Who is this product for? Find that person and ask them to use it.
Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?
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Re: Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?
#12I've posted on hacker news (avg 5-15 page views), Reddit (avg 2-5 page views) and Quora (no pages views that can be tracked anyway). Most of my Product hunt launches are completely dead, getting almost 0 traffic, although there was 1 that got 200 upvotes and nearly 400 page views). It's darn near impossible to get a steady stream of traffic unless Google decides to give it to you. It seems like, Most success stories…
Facebook groups are a good source of traffic, so are Instagram story links, if you can find someone with more than 10k followers to send them your way.
Re: Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?
#13I've posted on hacker news (avg 5-15 page views), Reddit (avg 2-5 page views) and Quora (no pages views that can be tracked anyway). Most of my Product hunt launches are completely dead, getting almost 0 traffic, although there was 1 that got 200 upvotes and nearly 400 page views). It's darn near impossible to get a steady stream of traffic unless Google decides to give it to you. It seems like, Most success stories…
Thank God I'm not the only one who can't drum up support on reddit. One thing that has worked for me in the past, though, is buying upvotes. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. People really love to downvote things. I mean they love it. They'd marry downvoting everything that isn't a meme if they could. Also, I think reddit is probably wise to bought upvotes. Either that or my super power is making people universally downvote my posts until the upvotes I purchased run out. I mean reddit can be good but successful posts are pretty random as far as I can tell.
But also, even if you get like 400 page views (which I did too once, thanks to purchased upvotes) those numbers drop off fast. I wonder if slow and steady advertising on facebook would be a better way to go.
Re: Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?
#14A bit of a cliche answer, but I'll still go with this: depends on the target audience. Find out who can most benefit our of your product? Developers? Sales? Marketing? General netizen? Next, figure out where they spend their time on. For eg: to target devs, post on communities like HN (as Show HN). Reach out to community driven blogs and be an author subtly marketing the product. In fact, an interesting story on what…
I've done this and usually get like 5 upvotes and 1 half ass comment telling me to change something. Then if you post again you get even less attention. That's why I don't think posting on forums is really a solution at all. It's like trying to fill a swimming pool with a squirt gun.
SEO, consistent posts, maybe a celebrity endorsement? Paying someone who knows how to drum up support to mentor you. That's the route I think I'll try next.
Re: Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?
#15I've posted on hacker news (avg 5-15 page views), Reddit (avg 2-5 page views) and Quora (no pages views that can be tracked anyway). Most of my Product hunt launches are completely dead, getting almost 0 traffic, although there was 1 that got 200 upvotes and nearly 400 page views). It's darn near impossible to get a steady stream of traffic unless Google decides to give it to you. It seems like, Most success stories…
So no matter what you do, your success is entirely in Google's hands ? Is that what you're saying ?
Re: Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?
#16I've posted on hacker news (avg 5-15 page views), Reddit (avg 2-5 page views) and Quora (no pages views that can be tracked anyway). Most of my Product hunt launches are completely dead, getting almost 0 traffic, although there was 1 that got 200 upvotes and nearly 400 page views). It's darn near impossible to get a steady stream of traffic unless Google decides to give it to you. It seems like, Most success stories…
So no matter what you do, your success is entirely in Google's hands ? Is that what you're saying ?
it depends on the business model of course. if you're product makes more than 5000$ per month per customer you have other options available to you.
And, virality is not unheard of, even this day and age, but incredibly rare. I'm just saying, in many indiehacker success cases I've read, they're getting significant traffic from Google.
Re: Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?
#17I help B2B SaaS companies scale their marketing. I can't really directly help you without knowing what your product is. I'm going to assume it's https://courseroot.com/ since it was a recent submission by you. In this case, it's a B2C product.
Upon landing on your site I immediately see typos / grammatical issues. I suggest you get somebody that's strong in english to help you proofread.
There's a lot of suggestions in the comments to go to your target audience and ask them. That's pretty solid advice but I don't think it's nuanced enough. It's super important to also consider at what stage of the funnel a potential user is at.
For instance, say I run a cloud CI service like Travis or Circle. You could naively say that I should go talk to developers / engineering teams because it's a tool for developers. While developers are the correct target demographic, you have to think about the funnel.
Do these engineering teams even know what CI is?
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Marketing that targets people that don't even know they need a CI tool is far, far, different than marketing that targets teams that are currently looking for a solution and far, far, different than teams that have a solution in place and have to go out of their way to switch.
Does that make sense?
So if we're talking about courseroot, I suggest you think about what stage your ideal user is at.
Do they know that they have a problem? (e.g. Do they know that these online courses can help them advance their careers?)
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If I told you to talk to your target audience and you just talked to people that are already taking online courses, already know what set of courses they plan on taking, it might be hard to extract useful feedback. But if you talked to the same demographic but they know they already have a problem (need to find online courses), that's where you'll get the most useful feedback right this moment.
Re: Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?
#18A bit of a cliche answer, but I'll still go with this: depends on the target audience. Find out who can most benefit our of your product? Developers? Sales? Marketing? General netizen? Next, figure out where they spend their time on. For eg: to target devs, post on communities like HN (as Show HN). Reach out to community driven blogs and be an author subtly marketing the product. In fact, an interesting story on what…
I read this again now, and I see way too many typos, can't edit it anymore though. Please excuse the messed up grammar and totally unrelated words in between.
Re: Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?
#19I've posted on hacker news (avg 5-15 page views), Reddit (avg 2-5 page views) and Quora (no pages views that can be tracked anyway). Most of my Product hunt launches are completely dead, getting almost 0 traffic, although there was 1 that got 200 upvotes and nearly 400 page views). It's darn near impossible to get a steady stream of traffic unless Google decides to give it to you. It seems like, Most success stories…
I can relate to this. Not a product, but a blog I run gets just ~20 (out of ~200 page views/day) of traffic from HN, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter combined. Rest is organic and most of it is via Google searches.
Re: Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?
#20Who are you building for? You should already have a market asking for the thing you're building.
They wouldn't lie around waiting for you to do something. They've already hacked a solution together by now.
All you have to do is go to the people who built those solutions and tell them about your MVP.