E551: Just as the title describes, this person got 20,000 users in 3 months for his startup with only $50 and shares how he did it.
Very actionable and repeatable strategies in this one.
If you want to get users and qualified traffic for your company, these methods will be great.
Sources:
How I got 20,000 users in three months with $50: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-got-20-000-users-in-three-months-with-50-5d1f91a4ba
Relaunch like a pro: 100+ places to launch, relaunch, and list your product: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/relaunch-like-a-pro-100-places-to-launch-relaunch-and-list-your-product-wWBE9KERza5CqZgAmc5U
EIN Presswire: https://www.einpresswire.com/
PRLog: https://www.prlog.org/
00:00 Introduction to Today's Share 00:24 Launching Startup Timer 01:18 Marketing Strategies: IndieHackers and Reddit 01:53 Old School Marketing: Press Releases 03:29 Press Release Success Story 05:55 Submitting to Software Websites 06:33 Journalist Outreach Campaign 08:37 Additional Resources and Episode Wrap-Up
The Edward Show. Your daily digital marketing podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
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I got a great share for you today. It's how I got 20,000 users in three months with $50. It was written in December 2022, right before the release of Chatshi PT, and it's just some direct actionable things that got this person 20,000 users in three months with 50 bucks, written by Junie Fleming on indiehackers.com, this is it. I launched my app Startup Timer on September 8th. Today, in the beginning of December, the app has had over 20,000 users, and the app's website Startup Timer.com has grown from zero backlinks and zero domain authority ranking to 213 backlinks and 21 domain authority. With my marketing budget of $50, I think that's pretty good. Startup Timer is a lightweight, freeware app for Windows that measures how long it takes for a Windows PC to fully start up. And it also measures which of the installed apps are making the system start slower. It's a very simple and straightforward app that has a somewhat small niche audience, but I would say that the app does its job and it does it well. Even though it's a simple app developing, it took me about a month. It consists of about 16,000 rows of code, and I made it as a side project after my normal work hours. This is exactly what I did to launch it. First, I posted it here on indiehackers, as well as on Reddit's R side project. The side project subreddit on Reddit. Great place to share what you're working on. This was mostly, to be honest, just to collect feedback about the app and the website because I want to make them better. I believe in quality and that users will see the quality as well. That's why in everything I do, I try to make it as good as I possibly can. That is how I implement an MVP, minimum viable product. For me, MVP means a product with minimal features, but those features are polished and they work perfectly. Second, I did a press release, and I didn't expect that when I read this the first time. Second, I did a press release. It's very much of an old school method, but I have had some success with it before. Basically, a press release needs to be written in a very specific format, and then you pay someone to distribute it to different relevant media outlets, websites, and freelance reporters, and I've talked about press releases a lot on the show. I've used PRLog.org. I use their most expensive tier, which I think is around $615. I write the press release myself. In my experience, the press release works best. If you're using one of these tools that just auto-distributes it for you, it works best if it's in a hot niche, a popular niche right now. Crypto is an example of that, or AI is an example of that, and if it's actually like share-worthy news. If it's not necessarily share-worthy news, you could still write a press release and then send it out to relevant reporters, reporters who have actually written or talked about relevant stories, similar stories to yours before. This person said, "I chose the press release distribution service from EIN presswire. I bought a package of multiple press release distributions, so the price for one was just $50, and that's a lot cheaper than my $615. Buying the distribution for just one press release would have been $100. There are also other press release distribution service providers and most of them are more expensive. I don't know whether you get more. If you pay more, that's why I just spent $50. I'm actually going to try that. I'm going to try that for compact keywords when it releases, hopefully, this week. I'm going to try it's $50. I'm going to try this. I'm going to try it EIN presswire. The press release got picked up by quite a few news outlets, nothing major, but everything helps. This is how the press release reads, by the way, and I'm going to click on this. The title is "MaceCraft Software Launch Startup Timer." I'll just read the first two paragraphs. "MaceCraft Software Launch the Major Update to JV16 Power Tools Utility Suite." The new version, 7.7, includes a new tool called Startup Timer, and it links to Startup Timer here. Along with other new features, improvements, and bug fixes, Startup Timer is a standalone tool that measures how long it takes for Windows to fully start and to see which installed apps make the Windows boot time slower. Its first version was launched on September 15th and has already been downloaded over 20,000 times. The thing is the links from most press releases like this are no-follow backlinks, so they don't necessarily pass link juice, but if you have a popular press release or people actually click the links, that still tells Google that this press release or this backlink is useful. People literally even send the press release to people they know and just ask them to click the link. That's something that people have done. So back to this article. One thing to mention is that news outlets might notice your press release but not publish it, but they might still run a story about your product either immediately or soon after. This makes it really difficult to measure the actual efficiency of a press release because you cannot just count the number of websites that publish your press release. That's just the tip of the iceberg. This is especially an important point in our case. The press release was sent out on October 27th and on October 31st, the app was featured in a major German computer news website called computerbase.de, which provided my website with thousands of visitors. This happened only a few days after the press release, so I have to assume they saw the press release via the distribution service and that's why they got interested and featured my product there. This goes to show that a press release can really help you even if the press release itself isn't published by many websites. That's really interesting. However, the press release said that the app has already been downloaded 20,000 times and the title of this post that I'm reading is how I got 20,000 users in three months. So maybe it was near 20,000 and the press release increased it to just over 20,000 or something like that. But this is an interesting anecdote about this press release service and it's really cheap. I'm very curious, so I'm going to try it. I like press releases. I like writing them. I like sending them out. It's fun for me. The article continues. The third thing I did was that I submitted the app to the best quality software download websites, websites like download.com and the likes. This is a rather tedious process because you basically need to do the submission to these websites one by one and the process is different for every website. Some sites make you sign up for an account, fill out a form and so on. While others have an email address, you need to write to asking them to list your software. I've done this so many times. It's important to focus on quality over quantity. There are many software download websites which accept automated submissions, which means they are full of spam, malware and other junk you don't want to be associated with. And lastly, I did a simple cold contact campaign. Basically, I searched with relevant keywords for articles that mention my niche, how to measure computer startup speed, how to make Windows start faster, et cetera. And I contacted the first page search result websites with a good quality handcrafted message saying that my new app would be a good fit for their existing content. And this is possibly something you could say about it. And this actually worked. The app was getting featured by these websites that I contacted. I've done this myself. I use a tool called lucia.com to find journalists, email addresses or even phone numbers. It's l-u-s-h-a.com. And it's a Chrome extension for LinkedIn. And you find a journalist name, you go to their LinkedIn profile in the Chrome extension. You pay, I think it's like $115 for a month. And so you do this for a month and then you stop paying and you get journalists' email addresses and phone numbers. And then you just do cold outreach. And you say, "Hey, I made this." You've written about similar things before. Maybe you'll be interested in this. The reason why we're interested is in so-and-so. And I've done this and I've made my products or my videos go viral like this. When I used to make like crazy YouTube stunts and I've done so many crazy YouTube stunts when I was doing that, I would send the YouTube stunts to relevant journalists and some of them would feature it. And we've gotten featured in some crazy websites. On the front page of these websites, as a result, these are really great thing to do. I personally will completely recommend that strategy. Then this article concludes, this is how I got 20,000 users in less than three months with a marketing budget of $50. I would say that the main keyword here is quality. I worked a long time to test, fine-tune and polish my product and its website to ensure they are good enough. Not good enough for me, but good enough for someone to actually use, share, and recommend. And every marketing and promotional effort I did was also made with quality over quantity. I believe if you work hard enough and you make something good enough, people will notice. And that being said, if you have any feedback about the app or its website, especially if there's anything I can do to make them better for your needs, please let me know. The last thing that I Edward wanna add actually, about to release a video on TikTok and Instagram Reels about this is I found this crazy article right before this, as I was looking for a topic for today's podcast. And this article on indyhackers.com again, super relevant to what I just read. It's called Relaunch Like a Pro 100 Places to launch, relaunch, and list your product. I'm gonna list this in the description for this episode, but you can also just Google relaunch like a pro 100 places to launch, relaunch, and list your product. And it is a list of 100 different startup submissions, SaaS submission places. It doesn't just have to be techic. It could be any startup to launch to. You have your product tons, you have beta lists, you have hacker news and indie hackers, but then there's a lot of places that even I haven't heard of. And I'm thinking, wow, for one of these places is another product ton or beta list. All of this is worth it. But it's also a great way to get backlinks. Now, like the person said, this submission process is a little bit tedious, but it's still a good way to get links. And lots of these places, they actually use do follow backlinks. They don't use no follow backlinks. There are plenty that use do follow backlinks. So I thought this was a great share. All of this is a great share. I like this article, very actionable, how this person got 20,000 users in three months with $50. I learned about a new press release service and then the relaunch like a pro with the 100 places to launch to. That is a great article too. And this is episode 551 of my daily digital marketing podcast, 551 days in a row doing this show. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again tomorrow.
