projects. Is it still
worth posting it on HN?

I also ran across a Reddit post where someone created a Twitter bot which
favorited and retwitted posts with certain tags to attract potential customers
for a product the OP was marketing. Those who ended up checking out his
Twitter page found a note which said that followers would get a deal if signed
up. The OP mentioned he got his first 20+ paid customers this way. Not sure
how effective this is but thought I'd share.

~~~
cylinder
Very much interested by compliance; please share if you feel like doing so.

I'm actually interested in using the Twitter bot you mentioned too...

------
logane
Someone posted my game ([http://hextris.io/](http://hextris.io/)) on Hacker
News - from there it spread to a few popular outlets (major tech news
companies, subreddits, obscure but popular blogs), all organically. Initially
I tried submitting the game to game journalists / iOS app review websites,
none of which responded to me - wouldn't recommend that route unless you have
ins somewhere.

~~~
reefoctopus
What is monthly revenue like?

~~~
logane
Currently not significant (few dollars a month), but it used to be a few
hundred a month when it initially became popular. Monetization could have been
much better if we had put in interstitial ads, etc.

------
encoderer
A few thoughts from our experience growing Cronitor as a side project:

1\. Hacker News has provided exposure but not a lot of direct business.
Sometimes people find us on other channels but recognize us from HN. I would
say, don't worry too much if you never front page here.

2\. Working on SEO consistently over the years has been our most valuable
source of high quality traffic.

3\. Work with influencers in your industry. When a popular AWS blogger wrote
about Cronitor and was tweeted by their AWS community lead Jeff Barr we added
8 subscribers that day that are still with us.

4\. Re-marketing to sign-ups that didn't convert. Every month our product
noticeably gets better in some way, and those early sign-ups to our free plan
that didn't subscribe have been an invaluable source of later conversion.

~~~
goodJobWalrus
What did you do for SEO? I can see you only have few blog entries...

~~~
encoderer
Blog posts are content marketing, not about SEO, especially since we use
Medium and aren't hosting a blog on our primary domain. There is plenty
written about content-farm SEO strategies if anybody is looking for that.

One thing I'll say, if you're talking about a SaaS app and not something on
the battlefield of big-time consumer SEO (which I also have some experience
with as an engineer), it starts with crafting your website copy to address
both prospective users and Googlebot. Iterate on it and continue improving.
The text on your page matters.

Here are a few technical tips:

1\. Many engineers do things like add ajax endpoints to robots.txt. Don't do
this. Google can read many dynamic pages but not if you block them from
loading the ajax requests.

2\. That, and other issues, are uncovered by using the google webmaster tools.
They will rank issues that are affecting your crawl.

3\. In my experience, server rendered content still out-performs client
rendered content. Server-render if SEO is a priority.

4\. Duplicate content causes SEO problems and can be subtle. You can have an
SRP like /catalog/results that can also be accessed when using your next-
page/prev-page links as /catalog/results/1\. That is a duplicate page.

Generally, though, I don't feel qualified to give much SEO advice without my
own survivorship bias. Also, I would like to be doing so much better than we
are, and continue to work for it.

~~~
goodJobWalrus
So your SEO strategy was(is) website copy? Anything else, like "link building"
or sth else?

Or if you want to answer in another way, how many hours a week/month/year does
that SEO work take, before one sees the results you are talking about?

edit. you expanded your answer while I was typing. it seems you are mostly
talking about on page and technical SEO, which doesn't sound like it takes
that much time.

~~~
encoderer
I think the best long-term reliable link building strategy is to build a good
a product that is well liked and discussed by people organically.

Take something like a website widget that you build with useful and free
content people can add to their Wordpress or whatever. Seems like the kind of
SEO strategy a software developer can get behind. Then, a year later, turns
out somebody used it for some "content" on 200,000 generated wordpress pages
as part of their own scheme. Now you're penalized for this with a manual
action from Google.

I guess my point is: to go this route means investing real time editing,
curating and disavowing. I find it more profitable to focus energy on
improving the product while Google and our users both notice.

------
shortformblog
My newsletter, Tedium ([http://tedium.co](http://tedium.co)), has slightly
more than 3,000 subscribers, and produces a lot of content each week—between
3,000 and 4,000 words over two pieces. My strategy for building it out has
essentially meant being willing to syndicate these articles far and wide. I
currently work with three different outlets (Atlas Obscura, Motherboard, and
Neatorama) to republish the work, all of which bring in new subscribers
frequently. Eventually, Digg started picking up its articles as well.
Basically, it gives me creative license to write whatever I want in my narrow
niche while ensuring the newsletter goes out far and wide. I try to reuse
every piece so nothing goes to waste.

While it's not bringing in tens of thousands of bucks, it's brought in enough
to make it worthwhile (in part through affiliate links—my strategy is to link
to the weirdest things on Amazon I can find, with the assumption people will
eventually go back to buy something else).

I've also tried to find ways to minimize costs on my end, including switching
email providers so that the financial impact of sending thousands of emails
every month is small.

~~~
yabatopia
I tried to visit your site trice. Each time my browser crashed (Firefox on
Android). Not sure what's going on.

~~~
shortformblog
Will have to look into it, but I don't personally have an Android device so it
might be hard to check immediately. (The site uses looping videos in place of
GIFs, which might be a factor.) I would recommend using another browser for
now.

------
aparadja
Radio Silence ([https://radiosilenceapp.com](https://radiosilenceapp.com)). It
evolved from a side project to my main income this year, and there's a few
valuable lessons learned. I don't think I could live off the app without them.

The biggest thing for getting incoming links was to release a free related app
under the same domain name. I built Private Eye
([https://radiosilenceapp.com/private-
eye](https://radiosilenceapp.com/private-eye)) and didn't charge anything for
it. A _lot more_ people are willing to blog/share/tweet about a free app.

The second thing was to simply cold email reporters and bloggers. I used to
think getting featured in the big sites required some kind of magic. Then I
started writing emails to individual writers, and the hit rate has been
astounding.

------
bengarvey
The week I launched
[http://kidsdungeonadventure.com](http://kidsdungeonadventure.com) I got a
review on Wired's GeekDad blog. That link drove nearly all my sales for months
[https://geekdad.com/2011/03/an-rpg-for-pre-schoolers-get-
the...](https://geekdad.com/2011/03/an-rpg-for-pre-schoolers-get-them-started-
early-with-the-dungeon-adventure/)

------
callmeed
I have a seasonal project that creates christmas/holiday cards from Instagram
photos. It makes a few grand between halloween and new years
([https://cheergram.com](https://cheergram.com) but the cert is expired rn)

Surprisingly, the best thing that I did to get it some traction was having a
few influential people in the design/craft community post it to pinterest. A
couple years ago, a single pin generated dozens of orders.

Other than that, some SEO fu has always helped. It used to be on page 1 for
"Instagram christmas cards" and I'd get lots of traffic from that (currently
on page 2). So, some SEO basics (good titles, good headings, a blog/news
section) always helps.

~~~
shanecleveland
What do you think caused the drop from page one to page two?

~~~
callmeed
Neglect and an expired ssl cert

------
khuknows
Not sure if this is helpful, but for myself, it was essentially a post on
ProductHunt & emailing some journalists.

The ProductHunt post was augmented by the fact the product
([https://uimovement.com](https://uimovement.com)) was clearly for a certain
community (designers), so it was picked up and shared on other
publications/social media accounts within the community.

From the PH post, it was picked up and shared on DesignerNews, r/web_design,
Webdesignernews, Codrops, Smashing Mag, etc. The other sources brought in way
more traffic than PH in the end.

For more long-term, but slower growth, automating social media has been
helpful too, but that can only work for content-heavy products.

~~~
callmeed
Out of curiosity, how were you able to get on the front page of ProductHunt?
Was it in the early days or were you able to get someone influential to push
you to the front?

I think its pretty well known/established (despite what PH has said) that
getting exposure on PH requires intervention from an insider.

~~~
ivm
We wrote to @_jacksmith (via DM on Twitter), he posts something to PH every
day and has many followers + a streamlined product submission.

Also 400+ points on HN brought 10x more visitors than being #5 on PH.

~~~
wishinghand
What is PH?

~~~
webtechgal
[https://www.producthunt.com/](https://www.producthunt.com/) (I guess).

------
sossles
My web/mobile game called Twenty
([http://twenty.frenchguys.net/play](http://twenty.frenchguys.net/play)) blew
up when I put it on hackernews.

But before and even after that, emails to game review sites were universally
ignored (with Rock Paper Shotgun as the one exception). Even the Ars Technica
guy who proclaimed it as his "latest obsession" wouldn't reply to an email.

I understand these people are inundated with emails, but I was still a little
surprised.

~~~
reefoctopus
You have had over 1 million downloads. What sort of revenue does the app make
per month?

~~~
sossles
That's on Android, and maybe half that again on iOS. It varies a little, but
it's $500-$1000 a month at the moment (even split between iOS and Android).
I'm pretty sure I could do better but I could never bring myself to do heavy
monetisation. I hate aggressive IAPs, for example.

------
duck
For my side-project,
[http://hackernewsletter.com](http://hackernewsletter.com), it has been simply
time and being passionate about it. In the beginning I tried various things
from reddit ads to guest blog posts, but now six years into it and 38k
subscribers, I've found that simply showing up and doing it every week has
been my biggest marketing resource.

~~~
jnunoferreira
What sort of figures do you pull up? (and how do you monetize? ads?)

------
erikb
Funny how most people decide after one attempt if a marketing approach works
for them or not. What happened to really learning the stuff before making
decisions? You can be sure that common sales channels will work if you know
how to do them and if you have a product that fits the corresponding market
you are targetting. Use one of the known common ones (SEO, ads, social
marketing), learn all that it has to offer, experiment with your product and
corresponding markets (i.e. if your market is not on HN, try a subreddit, or
other forum). You will certainly make some financial success if you do that
well enough. Only really start to decide that something works in a context or
not, after you have attempted different channels with success a few times
each, and base that decision not on whether or not that brings in money at
all, but whether or not that is a likely efficient approach.

~~~
tonyjstark
For me it's often that I have to decide how to spend my time. Improving or at
least working on my product or marketing. We're talking about projects that
don't pay the rent or they pay the rent but nothing more, so if you spent time
on it you probably want to have fun. I prefer programming to marketing and
marketing takes time and often costs money. So I will mention my product when
I write sometimes (it is Wokabulary,
[https://wokabulary.com](https://wokabulary.com)) but I won't go and spam
subreddits or HN. And I will write to journalists or blogs if I see a fit but
I won't spend my weekends just doing this because it would spoil the fun out
of the project for me.

~~~
erikb
Reasonable argument. Sure time value is also important. I also prefer coding
to marketing, however in coding I also have to do and learn unpleasing things
to get the desired result. So why not treat it like that?

~~~
tonyjstark
I kinda do, that's why I try out stuff from time to time but with marketing
it's so much harder to measure success and you never know if something does
not work because you're doing it wrong or because it just does not work.

Example: I wrote a lot of journalists that published articles about education-
software if they want to review our app, no responses. The mails were
personal, not templates. Did I wrote to the wrong persons or were my mails not
good or do they not care? Or something completely different?

Then I looked up blogs, sponsored posts but our traffic did not change so
much. Did I write to the wrong blogs? Are the users not the target group? How
to measure and learn?

I'm not so good with social media like facebook or twitter, I don't care
enough and I don't want to share too much personal details, but now I try to
work on social media marketing. Maybe that's what our app needs, again how can
I measure success and how can improve if it does not work from the beginning?
For me that is a black box...

------
inovica
SourceGuardian is old-school installable software, not an SaaS. It has been
ran by myself and a friend in Russia who I have only met once in 17 years!

We built it for our own use, as we are developers and because we frequented
forums where other PHP developers hung out we were able to grow it slowly and
steadily. We have been very consistent, making an income (without too much
work) for all of these years.

The key is to be authentic. We built something that we needed, but also in a
world that we knew something about. In doing this, we were automatically
passionate and that shines through.

------
amasad
[https://repl.it/api](https://repl.it/api) is an API to execute arbitrary code
in a sandbox from anywhere on the web. People use it to build code interview
sites and programming tutorials. Initial customers came from our open source
work where I included a link to it.

It's now basically running itself and I don't do much with it because I
recently quit my job and made this into a company and I don't see the API
being a big part of the business.

~~~
asadlionpk
I see that you have now become a classroom solution(?). How is your experience
with this market and if I may ask, what tool/feature has now become the main
source of income.

~~~
amasad
We haven't started monetizing yet, but we are growing really fast -- there is
a lot of dogma in edtech about making money so it's hard to predict.

~~~
dave84
Thank you for repl.it classroom, it's amazing. I am worried about getting too
invested in it though, will what is free become paid for at some point?

~~~
amasad
Hey, I'm glad you like it! We will not take any features away -- we'll just
introduce new paid features ;) I'm curious, where do you teach?

------
sarim
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.

------
jasonkester
I used to be a lot better at blogging. Or possibly it was just a bit easier to
get to the front page of Reddit 10 years ago, because that's how I did most of
the marketing for Twiddla back in 2007 & 2008.

This post:

[http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/04/zero-to-
dogfoo...](http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/04/zero-to-dogfood-in-
one-day.html)

... followed a week later by this one:

[http://www.twiddla.com/blog/2007/04/1000-signups-on-day-
one....](http://www.twiddla.com/blog/2007/04/1000-signups-on-day-one.html)

got us a ton of traffic and kept us going until we got accepted to SXSW and
won our category, getting us picked up by mainstream tech blogs and such,
leading to this:

[http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/03/6-million-
hits...](http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/03/6-million-hits-day-
time-to-think-scale.html)

I sort of stepped away from blogging after that, which from a marketing
standpoint was probably a mistake. It's been harder to get coverage for my
more recent products.

------
shireboy
I'm the author of Trello Dojo
[https://leanpub.com/trellodojo](https://leanpub.com/trellodojo) Marketing
does not come naturally to me. I feel like it's a good product, but I don't
want to be spammy. By far the best marketing choice was to ask Trello to put
it on their resource board. I was so nervous- what if they didn't like it?
What if they sued me for trademark infringement or something? They did none of
those things and put it up cheerfully, where Google Analytics says a majority
of me references come from.

------
anthnguyen94
SyntaxDB ([https://syntaxdb.com](https://syntaxdb.com)) was put on PH and HN
and that gave it a significant increase in traffic.

It was actually posted on PH once before, but that time it wasn't featured.
Almost one year later, I built an API, several extensions, increased the
amount of content, and integrated it with DDG. Eventually I decided it was
worth giving the PH people a shout to see if it would get reposted (they let
you repost if your product makes substantial progress). It successfully got
featured that time.

------
nhorob67
Facebook ads to blog posts. I've seen a 10.5x return on my investment so far.
For my farm software company:
[http://harvestprofit.com](http://harvestprofit.com)

~~~
agopaul
So do you use FB Ads only at the top of the funnel or do you also have have
retargeting Ads? Just curious as I'm in the process of setting up this very
process myself for [https://redokun.com](https://redokun.com)

~~~
nhorob67
Both. Mostly I send people to blog posts that contain some sort of an email
optin in. But I've also regargeted website visitors via FB's pixel with good
success.

All-in-all, I'm fan of "slow sell" via an email newsletter and FB's been great
for getting people onto my list.

------
goatherders
Great question and thread. I launched my side project a month ago and have had
zero conversions after about 200 click thrus from Facebook ads. It's a
platform for freelance developers and designers to pick up extra work without
me being a middle man; I introduce you to possible clients and the subsequent
conversations and experience are up to you.

www.devzil.la

Then I got busy at work and haven't spent as much time marketing it.

~~~
brobinson
When I click "Apply for Membership" -> "Create Listing" for the $20/month
Silver Plan, I get taken to a checkout page that is saying I can pay $1/month
or $95/year

~~~
goatherders
Thanks for that. I'll take a look tomorrow.

------
jonobird1
With [https://LaunchLister.com](https://LaunchLister.com), I found that the
best marketing I did was Twitter surprisingly.

Cater to the audience and engage with the founders and it has a steady flow of
increasing subscribers.

I just make sure my newsletter has good content consistently for my readers.

------
tonyjstark
With Wokabulary ([https://wokabulary.com](https://wokabulary.com)) we did no
marketing for years and just worked in our spare time on the product. Still we
got some posts by magazines and blogs. Now we do a bit more like writing to
review sites and journalists but we don't see much traffic growth by that.
OTOH we are not really good at social media stuff.

To answer your question, for us listening to customer feedback and releasing
new versions periodically worked best so far.

------
jonathanbull
[https://emailoctopus.com](https://emailoctopus.com) \- for cheap email
marketing via SES.

Submitted to the usual channels (HN, PH, Reddit) and saw a spike in traffic.
But what really worked was not charging anything for 3 months - people are
much more keen to tweet/blog about something if it's free. They're also a lot
more forgiving if they run into a bug (of which I used to have many!).

~~~
jackpointnl
Could you build something like this but for transactional email? I send i
trough SES but I dont have send, open and read stats.

~~~
jonathanbull
At the moment we're focusing on the marketing side (vs transactional), but
it's something we've considered for the future. Hopefully Amazon will beat us
to it!

------
taytus
Hi, I'm Roberto and I run [http://statimgram.com](http://statimgram.com). We
are Buffer for Instagram. We are officially launching this week, but we
already have some paying clients using the system. We had some early press
coverage: [http://launchdfw.com/2016/07/07/statimgram-fills-void-
instag...](http://launchdfw.com/2016/07/07/statimgram-fills-void-instagram-
users/) and I contacted a couple of local advertising agencies. I'm also a
professional photographer and this product is something a lot of professional
photographers told me they need. If anyone would like to test Statimgram for
free (or have any question), please shoot me an email to
roberto@statimgram.com. Cheers!

~~~
trymas
Congrats on your project, but why do you have scroll hijack on your website?

~~~
taytus
We're working on getting that fixed ASAP. Sorry.

------
skaplun
Hey All, I run UX-App ([https://www.ux-
app.com/dev/editor?m=trial](https://www.ux-app.com/dev/editor?m=trial)), a web
based mockup & prototyping tool, that attempts to give more flexibility to
users by directly styling html components & manipulating the full range of
front end events using an intuitive drag & drop graphical programming
language. Our model is a monthly subscription, starting @ $5/month with all
features included.

We're steadily growing just by being there every day. I try to write about my
experience across all social channels + medium, seek partnerships with other
like-minded businesses, find biz devs who will engage their network, go to
meetups of product/project managers and seek partnerships with other sites in
our domain.

------
bkrull
I run BitPixels ([http://www.bitpixels.com](http://www.bitpixels.com)) that
provides automated website thumbnails. I actually purchased Bitpixels from
another HN member a few years ago and have continued to build and market it.

The primary marketing channel is offering a free account that requires
attribution on their site (e.g. "Thumbnails powered by BitPixels). The
attribution links drive several new users per day and some eventually convert
to premium accounts.

------
vacord
For [https://userinput.io](https://userinput.io) (my service that connects you
with reviewers on-demand feedback for your website, app or idea), getting on
Product Hunt was the biggest thing. I got on Product Hunt nearly three months
ago, and I still get traffic from there that converts. I was #3 the day I
posted it. And yeah as other people have said in this thread, you need to know
someone who can post it for you. I coordinated with an influencer that I kind
of know, and he helped me out. My advice with Product Hunt is to post your
project at like 1am California time, then start working your mailing list and
social networks to try to get upvotes from Europe / Asia / Australia before
Americans wake up, so that you have a decent amount of upvotes already, then
just keep hustling getting attention to it that day. Be very available on PH
to answer questions and respond to comments etc.

Early on, my first customers actually came from Twitter, which I still find
surprising, but it worked. I simply did the "copy followers" technique of
copying people who follow similar Twitters, and since they're probably
interested in the topic of feedback, they would follow me back or check out
the site.

Reddit ads also got a few orders, and are pretty cheap and interesting to try
out.

Also I built out [http://feedbacktools.org](http://feedbacktools.org) as a way
to promote my own project and learn about a ton of other similar tools. It's
basically just a small curated directory of every tool I could find that was
related to feedback, but of course mine is at the top.

Also, a referral plan helps. I give customers a code that they can share with
their friends for $10 off their first order, and anyone who refers a new
customer gets a $10 credit.

------
lukethomas
For me ([https://fridayfeedback.com](https://fridayfeedback.com)) it's been a
mixture of outreach (sales), writing in-depth guides about topics that are
interesting to the target market (managers). I've tested some ads, but no dice
yet.

------
rafapaez
I run Transparent Startups
([http://www.TransparentStartups.com](http://www.TransparentStartups.com)), a
place that collects more than 40 startups that are sharing their revenue
numbers and growth stories. Most of these startups are still side projects or
started as such.

~~~
Amir6
Hey, can you share your contact info? I would like to have a conversation with
you about an idea.

------
vuchkov
I've started this side-project ([http://agresia.site](http://agresia.site))...
and I can share more info about it on a later stage... Wish me Good Luck!
Everyone is need it ([http://vuchkov.biz](http://vuchkov.biz))

------
recmend
My side project Nucleus Digest
[https://digest.meetnucleus.com](https://digest.meetnucleus.com) index of
great startup content. I market it by publishing content on twitter, point
resources to HN, Reddit, GH community questions etc.

------
kkt262
Best sources for us ([http://vyper.io](http://vyper.io)) -- Product Hunt,
Email marketing, content marketing (blogging), communities like Reddit /
Inbound / GrowthHackers, and PPC (Adwords).

------
novaleaf
i run PhantomJsCloud, I tried Adwords and found it to also be a total waste of
time/money (as mentioned by others here).

basic SEO seems to be what works. I should work on more "inbound marketing"
content but have a few technical features to add before doing another SEO
push.

also answering related questions on stack overflow helped me in the initial
MVP phase.

------
NateG
[http://www.pitofwar.com](http://www.pitofwar.com) is an online browser game I
created that targets a niche audience who likes strategy/simulation/text heavy
style games.

EMAIL LISTS

When I first launched I had two email lists I used. The first was an email
list I had laying around from an older game I had created many years prior.
The second email list I stumbled upon for an old game with some similar
mechanics to the game I was creating. I composed two sets of emails and sent
them out to the lists. For the list of my old players I re-introduced myself
and told them about the game. For the second list I started the email off with
a sentence that said something along the lines of "this is a one time email, I
will not email you again unsolicited. You are receiving this email because you
may be interested in a game I've just created...". Those two emails got me my
first 200 players.

ONLINE FORUMS

After that I found some gaming forums and asked the mods if it would be ok if
I posted a message about Pit of War and they were cool about it and said go
ahead. That style of marketing grew the player base again. I had a friend who
was the mod for a high traffic web master forum and he made a post in their
"off topic" section that helped get some more traction.

TWITTER

He also knew a handful of folks with a good number of Twitter followers and
asked them if they'd make a tweet about Pit of War and they were kind of
enough to do that for free to help me out.

PAID ADS

I tried Facebook ads a number of years ago and they weren't very effective,
however, I'm told they are much better now. I may try them again in the near
future. I then turned to cpmstar which is an ad network dedicated to games.
This proved to be very good with the CPA (Cost per Action - which in my case
is someone clicking on the ad and then signing up for the game) being much
lower than the LTV for a player gained through this channel so I focused on
that for awhile. CPA prices have gone up a lot since I started and there are
many more games out there competing for the same eyeballs so this channel has
started to wane but is still acceptable.

DEVIANTART & FACEBOOK

Using DeviantArt and Facebook I would upload some of the art from the game
which would get shares and more eyeballs which helped increase exposure and
player count.

WORD OF MOUTH

I asked my friends and family to try the game out and if they liked it to
please share it with people they think might like it as well.

Hard to pick a _best_ because each channel contributed. Having said that, the
initial email lists and paid advertising via cpmstar were crucial for the
success of the game I believe.

------
angry-hacker
Paid for the "influencers" in my niche to talk about my product. It works. Now
who said native advertising doesn't work? Unethical? - maybe...

~~~
jflowers45
Note that to do this, you also have to be able to identify the influencers in
your niche which is a skill in and of itself.

------
mirceasoaica
I've started an online store ([https://adorely.ro](https://adorely.ro)) with a
friend of mine using dropshippers (so we don't buy stock and manage the
delivery) and we're getting our most valuable traffic from price comparison
sites. While there is a limit of how many visitors you can get, the conversion
rate is amazing (in some cases is more than 10%) and the cost is extremely
low. Adwords is not a good idea if you don't have a good lifetime value. Also
we tried to increase our Facebook fanbase but the conversion rate is pretty
low (still bigger than adwords).

------
icelancer
Nothing. I made the best mousetrap. Then I told people it was the best
mousetrap. And I never lied or used marketing BS. Now my company is worth
$2MM.

That's how it used to work. It still does.

~~~
aparadja
I don't think this thread is about sharing lies or BS tricks.

"I told people it was the best mousetrap" sounds like your contribution to the
discussion, and it sounds like there's more to the story here. Care to share
any details or lessons?

