How to get traction?
I am Aarihant Aaryan! Welcome to the Iron Sharpen Iron newsletter,
I share my weekly homework from my startup journey, learning about human behaviour, and sometimes decoding industries and business models for fun.
I can’t control my curiosity :) )
When I was building my first company, It was a nightmare for me to create traction - most founders I knew were clueless then.
Even today if you look at India’s tech talent, we have very few people who can grow apps, products or services. The worst part is I’m yet to meet an Indian version of Nikita Bier
Since it is a struggle for first-time founders or founders who don’t have a growth mindset - I am sharing a quick guide on how to get traction for your product and scale it from there.
1. List your product on Product Hunt, and ask people to upvote it so that it gets some visibility
2. Please write on LinkedIn and Twitter, mention what you are building at the end of the post and ask people to check it out. During the first year of my company, I wrote every day on LinkedIn, which helped us get more than 100k visitors on our website in a year, and get a few thousand users on our waitlist. Because I was active on the internet we also found our investors and team members.
3. Become part of communities, if you are building a developer tool or tool for D2C get into their communities and understand them.
4. Write blogs around the problem statement and publish, drive organic growth
5. Create videos, first double down on Instagram reels, if you create relatable content - you will reach a great number of followers and you will make your first 10L in revenue without much effort
6. Build communities, if you’re building for India your community should be on WhatsApp - engage them with great content, and keep distributing your product, updates and content in these communities.
7. Create a YouTube channel but it is a very long game, if you can crack it - ideally your customer acquisition cost becomes lesser than all your competitors by many multiples.
8. If you’re targeting enterprise customers cold DM’s on the internet is the best, make it crisp - tell them what you are solving, what impact it could have - and the impact your solution created for others. Another great hack is creating a demo for your enterprise clients and tagging them on social media.
9. Think, about what potentially can be the most neutral place for your target group and keep targeting that place. For example, If you are targeting anyone below 21, the most neutral place would be colleges/schools or universities - share your pamphlets, QR code, and products or tell them all the good-looking women in their college are on the app :)
10. There are 100 other hacks that you could do, which largely depends on the market and target group you are solving for. But one last thing I would recommend is doing ads on Facebook or Google ads, you don’t need an ad expert - it’s pretty much self-explanatory. If you can spend 7000 to 10,000 on ads you’ll get 1000+ users and more than 20+ paid users.
If you have any thoughts share them in the comments :)
If you found this insightful, do drop a like :)
A ❤️and share on LinkedIn / Twitter would mean a lot.