[HN Gopher] Marketing for Product-Obsessed Developers
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Marketing for Product-Obsessed Developers
Author : marclou
Score : 79 points
Date : 2024-01-21 08:33 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (marclou.beehiiv.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (marclou.beehiiv.com)
| zubairq wrote:
| Yep, makes sense as a marketing guide by using the free product
| as the top of funnel for your sales pipeline
| igeligel_dev wrote:
| Free tools work great for traffic. What's the best way to convert
| users into paying users after?
|
| I have tried a lot of things for my side project like limited
| generations of the output and then putting a signup requirement
| if you want to use the tool more often but people are simply not
| converting to the main solution.
|
| Link to free tool: https://www.hackathon.camp/free-
| tools/hackathon-certificate-...
| have_faith wrote:
| What are your users main alternative to upgrading to your paid
| product?
| humbleferret wrote:
| > "Take a standalone feature of your main startup and make a free
| version of it."
|
| > "It's also a good strategy to validate potential features.
| Instead of cluttering your main product, launch a standalone
| feature as a free tool."
|
| Creating free, viral 'mini-apps' to promote your main product is
| a genius idea. It's like hitting two birds with one stone --
| marketing your main product and testing new features without
| messing it all up.
|
| I've been following Marc Lou[1] for a while, and I really dig his
| approach as a 'solopreneur.' It's cool to see someone who's real
| about the ups and downs of the bootstrapping journey. No sugar
| coating and honest about some life issues along the way like
| depression.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/marc_louvion
| deepGem wrote:
| Take a standalone feature of a product and make it free
|
| Indirectly this also forces decomposition and building loosely
| coupled features even at a product level. The speed for delivery
| and iteration acts as a force function to build pipelines and
| systems to adapt the new feature into the product should it be a
| runaway success.
|
| May be the small engineering benefits for a building obsessed
| dev.
| longnguyen wrote:
| I've been following this strategy and it works pretty well for
| me.
|
| A few tips if you want to pursue this strategy (sorry, English is
| not my mother language):
|
| - It can be great for SEO, so pay attention to keywords for these
| free tools
|
| - Collect email addresses if possible
|
| - Mention your main product, multiple times. But don't annoy your
| users (minimize popup, snag screen...)
|
| - Minimize your time on building these tools, ideally less than 2
| weeks
|
| - Picking features to make it free: ideally not a core features
| (obviously), but fun and good for marketing (visual appealing,
| wow effects etc.)
|
| - Submit to as many directories as you can. People love free
| tools
|
| - Subdomain/subfolder or separated domain? Ideally subfolder for
| SEO juice, but it could live on its own and you can 301 redirect
| later. Also you might want to turn one of these tool into a paid
| one, separated domain would be better in this case.
|
| - If you collect email addresses, do not promote the main product
| after at least 3-4 product email updates of that free tool.
| People _might_ remember your free tool, but almost never remember
| your main product.
|
| Here are 2 examples:
|
| 1. I build a native ChatGPT/AI app for Mac called BoltAI[0]. One
| of the features was to "chat with screenshots", basically take
| the screenshot with a shortcut key then type your prompt and let
| GPT-4 Vision handle your request.
|
| I turned it into a free, standalone app called ShotSolve[1] and
| it's been welcomed by many users. So far it brought ~1k visitors
| to BoltAI with about 5% converted to paid customers. I also
| collected about 500 emails, which I could nurture into paid users
| later (hopefully)
|
| 2. I build a tool to send web articles to Kindle called KTool[2].
| It supports multiple type of content and so I figured I could
| build free, standalone tools for each of these content and give
| it for free for the right community.
|
| - [Send Hacker News threads to Kindle](https://ktool.io/hacker-
| news-to-kindle)
|
| - [Send AZW3 to Kindle](https://ktool.io/azw3-to-kindle)
|
| - [Send Reddit to Kindle](https://ktool.io/reddit-to-kindle)
|
| The HN tool brough about 20K visitors to my product and helped
| kickstart the initial growth of my product.
|
| Each tool drives about 200-500 visitors monthly to the main
| product.
|
| [0]: https://boltai.com
|
| [1]: https://shotsolve.com
|
| [2]: https://ktool.io
| kjqgqkejbfefn wrote:
| What are the risks of offering access to GPT4 ?
| longnguyen wrote:
| Users bring their own keys so no risks. I might add support
| for Llava later
| cuu508 wrote:
| > If you collect email addresses, do not promote the main
| product after at least 3-4 product email updates of that free
| tool.
|
| I would generalize to: if you collect email addresses, do not
| use them for anything other than the original stated intent.
| For example, if the collection form said "enter email to get
| notified when this launches", use the collected addresses for
| the launch announcement, and then get rid of them.
| turnsout wrote:
| This is the email marketing equivalent of donating 100% of
| your profits to charity; I applaud it, but it's not good
| business advice.
| cuu508 wrote:
| This is ethical email marketing.
|
| Here's another bad business advice: don't be a spammer,
| don't facilitate spamming, don't work with spammers.
| alin23 wrote:
| Looks like I'm doing something similar without being aware of it.
| My latest free macOS app IsThereNet [1] is really just a swift
| file bundled as an app. But it got a lot more press than I
| expected and brought enough users for my Clop app [2] where my
| marketing efforts did very little.
|
| I like to help others by sharing my efforts into fixing macOS
| incoveniences. But going from a script that runs fine for years
| on my Mac to a thing that can run on other Macs requires 1-2 days
| of concentrated effort so I don't do this for everything I
| create.
|
| [1] https://lowtechguys.com/istherenet
|
| [2] https://lowtechguys.com/clop
| barrenko wrote:
| This is cool, I don't realistically know how to market a website
| at all, besides there being this thing called "SEO".
| realusername wrote:
| Looking here https://marclou.com/, it seems a somewhat classic
| entrepreneur selling to entrepreneur kind of projects.
|
| Not that it could not work for other products, it sounds sensible
| but I've seen so many of those that learned to be careful.
| __natty__ wrote:
| During a gold rush, sell shovels.
| realusername wrote:
| Yeah exactly, I'll be skeptical of any sales or marketing
| material made by people which succeeded by selling said
| material. They have to prove their experience somewhere else
| than this very specific niche.
| LaundroMat wrote:
| I got the same vibes. Marketing to developers who don't like
| marketing by pretending to be a developer who doesn't like
| marketing but doing almost nothing but marketing.
| gsuuon wrote:
| Doesn't this just offload the work of marketing the main product
| to marketing the free tool?
| ativzzz wrote:
| How does one learn to market themselves this way? I come from a
| culture that values privacy & humility and it's really hard to
| express myself in public like this. I have no trouble doing it
| IRL, but doing it online just seems... wrong to me.
|
| I understand that if I want to sell products, people need to find
| out about it someway and good marketing is what drives people to
| your product, but it just seems like such a foreign language to
| me.
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