#BuildingInPublic
This is where our beta users have come from:
- Facebook Groups
- Reddit communities
- Direct Outreach on the above + LinkedIn
This is how we did it:
Direct Outreach
Heads’ up…. the grind is real. Most of our users (~60%+) came from direct outreach. Finding people in groups, direct messaging, and having a small conversations – either in the post or through DMs.
Some conversations didn’t lead to anything, some lead to ‘hey, yeah let me know when you’re launched’, and others signed up officially.
The group posts (if it gets approved – and depends on your messaging) – got us a few sign ups at a time. I’m not scaling this approach until our product is not ready to actually start putting in front of users straightaway.
We were supposed to launch in April. Our product sucked, so we didn’t. Only pushed it out to a few users to get some feedback.
So I ended up converting 3 customers into service contracts, paying a monthly fee, total around $500. This is also a grind, our product is not ready, so I have to service them using the tools that we’re trying to replace! This has given us two significant benefits though:
- We’ve become our own user
- We’ve got validation to a small degree that the pain points are real
Marketing Pipeline
I’ve been working at getting other marketing channels up and running:
SEO
Website traffic is starting to trickle through. This comes from feature pages primarily e.g. this one here, but am relying that some of my long-tailed keywords will start to rank. I wrote 2 x 5000 word articles:
Quality over quantity – so I spent at least a week or two on each to push them live.
I did a distribution of the first article across various social media and got a few hundred site hits when I did that. I’ll do more distribution of content:
a. when I have more content produced
b. when the product is ready to be used at scale, this is because of the next item
Also focusing on more long tailed keywords but that have low search volume. Example posts include:
Site Conversions
Conversion on site visits to getting a hit to our online tool is above 20% – 30%. This is surprisingly well. Users are clicking into the Studio (or video editor) tool from any page on the website. Unfortunately I’m considering changing any direct links to the studio as it’s going through more updates before we launch it to betas. We’ll see.
Community on Facebook
I’ve kick started a community on Facebook for Content Creators and Marketers (our long term target audience) – if you’re in this industry, please connect there and join the conversations. I’ll be posting a follow up to this post there in the next few weeks.
We went from 0 to 92 members over the last week and a half. Meanwhile our Face book page went from 70 – 400 follows during the same period.
This comes from inviting contacts manually and running a paid ad campaign on Facebook. I’ll do a post on this in the Content Creators and Marketing community once the numbers are more significant – but it’s something that’s worked amazingly well for the price of a coffee a day.
LinkedIn – I initially wrote this off as it was too time consuming and there’s no clear path to scale activities. Recently I’ve found that using Groups can be leveraged reasonably well – for free. Groups on LinkedIn… suck. So I’m still testing this. I spent one hour last week and got about 5 sign ups. But will give an update after a few weeks if my strategy continues to perform.Stuff that didn’t really work, but might later
1. Lead Magnet: I created a lead magnet to try to get some emails upfront. How to Grow Your Business using Video – I’ve sent this to TWO people! and another TWO have downloaded it so far! TBH, it’s great content in there and I poured a lot of sweat adding value into the Lead Magnet. I haven’t promoted it anywhere, and it’s linked on the website in the footer somewhere. So it’s probably my fault.
I’ll make it more valuable by:
- Making it available in our FB Community
- Using it as part of a paid ads campaign at some stage
2. Social media – Instagram I spent at least a month of creating really good content, two quality posts a day, engaging with others, following, direct outreach. I had 70 followers when I started, and got to 140 followers. THIS IS NOT WORTH IT. I know I can make our Instagram more useful in the future, but given the stage we’re at, it’s not worth the time or the effort.
3. Twitter Literally only started working on our twitter a couple of weeks ago. 0 – 30 followers! I don’t know twitter, never used it, so will eventually understand the dynamics. The only tip I’ve got is that it too is a grind.
The pro of Twitter is that it’s easier to connect with others very easily – both publicly and privately. So definitely a channel I want to focus on. My co-founder and CTO is active on twitter, and I assume his account will do better than the company account – so we’ll leverage that too.
That’s it. Right now we’re focused on delivering the product and getting it in front of our users asap, but the marketing doesn’t stop either.