Ask HN: Ok, so i have an awesome app, and 10K in budget, now what?

15 points by grab 14 years ago | 16 comments

I am a tech guy, creating apps is easy. I can get around the coding, design, ux and make it shiny. But how the hell do i get users? 10K/life is all the money i can spend on this.

Social sites are bullshit, unless you got an army of friends, no one is going to notice you.

CPC? Even with insanely low 0.2 per click, and 5% ridiculously high conversion, that’s only 2500 users. Only 5% of them will be loyal users, so we are down to 125. What about next month?

Hoping to get noticed by techcrunch / mashable is stupid.

SEO is also no good, it will take months to get ranked. And If the idea is unique it won’t help (did anyone search for "how do i send 140 char messages" before twitter, or even after?). Trying to rank for more general keywords like ‘find friends online’ is retarded, would take years.

Solution one: Get lucky, get noticed by the players. Solution two: Get funding, switch 10K/life to 30K/month. Solution three: ????.

andymurd 14 years ago |

Realise that massive success is not going to happen overnight.

Don't dismiss SEO because it will "take months to get ranked" - start pursuing SEO now and in a couple of months you can rank. If your idea is unique, that's great! Try to rank for the problems that people have, not how your app solves them.

While you're waiting for your SEO efforts to pay off, use PPC to refine your marketing message. Test, analyse, refine, repeat. PPC is an expensive way of getting users at first, but it's a cheap way of refining your marketing.

Finally, find people that are experiencing the problem that your app solves. Join and contribute to communities, sponsor competitions, write guest blog posts. Establish yourself before using the back-channels to Mashable/Techcrunch.

Do all this stuff for a couple of months and don't get downhearted if nothing pays off immediately. It's investment.

hcho 14 years ago |

You might start with putting a link here.

The advice will proably be a combination of online marketing strategies out there. CPC, SEO, viral loops, what not...Some will work better than others, some will work quicker, some slower.

It's relly hard to give further advice without knowing details.

pgroves 14 years ago |

Finding a (legitimate) excuse to post on reddit (or similar) gets a surprising number of hits. I can't tell you anything about conversion rates of those visitors, but just the other day I broke down and submitted a company blog post to the relevant category on reddit and got a few hundred hits in a few hours even though it didn't get many upvotes and zero comments. It was an actual essay, not a sales pitch, but at least they ended up on my company's site.

As far as I can tell, it seems that lots of people are interested in "this is where I see my niche going" posts for any industry or technology. The people who will end up at your site probably are already thinking about that niche, but they are probably your best bet for early adopters, anyway.

Maybe all that is obvious and old news. Like you, I find it hard to get excited about social media marketing so I'm just now begrudgingly experimenting with it. It's not a long term strategy, but it should be enough to build some traction.

And if you really want to spend money, a good copy editor for every word that ends up representing your product definitely gets you better copy much faster.

LarryA 14 years ago |

If its so awesome why didn't you mention it? You have to promote it, and you don't always need money.

The eat your own dogfood axiom is a good method for starting out. Post about your app on places where it is relevant, how it has helped bring about alignment of the planets and increased your bowling scores, etc. If it is highly interactive and fun to use or watch it being used, make a youtube video on "Get Ninja (insert category of app) Skillz With Easy App X"

If it is crowd sourced thing maybe run a contest to gather content/interest, don't have to blow ten grand on it, only a few hundred and some well placed shout-outs about the contest.

I myself like to look at videos and screenshots of apps (ohhh... shiny stuff!) You have a site with screenshots??

veyron 14 years ago |

Do you actually have an app? If so, can you talk about it at all or send demos? I, and I imagine many others on HN, could directly fund the project directly if the idea and execution are good.

If you are just asking the rhetorical question, it depends on whether or not the app requires a critical mass of users (ie social networking) In either case, your best bet is to publish and start discussing on a forum (HN is a great start).

olegious 14 years ago |

Depending on where you live, there are many meetup groups (or similar groups) that meet monthly to demo new products, discuss new technologies, etc. Find a few of those groups, make presentations, receive feedback. If you live in an area without these groups, look up a few in a specific geographic area (ex: SF Bay Area), contact the organizers, arrange to present at a few of them over a week long period and take a working vacation.

rick888 14 years ago |

It may take some time, but start a blog about something related to the app and push your articles to as many places as possible (stumbleupon, twitter, etc).

When you pay for marketing, you will make mistakes that cost you money during the learning process. You should only do this when you can afford to do so.

SamuelA 14 years ago |

I have a different take. Get professional marketing help.

This is not impossible. I - a professional marketing person - am your mirror. I have ideas, skills and the ability to get noticed but lack the ability to code. There are many like me and our talents and abilities are both real and valuable.

Find someone like me and partner with them. They can then do what you can't which is build an audience with very little budget.

In case you're wondering how, a lot of it is contacts. just like it is with code. For instance, I can get ads on networks at cost thanks to having friends that run them and owe me favors. I can also contact journalists who are friends directly. Finally, I already have the network and reach you don't.

Good luck. I think there's a huge gap for recognizing the value of non-tech skills in startups.

bochi 14 years ago |

Create something that makes people so happy they will tell their friends about it.

WilliamHurst 14 years ago |

I would say solution one should be "be more positive and don't write off options as retarded unnecessarily". Your answer is probably a well thought out combination of all of the above and lots and lots of hard work and effort.

JoachimSchipper 14 years ago |

Have you considered finding customers that are actually going to pay you a decent amount of money? E.g. business-to-business may turn out to be slow going, unsexy and very profitable.

RealGeek 14 years ago |

There us no one size fits all solution to marketing a startup / website. Usually, it is a combination of PR, SEO, CPC, Display advertising, Social, Viral techniques etc. Post the URL of your website, or answer the following questions:

- What problem does it solve?

- Who are your customers / users?

- Where do they frequent?

Then we figure out a strategy to reach them.

grab 14 years ago | |

It is safe to say my app is a social one, like twitter, or even chatroulette. It does not solve anything in particular, besides boredom.

Chatroulette does not solve anything either, and people are more likely to use skype or msn for video. I doubt there is high traffic search for "chat with random strangers".

Anyway, i will share some progress. I tried a few ad networks.

Banner ads seem like a fail, only 0.1-0.15% ctr, this is horrible.

Adwords is also not kind to me. Since the idea is new and does not solve anything (as in there is no “how to….”) i can’t target specific searches. Some related keywords are getting very low traffic search and ctr is 0.04%, terrible.

Those were CTR if you didn’t notice, not conversions. Conversions from above are single digits.

What i did find to work marvelously well is ads direct to website (popups and such). Right now i have a decent coming soon page, and for some regions i pay 4 cents per conversion (as in email). For conversions from US it costs 60 cents per conversion. Is it worth paying x15 for people from us? Maybe it will be easier to get "big in japan" and get world domination only later on?

I wonder how many users will actually be created once I start sending emails out.

petervandijck 14 years ago |

Solution three: make the app so good that people love it and spread the word.

ohashi 14 years ago |

Talk with people about it.

ddemchuk 14 years ago |

join and participate in some forums that are niche related and have users interested in what you built. You can easily bootstrap a SaaS if you have a presence and some authority on a few forums.