Marketing for a startup: how to attract thousands of users from around the world without spending $ 200

Today, I’ll tell you how to prepare a startup to enter Product Hunt, what steps to take before, and how to warm up interest in the project on the day and after publication.

Introduction

The last couple of years I have been living in the USA and have been promoting startups on English-speaking (and not only) resources. Today I will share the experience of attracting international users for IT start-ups with minimal investment. Mainly content marketing tools are suitable for this. Many of them are free or almost free, but can bring good results.
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So, this is where your startup should be promoted if you want to attract international users.

Show HN

Resource Hacker News has long been one of the most popular technologies and start-ups in the niche. If a project manages to get to its main page for at least a couple of tens of minutes, this can already lead to a surge in traffic - you can easily get several hundred clicks to the site.



This resource has a section Show HN - here the creators of projects or ordinary users can share useful links. It is worth starting a promotion with this resource - it is free, and if successful, you can get a good result. Most likely, you will not be able to get on the main page, and the audience on HN is not always very friendly, but a link to the site from a reputable resource in any case will not be superfluous.

Betapage and Betalist

Two resources working on a similar model. These are directories with descriptions of startups. For a fee, the project description gets into the listing bypassing the general queue (which is not fast moving), it can be fixed on the main page, these services also include a link to the project in their mailings.

The Betapage price tag at the time I last used it was:

• One day on the main page: $ 28
• Two days: $ 48
• Three days: $ 68
• Four days: $ 88

Inclusion in the newsletter costs another $ 30, so this figure should be added to the final price. Our experience of using a paid listing on this site is not a good one - one day on the main one, plus the mailing list, did not even give us hundreds of registered users.

The cost of placing on Betalist is higher - $ 129, but there is also the possibility of free publication. In the latter case, it will take about a month to wait for placement, but if there is a task to save - this is quite an option. During the most recent project, we chose this option and got a total of 452 users, while the surge occurred on the day of the announcement.



In general, the main costs fell on Betapage and Betalist, and in our case they were at least partially justified only in the second case.

International content marketing

Since we planned to attract not only users from English-speaking countries, we decided to experiment in this direction. We already had some good articles in English, as well as descriptions on Betalist and Product Hunt.

With the help of Upwork, we found Hispanic editors who not only helped us with the translation, but also advised on where and how to share links to published materials. I must say that the cost of translating a single blog post from English to Spanish usually does not exceed $ 10.

As a result, for the "seeding" of content, we selected two main resources:

• Taringa.net is a popular site aggregator in Latin America, with something like Reddit, more than 21 million visitors.
• Meneame.net - 9.5 million visitors.

In addition, on our own, we selected a number of sections on Reddit, where residents of Hispanic Latin American countries communicate:

• r / aprendeingles / - section dedicated to the study of English;
• / r / es / - general Spanish-language subreddit, 14.3 thousand users;
• / r / argentina / - 92 thousand subscribers;
• / r / vzla / - section of Venezuela, 34.5 thousand subscribers;
• / r / Colombia / - 13.8 thousand subscribers;
• / r / chile / - 48 thousand users.

The result surpassed all the most daring expectations - we not only received registrations and comments on Reddit, likes on Meneame, but Latin American journalists and bloggers noticed the project. In particular, after a review on wwhat's new Argentine IT resource, several thousand people visited us in a couple of days.



But the most important event was, of course, placement on Product Hunt.

Product hunt: startup guide

There are a lot of guides and stories about how best to launch on Product Hunt, so I will not write very much, I’ll dwell only on the main points.

First of all, you should read the launch guide from the PH team itself. Here are the three main theses of the document:

• You can not look for a hunter who will post the product . Now it makes less sense - before a popular user’s subscribers sent email-alerts about products published by him, now there’s no such thing.
• You can link directly to the product post, not to the PH home page. The urban legend says that PH finishes the projects for which users are voting, who go to the direct URL, and not found it through the main page. It is not true.
• You can not ask for likes - that's what they are fined for . Therefore, all communications dedicated to launching must contain a clear message: “We published on PH, here’s a link, come in, comment, ask questions!”

These are items that many people still do not know about. There are a few more points that are important to highlight.

• Hunter is better to find . This is more of an image moment, if this person publishes a link to your post on PH in their social networks, it will be a plus. But if such a character is not searched for for a long time, then you can do without it.
• Running on a PH is a 24 hour job . The countdown of the new day begins at 00:00 US time on the West Coast. You must be online 24 hours to respond to comments in a timely manner.
• After 24 hours you also need to work . Getting to the list of top products of the day gives a bonus - you are also mentioned in the mailing list, but if this was not possible, then there are other ways to further use PH. For example, the site has the opportunity to ask questions, the answers to which may be the recommendations of a particular software. If you get into this collection, you will get more traffic.

In the end, we did not get into the list of the top 5 projects, but users voted for us for at least another week - this allowed us to stay on the main one, because about 10-15 products per day are displayed on it. The more days passed from our launch, the further it was necessary to scroll to find the product, but this did not prevent the transition to the site.

The main secret of such a long-term placement is that you must keep an interest in it. This means preparing and periodically publishing articles with references to your listing, doing mailings, etc.



Example: a post in the project blog, which calls to go to the product page on PH and the built-in badge with a likes counter.

Conclusion

The activities described in the material cost us about $ 200, and a couple of weeks left for their preparation and implementation. As a result, we received thousands of clicks and hundreds of registrations. You can copy these techniques for your startups, I am sure it will help to get the first international users.

If you have any questions - write, I will be glad to answer.