Hey,
Thank you for taking the time to read, and for your potential advice.
In the case of a digital product MVP, without funding, how do you generate relevant traffic without breaking the bank (as you don’t want to over-invest from the get-go)?
For context, here’s what I know about how to generate traffic:
- Personal network
- Pros: Free, and quick exposure
- Con’s: One trick poney, Usually a low match in terms of potential customers
- Virality
- Pros: Awesome, free, recurrent
- Con’s: Completely out of your control or what you can do in early stages
- MVP sharing spaces
- Pros: Free, Wide exposure
- Cons: Very low relevancy, I feel like all of the known MVP-sharing space is filled at 99% with people sharing their own MVPs. Everyone wants to talk, no one wants to listen.
- SEO:
- Pros: Long-term traffic building
- Cons: It takes such a long time, has no guarantee, and doubtful future with incoming AI search engines. Also is a debatably too big investment when just testing the water with an MVP.
- Ads:
- Pros: Effective, potentially more relevant, Quick
- Cons: Costly, can take a while to fine-tune for good targeting/costs.
In my case it’s not a “have been working on it for 3 years mvp”, it’s literally a 2-week free product, put three links on a couple of subreddits and I am getting a new user a day. My current plan would be to ask users to register their email if they are interested in a paid pro version, put a small amount of $ into ads, and only continue and build the pro version if I can get 100 registered interest.
But I wanted to know what is your usual process for this, how do you handle it? I would love to hear from people who have serially launched digital products, if you have a pattern in how you do things, regardless of the industry for the product.
And as a related question, are there things you can do as a non-marketer person to build up coverage in a way that doesn’t involve throwing money at it and that is value-adding, ethical, and non-spammy? I am happy to spend some time and energy, I am just not sure how to go at it.
Thank you again, and have a fantastic day!
I think using as many no-code tools as you can is the answer tbh. It’s very expensive to build especially if you aren’t an engineer so I’d avoid that at all costs. Once you have something that does 80% of what you think you need to do, it’s go time. The first thing is figuring out where people who want your product hang out. There’s probably a subreddit for that community. Then you can start by joining, participating, then slowly maybe start reaching out to folks who are dealing with your problem. Eventually, you can try a post with mod approval.