479 Founder Interviews Later: Here are 15 Sure-Fire Acquisition Channels

The Problem

The Story

1. SEO (only after getting results with another acquisition channel. I explain below why this is important). Mentions: 83
2. Platform-specific marketplaces. Mentions: 77
3. Product Hunt. Mentions: 77
4. (sub)Reddit posting. Mentions: 44
5. Cold email outreach. Mentions: 42
6. HackerNews. Mentions: 39
7. Building a media brand before a product/service. Mentions: 38
8. Using your own network/connections. Mentions: 36
9. Google Ads (AdWords). Mentions: 31
10. Affiliates / having an affiliate program. Mentions: 30
11. Niche communities/forums. Mentions: 29
12. SEO (starting right away). Mentions: 29
13. Twitter posting/engagement. Mentions: 28
14. Facebook groups (posting/engaging/creating a FB group). Mentions: 28
15. Mainstream press outreach/being mentioned. Mentions: 27

1. SEO (after being successful with another acquisition channel). Worked for 83 Founders

In time, we realized our shaky, well-intentioned blogging was driving more and more organic traffic and even a few direct conversions. Especially our platform-specific e-commerce tutorials. So we decided to really own that channel. (source)

We’ve seen that we are also getting some revenue from SEO, that is around 22% of the revenue. So we decided to invest in SEO and we’ve got an SEO consultant which we pay around $500/month to improve our products ranks in Google. (source)

What’s been most crucial in helping you to succeed? For me, SEO. I think it took about 5–6 months for me to realize that the business was primarily sustained from SEO traffic.

Today Instapainting is earning about $400,000 of revenue per year. This is up from the first year, which was only about $89-$90k in revenue. The main driver of the increase is improved SEO from content marketing. (source)

We didn’t get much more traction after the initial Product Hunt launch. So we decided to pivot our efforts and focus on increasing organic traffic by writing high-quality, SEO-boosting articles. We mainly wrote about how to use Convertify to solve specific problems using keywords like “convert website to android app” and “convert website to iOS app”

2. Platform-specific marketplaces. Worked for 77 Founders

Another massive source of trials was the Slack App Directory. After our experience, I highly recommend launching on a platform like Slack, WordPress, or Shopify. There’s a whole chunk of functionality that you can essentially “outsource” to the platform. For us, that was authentication, user management, and access to the “work graph”. You also get free distribution from the parent platform and a clear target persona you can attract.

To partner with site builders, we check those that have App Stores and we integrate directly. Most site builders have below 1M users and no marketplace, so we connect directly with their business development people to explore if an integration makes sense. Once they see the value and we work through the technical issues, they usually upsell their plans and our apps become available to their paid users — it’s a win-win situation. (source)

3. Product Hunt. Worked for 77 Founders.

For us, the best way to attract users was by promoting our website and products on Product Hunt. We launched on March 6, 2016, and ended up at #2 with 650 upvotes and 5,799 new users, but our traffic went down to normal shortly thereafter. (source)

We launched Standuply and related Slack bot products 8 times on Product Hunt in the latest 18 months. At first, it was our initial launch that brought in our very first users. It wasn’t that successful as we ended up in 7th place. However, it brought us 150 teams.

Our best launch was our latest one: Standuply 3.0. It became the number one product of the day and number four product of the week. So we made it to both the daily and weekly Product Hunt email lists. See how it affected our registrations: (source)

4. (sub)Reddit posting. Worked for 44 Founders

I posted WriteMapper to Reddit’s /r/macapps, making sure to share details I thought were interesting, and replied to every comment that came in. As a > small subreddit that 1) doesn’t get many posts to begin with and 2) typically gets posts with no effort made to either provide a background story or active comments by the original poster, I was able to have my post stay on the front page of the subreddit for quite a while. (source)

I then decided to go a little bigger, and post to /r/apple, which has more than 600k subscribers (compared to /r/macapps’s 19k). Besides making sure to stick to the subreddit’s rules, I also used WriteMapper’s positive reception on /r/macapps and Cult of Mac as social validation that the product would be something of interest to this community as well. That post took off, ending up with 1.3k upvotes and attracting almost 9k visitors to WriteMapper’s website.

Cumulatively, these efforts attracted almost 16k visitors within the first two weeks alone of WriteMapper launching, and about 21k page views, which then translated into actual sales.(source)

Besides friends and family, our primary way of attracting users in the beginning was via Reddit; we would make a post with something cool from our game and then individually message everyone who left a comment, asking if they wanted to be a beta tester. (source)

5. Cold Email Outreach. Worked for 42 Founders

We’re very lucky to be in an industry where gathering lead information is very easy. Fortunately for us, real estate agents plaster their emails and phone numbers all over the place, which is very convenient.

Raza and I spent the first several months cold-calling leads, continuously collecting more email addresses and numbers, and sending individual marketing emails, one by one. Sometimes the client wanted a demo in real-life so we went and did it.

We operated this way for a good 5–6 months, and grinded our way to about 200–300 paying users. (source)

How have you attracted users and grown ShareKit.io? We also cold-emailed marketers who expressed their frustration with Facebook’s move on Twitter and Facebook. (source)

6. HackerNews. Worked for 39 Founders

All it really needed to get off the ground was a catalyst — something to get it into the hands of a few users who could start to spread the word. And that’s precisely what that first wave of self-promotion on HackerNews (ShowHN) and Reddit did. After that, the popularity of the tool grew organically. (source)

7. Building a media brand before a product/service. Worked for 38 Founders

Right now our traffic on ThePodcastHost.com is in the 200,000 unique visitors per month range. That traffic is the main driver of sign-ups for Alitu, directing readers and listeners towards the tool.

Our main site, ThePodcastHost.com, receives around 5k to 6k users per day, and we canvassed them via email lists, surveys, and chat tools on the site. We asked as many people as possible — what are you struggling with? And, like I said, many mentioned editing and production as the biggest barrier. Either they can’t learn the technology or they don’t have the time. (source)

My secret weapon — the source of the majority of Baremetrics’ first customers — was Twitter.

When I first launched Baremetrics, there was a small group of other founders I knew. I reached out to them, they became users, and they started the word-of-mouth snowball. Simple as that.

Our first 100 paying users very much came from that. (source)

8. Using your own network/connections. Worked for 36 Founders

My first corporate customer was a small, local business that I found through personal association. (source)

…most of our early clients were UX designers in our personal network. (source)

We’ve grown very organically to over 150 users, thanks in large part to my connection to Fullstack Academy (FSA), the coding bootcamp I attended between September and December 2016. (source)

9. Google Ads (AdWords). Worked for 31 Founders

The thing that really worked well for me was Google advertising. I’m currently spending $100/month on the “screenshot API” keyword on Google. And so far, 13 of the 20 paying users came from that paid Google advertisement.

If you look at the Google Analytics report you can see a spike in users when I started advertising on Google Ads. (source)

You might think you know AdWords, but chances are you probably don’t know everything about it, especially given the new features Google is constantly adding. To “hack” this, I requested an AdWords specialist review my ads and give some feedback (AdWords offers this as a free service, which is awesome). What was supposed to be a 15 minute chat turned into a two hour learning session because I wouldn’t let the guy go. Every entrepreneur should take advantage of this! In the end, we had an AdWords campaign built around a custom intent audience, which goes beyond pre-defined audiences categories and reaches people as they’re making a purchase decision by targeting them as they’re actively researching a related product or service. Using fantasy sports players as our custom intent audience, we placed ads in specific Bitcoin apps. We paid relatively little for it, and It really drove relevant users to our platform. (source)

To get from zero customers to 15, we probably had to generate about 100 sign ups — these sign ups predominately came through Google AdWords and a co-marketing blog post with a partner.

To date, our acquisition is spread relatively evenly across multiple channels: Google Ads, Organic Search, and Word of Mouth. (source)

10. Affiliates / having an affiliate program. Worked for 30 founders

Affiliate Marketing

This is the most effective method for B2B business. We’ve onboarded a total of 29 clients since the day we launched; 17 are active clients and half of them came from affiliate marketers. We provide a 10% commission for each sign up and have a dashboard which provides an affiliate link after signing up. (source)

The main growth channel has been affiliates. We pay out 40% lifetime commissions to our affiliates to incentivize them a lot to promote us, and it seems to work. (source)

I reached out to influencers in the Amazon Seller space and asked if they would be interested in an affiliate program. This has been the most consistently successful channel for me. I would say a third of our sales are driven this way. (source)

Once we hit about $20,000 MRR (through direct sales and word-of-mouth) we added an affiliate program. That worked exceptionally well because bloggers — our target market — are used to using affiliate programs to generate revenue. Also, if a small business owner loves your product they might tell 2–3 friends. But if a blogger loves your product, they’ll tell 20,000 readers!

We decided to pay a 30% recurring commission each month, rather than a large upfront commission, mainly because we didn’t have any cash and couldn’t cashflow anything up front. That turned out to be a great decision since many bloggers want a predictable, recurring income source. (source)

11. Niche Communities/Forums. Worked for 29 Founders

We seeded traffic to Levels.fyi by answering related questions on Blind and other Q&A forums with a link to the site Other Blind users started linking to Levels.fyi (source)

What started working for me:

Being active and helpful in communities like Quora, Stack Overflow, and forums for popular desktop app frameworks like Electron. I’ve answered a lot of questions about software licensing, some which mentioned Keygen as a solution, some which didn’t mention it at all. (source)

How have you attracted users and grown Asana Superheroes?

I used the Quora community for a while to validate new ideas and share news. Then I moved to the unofficial Asana Google Group, and then to the official Asana community that launched last year.

12. SEO (being intentional about it from the start). Worked for 29 founders

Initially, our clients came through organic searches of websites like Google. We didn’t do much advertising. (source)

What’s been most crucial in helping you to succeed? For Jitbit, SEO. There’s room for SEO even in a highly competitive niche. Sure, if you Google for “help desk software” my company is somewhere on page four, but there’s the long-tail search you should focus on. (source)

13. Twitter posting/engagement. Worked for 28 founders

While many think Twitter is dead, we knew that our target audience not only used the site. They lived on it. We were marketing to a bunch of Twitter power users

So we spent a ton of time and resources building our brand’s voice on Twitter. By tweeting almost every day and engaging with our followers, we were able to build a community that loved our game. (source)

Our Twitter account has been fully automated and will use some of our existing data to provide stock market insights for free. Our bot will provide breaking news on an hourly basis and will also tweet upcoming earnings dates for the next day and week. We’ve gained five to fifteen followers per day with this strategy as well as a few subscribers along the way. (source)

How One Tweet Led to $12,000 in Revenue:

One of the things I do on a regular basis is type ‘video game addiction’ into Twitter search and just check out what people are saying. It’s helped me connect with journalists and stay on top of the conversation around the issue. Last year I saw a summer camp tweet an article about gaming addiction, and after checking them out, decided to tweet at them.

A few hours later I had an email in my inbox from the director wanting to hop on a call, and that call led to them licensing our program IP this past summer, leading to $12,000 in revenue. (my note: People that tweet about your niche may be journalists or potential partners.) (source)

(source)

14. Facebook Groups. Worked for 27 founders

I posted the site on a few Facebook groups for entrepreneurs, and we made our first sales (about $1,500 in one day). We got our initial users solely via niche Facebook groups of entrepreneurs and startups. I joined many Facebook groups and wrote a post asking for feedback on ManyPixels and our value proposition. My message basically was, “Hey guys, here is what we do, would you be interested in this? Yes/No/Why not?” I also experimented by promising that each person giving us feedback would have a promo code. This worked well — lots of people commented, and this was a small hack that got us a lot of buzz. (source)

For around six months in the lead-up to the launch, we wrote a bunch of blog posts. These were long, high-quality, and genuinely-helpful posts for our target audience of web designers, which made it easy for them to share in groups and get discussion going. They received a lot of thanks, and made people aware of Content Snare. I’d post in two or three key groups every week, as well as helping out people where I could, totally unrelated to our product.

Once we had our own audience, we funneled them into a new Facebook group aimed at web designers looking to grow their business. This wasn’t a group for our product, just a place where our target audience could go to get advice. Through these groups and Twitter I began engaging with influencers in our space.

By far, the Facebook group has been the best thing so far. It’s helped give us a good understanding of our audience, the language they use, and the questions they ask. This feeds back into marketing, content, SEO, and copy. (source)

15. Mainstream Press Outreach / Being Mentioned. Worked for 27 founders

A few weeks later, I launched on TechCrunch and did over $30,000 in revenue in the next 3 months. (source)

One of our other main focuses has been press. We are fortunate that “video game addiction” is a hot debate and trending topic in the media, and we have leveraged that as much as possible. I regularly appear in the press, with over 75 features in the last two years, many of which were initially sparked by reaching out to journalists with a simple pitch for a story hook that was interesting, local, and timely. (source)

Last year I was speaking in my hometown and I wanted to see if I could generate any press for it. But I didn’t have any press contacts, and although I could email journalists or tip lines, a warm intro is always better. So I took dumb action, and posted on Facebook asking if any of my friends had friends in the media. Within an hour I had multiple friends who tagged different people and this one post on Facebook led to 25 media interviews in five days. (source)

We searched for articles about meme makers and contacted the relevant writers. I tried dropping a “tip” on hundreds of news sites and experimented with a lot of different email tactics to see if reporters would cover or mention Kapwing. But I got almost no response :( Early on, one blogger from Try Modern wrote about Kapwing, and that helped a lot. We learned that when one news site blogs or writes about a product, other websites will re-publish the content on their own feeds, meaning even one post echoes across the internet and gets you tens or hundreds of links.

Now, seven months later, I still send ~10 cold emails a week to bloggers/writers who might be interested in our product. I find potential bloggers by Googling relevant queries, skimming the recent articles and editorials, and using a Chrome extension like Hunter.io to find an email. Sometimes, I find promising leads through Facebook groups, Instagram, or Twitter.

Then, I send a personal email to the author. I explain that their article could benefit directly from our product. Here’s an example:

“I saw your blog article about Facebook Cover videos — thanks for the helpful tutorial! I’m Julia, a web developer and entrepreneur living in San Francisco, and I just launched a tool to help people resize videos for Facebook Covers: Kapwing Resizer.

Could you take a look at the free tool and consider adding it to your article? We’re still a very young company, so would love all the feedback we can get from experts like you!”

Outreach like this has resulted in links from people like Rachel Beaney, Premiere Gal, and The Creative Folk.

Takeaway: Send brief emails with clear calls to action to bloggers and journalists letting them know about your product. Follow up. Expect a low hit rate and don’t get discouraged. Manual work is important at the beginning. (source, mentioned in their original interview)

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