Getting from 0 to 50 users
The road to 50 signups is a small but important milestone!
From the get-go, I made this extension as a way to hack users. The idea was to revamp the existing features of 3 well-used but now defunct Google calendar extensions. Each of these extensions had 20,000 users so how hard would it be to steal a bit of market share and take some of their users 😈?
Marketing activities
It turns out to be a bit harder than expected. Being from a technical background, marketing, SEO, outreach, and conversions are a whole new ball game for me. I had to do a lot of learnings here and devoted most of last month to these marketing activities.
Organic SEO
Writing articles was a big part of the marketing strategy. It helps improve the SEO of the site and builds organic traffic. I would post these articles on Indie Hacker and Hacker News, with one article hitting the front page for a brief moment!
This early success was unexpected and gave me high optimism but was never repeated. In total, I wrote 15 articles with a median of 23 views each.
Paid Ads
For paid ads, I opted to post on 2 platforms. Google and LinkedIn. This blends the general and professional crowds quite nicely together. Google Ads - I added the core keywords and made some snazzy headlines. There are not many impressions due to the niche-ness of the terms.
Conversions…
There’s a lot needed to improve here! From the statics, although there are visitors to the site, almost none resulted in conversions. Especially for a free product, I was expecting much more. This spawns a few questions… Is the landing page bad? Are the right people visiting the site? Is the tracking working properly? to which I have no answers for yet.
Takeaways
Getting the word out there is a slow game. SEO ranking is a mystery (my site is currently on page 7 if you search for google calendar tagging), there’s often nothing more you can do than just wait and keep pumping out solid and good content. All the SEO hacks do not work.
Conversions trump impressions. Getting a lot of views on an article is great, but if no one signs up then it doesn’t help a whole lot.
Make existing users happy and they will recommend you. Many of the signups came directly and it’s clear that they came from suggestions. I try my best to engage with existing users and make them happy and it has paid off!
My final 2 cents is that compared to building a product and coding, marketing is a different beast where time and effort do not necessarily mean results. Patience is key so… I’ll keep up the grind and hopefully onwards and upwards we go!