Developer Adventures in the Marketing World

Note from the translator:

We have no relation to the product that the author mentions. To be honest, we did not even get acquainted with its free version. The mention of the product name in the article was left out of "ethical" considerations.

Most of the marketing methods described in the article are known to most specialists, but are often ignored by newbies. We hope that this material will help those who independently promote their projects, as it demonstrates the basic principles with a real example.

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Preparatory stage

I was not engaged in marketing before the immediate launch of the product. I didn’t even guess to let my friends test my application. The first user who saw and tried my idea met her after the project was already launched on Codecanyon. Today, I sincerely regret that I did not carry out any preparatory work and did not assemble a preliminary database of email addresses before launching the project.

Run on Codecanyon

I placed the product on Codecanyon, as this resource seemed to me a suitable place for this. Duet was well received. Sales were good, but did not reach the title of impressive. I did not make any marketing efforts, because I wanted to test the product in a “battle”, test it and correct mistakes before reporting it to the whole world.

Hacker news

When I was sure that most of the existing errors were found, I went to Hacker News. This was a major part of my marketing plan. I read many articles that a successful message on HN can generate a huge amount of traffic. I thought that if I managed to attract an audience of Hacker News, the other users would come after them. My first post was published on May 12, but went unnoticed. Despite the fact that I was depressed, I realized that I needed to succeed, and returned to HN on May 15 with the message:

“Hey, HN, I independently created an alternative to Basecamp. The demo is here.

The reaction was positive and brought me short-term success. The message brought 27k new visitors over the course of an hour, which brought me about $ 2000 of net revenue. After that, the traffic dropped significantly, but I earned another 10 thousand during the month. In general, everything went well, but again I regretted that I did not have a mailing list to which users could subscribe, because I again lost valuable information in the form of a database of emails of my clients.

Over the next few months

For a while I did absolutely nothing to develop my marketing campaign. Instead, I fixated on what I can do: programming. I corrected errors, expanded functionality, etc. Unfortunately, “Duet” did not get viral spread, which happens with products just because they are good.
The traffic died almost completely, which is not surprising, but this was not what I was expecting after a positive response from Codecanyon and Hacker News. Today I understand perfectly well that neglecting marketing has become one of the biggest mistakes. When I started marketing again, I had to start from scratch.

Start of sales

Thanks to users of Hacker News, I realized that my idea of ​​selling a product through Codecanyon was terrible. Therefore, I deleted the application from this resource and started selling it directly to customers using Gumroad. It was also a great solution because it finally allowed me to start collecting data about my clients.

Blogs

The next step was an attempt to achieve the mention of my product in several popular blogs. I sent out thousands of letters, most of which went unnoticed. Those few who deigned to answer, most often asked for money for their services. It seemed to me something wrong to pay for reviews, and I refused their offers.

Very few answered that they would like to familiarize themselves with my product for some time. I sent copies to some bloggers, but unfortunately, not one of them has ever written his thoughts about my project. I sincerely believe that these people are just very busy, but this turn of events pretty disappointed me.

Freemium

The freemium model works well for SaaS applications, so I decided to develop this area and start distributing a version with limited functionality for free. The free version is called "Solo". I was hoping that after installation, users will appreciate my application and will want to purchase the full version. It was a good solution and still serves as a good source of conversion.

Solo gets into the media

Once I received an email from a resource called eWebDesign. It was the first time I heard about him, but its content seemed appropriate to me to post here an article about “Solo”. I sent the necessary information to the resource employee, and he agreed to publish the news absolutely free. The appearance of the product on this resource has become the second most effective way to attract new users, after the success of Hacker News.

After “Solo” appeared in the media, a few more resources were quoted about it, which led to a new surge of “free” traffic.

Tweets about Solo

The site “Solo” has buttons for quoting on social networks, which led to a significant number of retweets and Facebook posts. This provided good traffic for a few more weeks. I realized that it was necessary to add such functionality on the “Duet” website, since I do not fully use the potential of social networks.

Comments on project management application blogs

I personally commented on Duet in many blogs that write articles about project management applications. It was an extremely time-consuming process that did not bring significant results. But I noticed that users who come from these resources spend significantly more time on the page of my project. This is probably good.

I also answered some Quora questions about PM applications. I still don’t know if it had any effect.

Again blogs

I am addicted to Hacker News, I just cannot count the number of successful entrepreneurs who preached to HN that the content of marketing is the key to success, which is why I plan to devote considerable efforts to blogging and articles like this.

The overall effect of my efforts

Nothing compares with the 27K visitors that I received from HN in one day, but sales are still quite good, and are growing slowly. Today I have a little more than 5k unique visitors per month, which is not so good, but not scary either.

Future plans

I will continue blogging, but I am actively seeking additional marketing opportunities. Here are some ideas that I have:

- I plan to release another free application in the same vein as Solo. This will be the most lightweight mini-app;
- Deal with email marketing. I have a couple of hundreds of email addresses, but I have not yet sent a single letter, because I do not want to scare off potential customers and do not know what to write to them;
- Expand the presence of my products in thematic blogs;
- Resurrect my second blog “codebasehero”, which still receives decent traffic, despite the fact that I completely abandoned it;
- Take advantage of paid marketing (someday).