What's New: The benefits of grassroots marketing

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Grassroots marketing can provide a valuable opportunity:

• Seeking out community groups and forums helps you connect more deeply with potential users, gather feedback, and craft your roadmap.
• As a bootstrapped founder, every dollar counts. Avoid unnecessary spending on minor optimizations, and prioritize SEO from the start.
• $19.8K MRR in the midst of wartime. Oleg Kulyk benefitted from SEO with 2-4 blog posts monthly, and is also using his tech skills to aid in the war.

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Grassroots Marketing for SaaS 💪

by Mehedi Hasan

As founders, we know how crucial it is to get an early boost in funding and exposure. Lifetime deals (LTDs) are supposed to provide exactly that, but the launch platform matters.

Choosing grassroots marketing over big platforms

With TubeOnAI, instead of going to AppSumo, we decided to go the "grassroots" route. We searched for, and joined, popular Facebook Groups for SaaS LTD deals. We quickly recognized their potential as spaces to effectively promote.

With our unique selling propositions in mind, we crafted personalized messages to group admins, seeking to connect and showcase our tool in the best possible way.

To our surprise, their response was overwhelmingly positive. With just a 25% affiliate commission, we saw an opportunity worth seizing.

Within two weeks of launching our deals in these Facebook Groups, we generated $6K!

Beyond the number of sales

Engaging with members of the Facebook Groups improved our understanding of user needs and preferences. It helped us increase the value of our product, cover more use cases, and address our users' most urgent issues.

Moreover, the feedback, ideas, and suggestions provided valuable insight, and helped shape our product roadmap. We gained a deeper understanding of how people used our product, and identified their most pressing needs. As a result, we prioritized working on features that would make the most significant impact.

The takeaway

If you are a SaaS founder, consider the alternatives and carefully calculate the ROI before committing to big-ticket promotional platforms. You should always research and compare all available options.

Remember, starting small doesn't mean sacrificing success. It means laying a sturdy foundation for growth. Our experience with Facebook Groups proved to be a game-changer. It shows the power of grassroots marketing, and the willingness of communities to support innovative ventures.

Reach out to folks, try to seek advice, and connect with like-minded people and communities!

Discuss this story.

In the News 📰

from the Growth Trends newsletter

🤖 Here are the jobs being replaced by AI.

⛵️ Customer portals for Paddle, free until you reach $500 MRR. #ad

✨ Six new Reddit Ads Manager features to simplify your campaigns.

💡 Coming up with high-performing blog post ideas.

🤓 How reading patterns can help optimize content for organic search.

📧 On 20 years of Gmail.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

Lessons in Bootstrapping 🥾

by Wyatt Feaster

In reflecting on my journey of building Email Emu, I've pulled together my top five learnings for new startup founders!

Avoid unnecessary spending on minor optimizations

In the early days, I poured around $3K into my initial setup. Soon after, I began chasing enhancement, spending an extra $6K on image display updates, email categorization accuracy, grid adjustments, and more.

In hindsight, those tweaks barely moved the needle for user experience. Lesson learned.

Explore monetization sooner than later

It took me until last week, six months in, to consider monetizing the platform. In retrospect, I missed out on early opportunities.

Experimenting with affiliate links, ads, or separate presales could have been beneficial alongside the free offering. This is crucial when you are bootstrapping.

Hold yourself accountable

Momentum is important. I noticed that if I took time off from creating content, it was hard to get back into a rhythm. Set weekly goals for yourself, and hold yourself accountable.

Prioritize SEO from the start

I overlooked the power of SEO. Had I produced SEO-driven content from day one, I'd be reaping the benefits now. SEO takes about six months to show results. It's a reminder that it's never too early to start.

Right now, we are getting roughly 5K pageviews and ~1K unique users each month. We've spent zero in marketing dollars up to this point.

Networking is invaluable

Engaging with marketing professionals weekly has been enlightening, helping me dive deeper into the marketing realm, uncover day-to-day challenges, and learn from these interactions.

My background in product design and user testing has enhanced my ability to listen, empathize, and identify needs. These conversations not only expanded my network, but also influenced a pivotal shift in my product's direction.

Discuss this story.

🔥 Landing Page Hot Tips

by Rob Hope

Strengthen your landing page with these design, development, and conversion tips!

Align with a grid. Layout grids keep your landing page tidy by positioning within constraints.

Subscribe to Rob's One Page Love newsletter for his favorite UI, design, and development finds.

Indie Hacking in a Time of War 💻

by James Fleischmann

Oleg Kulyk grew to $19.8K MRR in the midst of war, with ScrapingAnt, his web scraping tool.

War and business

Right now, Ukraine's in a tough spot; we're fighting a war. This has turned my focus towards contributing where I can, utilizing my technical skills to aid in our collective fight for sovereignty and peace.

Tech is more than a job now; it's about helping in any way that I can. I've been trying to make my cybersecurity and data engineering know-how useful. I can't go into further detail about that, given the sensitive nature of this work.

Running a business amidst the backdrop of an active war presents a unique set of challenges and lessons. It demands unparalleled resilience, adaptability, and strategic foresight. We weren't able to deliver any new features during the first year of the Russian invasion. We just focused on support, and relationships with existing clients.

Everything is harder during war. Everything gets destroyed, including businesses, houses, and lives. Lots of new businesses get started, too, but more get destroyed.

I'm used to the air radar alerts, explosions, and missile attacks. But I'll never get used to news of friends and family members being killed.

Coping as a founder

Unfortunately, the situation won't be resolved soon, and I have to be able to continue performing. The only way to do that is to rest. I've learned how to rest properly.

We also started hiring more people from Ukraine, so I know that by growing this business, I'm helping my country and my people. That motivates me.

Growing to $20K MRR

We started providing our API using RapidAPI. That allowed us to test the idea of using a web scraping API as a service, and it's how we got our first customer.

Starting on a marketplace gave us visibility with our target audience right away. Then, we added a landing page to the RapidAPI listing, and tried running ads.

This approach failed, as we had no idea how to run ads properly. Running ads for a website you have no control over is not a good idea for beginners.

So, we reverted to classic content marketing. That worked best for us, as SEO paid off.

Growth tips for indie hackers

• Focus on customer support. We always try to go beyond expectations and help our users, whether they're paid or free.

• Understand the need for marketing.

• Talk with people from the domain you're working in.

• Constantly search for different marketing channels. Some channels will perform better than others, and it's all about experimentation.

• Start with the most affordable channels.

Discuss this story.

The Tweetmaster's Pick 🐦

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Mehedi Hasan, Darko, Wyatt Feaster, Rob Hope, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing