Ask HN: Those with successful side projects that required minimal marketing

5 points by jnguyen64 4 years ago | 2 comments

Common advice I've heard is you're gonna need a lot more than a single release to Product Hunt to market your product. For those that have had to do minimal marketing (people shared it with minimal prompting, product grew on its own, etc), what's your story and if you're comfortable sharing numbers, how much does your side project make?

Honestly, this sounds like a developer's dream, so would be very interested in hearing at least one story

hacky_engineer 4 years ago |

I launched a baby book computer engineering for babies. I have posted about it a few times on Hacker News & Reddit, and that was enough several thousand dollars through kickstarter.

The kickstarter campaign probably brought in about 150k with minimal marketing effort, and at around that point, I brought on an ad agency that juiced it up to $250k after that.

I'm continuing to do preorders through my website, but all of the pre orders I get now are mostly driven by facebook ads.

Thanks for letting me share!

jnguyen64 4 years ago | |

Woah, that'd qualify as minimal to me! I've been seeing CS-related materials popping up a lot targeting elementary-school aged children and older, but never anything targeting babies.

Thanks for sharing your numbers as well, those are pretty impressive figures.