My VC Journey: I Wasted $1M On Marketing Until I Decided To Pivot

In the VC world, profits didn't matter. Only revenues did. But nine months ago, reality struck:

- low rates are gone.

Time to do organic growth.

The next nine months, I had to learn three new skills; these were the wildest months of my life.

I was just entering the bootstrapped indie maker world, which was totally new to me. Don't laugh, but I didn't know there were bootstrapped startups at all.

After looking around into best practices, I set these three targets to reach by the end of 2023:

→ Grow big on social media and blogs

→ Master SEO

→ Build and launch free directories for traffic

1. Grow big on social media and blogs

I began by sharing stuff everywhere. I did this for weeks but got nothing: no likes, comments, views, or followers.

I found a tip: "Stick to one platform until followers grow.” I chose X because I saw Pieter Levels and Marc Louvion were there, hitting millions of views.

After six months, I got it. One platform is like one product. Start with ten followers—post and watch reactions. Look for patterns in attention-grabbing content—iterate based on feedback.

I wrote and replied 10,000 times. That's a lot. It took a lot of time. But it was worth it.

My brain had rewired, and my content creator intuition turned into a pretty solid machine.

This month, I hit my goal on X - almost 10k followers and 6 million views in 3 months.

Next Stage: defocus from X and go wild on all platforms.

Started from scratch there with no karma or followers.

In a few weeks,

→ Best post of the year on SaaS Reddit and topped many more subreddits

→ Twice topped hacker news

→ Went viral on LinkedIn/FB/DevTo/Hackernews

None of it was working in April, but now it did.

Wrap up on social media,

For nine months, I posted and replied 10,000 times.

All my energy went into one platform before spreading to others. On day 30, I only had 135 followers with no interaction. But something told me to keep going.

And so I did.

2. Master the SEO.

Last April, I was clueless about SEO.

Reading a lot online, I learned about it.

Free traffic seemed like too good to be true.

However, after more research and writing many articles,

We held on to hope: "SEO just needs time.”

May brought small wins but not enough for all our hard work. Yet, I lost hope, to be honest, but my partner convinced me to give it some time, saying - SEO works; it just takes patience.

That's when SEObot was born – an AI tool to speed things up. Cuz it was taking too much time.

By the end of summer, we saw good progress. 'SEO does take time' proved true! In September, SEO became my main traffic source for some of the projects!

Looking back,

I wish I had started this journey in 2009 when I first got into the startup world.

3. Directories for traffic.

Sometimes, I get the visions, like daydreaming.

One day, I had one where I owned 100 directories which are all famous.

I told my team we should make directories to increase our traffic in the future. They didn't like the idea because they thought it was too old.

I dropped the idea until six months later when DevHunt came into my mind. It's a directory for developer tools. I couldn't let this idea go, so I built and launched it with friends. The results were great! It turned into the second most famous launchpad in the world for devtools.

Four months later,

A rumor about custom gpts gave me another idea - "allgpts,” a directory for them. I decided to try it out. I didn't tell anyone on my team. This was totally secret project which I was sure would fail. But no! It worked really well!

It became the most popular gpt directories worldwide, with half a million visitors and 7 million clicks on gpts. It brought the biggest growth to my premium tools just from the links in the footer.

This hit made me realize that ignoring directories was wrong. So, using keyword research and 20 domain names, I started launching new directories every week.

Next: osssoftware_org turned out to be another hit!

It got famous overnight on Hacker News with around 30k users visiting the site just within one day!

This proved that directories are indeed worth trying! They can drive lots of traffic if you know how to pick cool domain names paired with relevant content-collection tactics.

So there I was, spending hours searching Google Ads Planners looking for matching keywords and free domain names on Godaddy.

It took time, but looking back now – definitely worth every minute!

That’s the end.

The main point of this essay was to promote organic growth. It's very much underlooked by founders, just as it was totally ignored by me for more than 10 years.

It's not easy compared to loading ads with cash.

But it's so fulfilling, fun, and once it works, it just keeps growing on itself exponentially.

Also published here.