Experience in project promotion with minimal costs

A year ago, the story began Raindrop.io . During this time, the service was visited by 250,000 people, and the number of saved bookmarks exceeded 2.5 million. At the moment, the web version is implemented, extensions for all browsers, Android and iOS client. As before in the project I am alone. In this post I will try to share my experience and tell about important events that happened with the project.

Promotion

The first big push of attendance was the announcement on Habrahabr , which in total attracted 15,000 unique visitors. But of course the huge fitback that I received from the community is more important. He determined the future path of development of the project.

A big surprise for me was a bunch of Hackernews + Designernews (Reddit for programmers / designers). They gave colossal results. At the peak there were 400 users online and in a couple of days 40-45 thousand came. In addition, records began to appear in the Western media. Plus, I had a call from Pinterest. The girl introduced herself as responsible for the takeover of companies. She admitted that they have a lot of Raindrop.io fans on the team. They did not absorb, but such interest from such a company was very pleasant. And it all cost me 5 minutes of time: place a link and specify a title.
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Personal contact with the authors of various media / communities in social services has also proved very effective. networks. Letters asking for a review of the service responded and were followed by entries that attracted quite a lot of traffic. And completely free of charge. I will not celebrate specific publications, if I’m interested in answering in a personal. And write directly to the authors, you can’t wait for an answer from corporate emails.

Contextual advertising as well as advertising in communities gave an incomparably low result in comparison with the above.

I cannot say anything about other promotion methods. Perhaps you will recommend something in the comments? I will be very grateful.
And now if I may, I will make a small review of the chips that have appeared lately on Raindrop.io.

Android version

What is most requested from the very appearance of the service. As it turned out in practice, only 10% of the total number of active users used it. I hope this figure will grow in the future.
I was very disappointed with Appcelerator Titanium, on which I was developing a version for Android. When the application was almost ready, I had to admit that speed and fault tolerance were no good. Learning Java and writing the native version from scratch took another month and a half, but the work was worth it. In the next post I will talk more about this transition.

Browser Extension

This is a full-featured version of the web version, except that it is presented in a compact form and is available from any browser tab. Plus, you can drag (drag'n'drop) a link or image from the page and immediately save it to the collection.
In general, the expansion itself can be considered as another source of new users. In my case, Opera marked it as recommended, and this fact brings about 1,000 users a month.

Afterword

Opera and Google recently presented their visual bookmarks that are very similar to Raindrop both in terms of the interface and in terms of functionality. But do not forget that their solutions are not cross-browser and this is still the usual bookmarks, without saving the content and the possibility of deferred reading of articles.
I will be glad to hear from you constructive criticism and suggestions for the development of the service in the comments!