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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?

#21

Post by muzani »

pascalxus wrote: post #10

I'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 launched a product. We got got a thousand downloads on the first day just by posting in one FB group about it.

In the long run, about half the downloads came from google searches. One trick is to completely forget about branding. E.g. if you wanted to promote a habit building app, just call it "Habit building", not "Habitly" or some custom name.

We were on 5 newspapers and several blogs. Nobody reads newspapers, and they brought us about 3% of traffic. However, about 10% of our total traffic (and about 90% early on), came from people linking newspaper articles. Blogs, one of our suppliers, Facebook groups.

HN, Reddit, Quora actually seem terrible direct ways to get traffic, but awesome indirect ways for it. You can't actually shill yourself, someone else has to do it for you.

Re: Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?

#23

Post by VvdHout »

147 wrote: post #17

I 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…

Hi! Thanks for the elaborate reply. It's actually for a different idea that I am playing around with and am just trying to see if I can find people to talk to to get a lay of the land and or throw a landing page in front of them. But you feedback is still very valuable; the principles translate also outside of Courseroot (and it's good to have feedback on Courseroot as well haha). I'll see how I can use this for both projects.

Thanks again!

Re: Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?

#24

Post by VvdHout »

pascalxus wrote: post #10

I'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…

Hi!

Thanks for sharing. Yeah I totally get you. Have been very dependent on Google with another project of mine and it's not great. But right now I am more trying to figure out how to just get a bunch of (target) people in front of my MVP (which is really just a landing page) for another idea, just so I can start to talk to them.

I feel a landing page is probably not enough to post on HN or PH but paying Google for ads is also so, so. The other thing I have been trying is going to related subreddits and that seem to bring in at least some feedback (maybe not super specific to what I am doing, but in general).

Re: Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?

#25

Post by VvdHout »

muzani wrote: post #20

Who 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.

Hi Muzani,

So I do not even want to get to building at this stage. I just want to get a landingpage in front of the right folks, collect some emails, and see if I can talk to them. I have some broad ideas on products I'd like to work on but have made the mistake in the past many a times before where I just start building something people do not really care about. So right now I am trying to figure out the best way to just get in touch with these people. I have done some AdWords (freaking expensive in the market I am in) and going through subreddits which seem to help. Next stop is trying to find some people on Quora that seem to experience the problem.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!

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