I wasted $1M on Marketing. Until my pivot.
In the VC world, profits didn’t matter. Only revenues did. But 9 months ago, reality struck:
- low rates are gone.
Time to do organic growth.
The next 9 months I had to learn 3 new skills; these were the wildest months of my life.
I was just entering the bootstrapped indie maker world, which was totally new to me. Don’t laugh, but I didn’t know there were bootstrapped startups at all.
After looking around into best practices, I set these 3 targets to reach by the end of 2023:
→ Grow big on social media and blogs
→ Master SEO
→ Build and launch free directories for traffic
[1] Grow big on social media and blogs
I began by sharing stuff everywhere. I did this for weeks, but got nothing; no likes, comments, views, or followers.
I found a tip: “Stick to one platform until followers grow”. I chose X because I saw Pieter Levels and Marc Louvion were there hitting millions of views.
After six months, I got it. One platform is like one product. Start with 10 followers. Post and watch reactions. Look for patterns in attention-grabbing content. Iterate based on feedback.
I wrote and replied 10,000 times. That’s a lot. It took much time. But it was worth it.
My brain had rewired and my content creator intuition turned into a pretty solid machine.
This month, I hit my goal on X - almost 10k followers and 6 million views in 3 months.
Next Stage: defocus from X and go wild on all platforms.
Started from scratch there with no karma or followers.
In a few weeks,
→ Best post of the year on SaaS Reddit and topped many more subreddits
→ Twice topped hacker news
→ Went viral on LinkedIn/FB/DevTo/Hackernews
None of it was working in April, but now it did.
Wrap up on social media,
For 9 months, I posted and replied 10,000 times.
All my energy went into one platform before spreading to others. On day 30, I only had 135 followers with no interaction. But something told me to keep going.
And so I did.
[2] Master the SEO.
Last April, I was clueless about SEO.
Reading a lot online, I learned about it.
Free traffic seemed like too good to be true.
However after more research and writing many articles,
We held on to hope: “SEO just needs time”.
May brought small wins but not enough for all our hard work. Yet, I lost hope, to be honest, but my partner convinced me to give it some time, saying - SEO works; it just takes patience.
That’s when seobot was born – an AI tool to speed things up. Cuz it was taking too much time.
By the end of summer, we saw good progress. ‘SEO does take time’ proved true! In September, SEO became my main traffic source for some of the projects!
Looking back,
I wish I had started this journey in 2009 when I first got into the startup world.
[3] Directories for traffic.
Sometimes, I get the visions, like daydreaming.
One day, I had one, where I own 100 directories which are all famous.
I told m....
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