@jazeps Let me share how we tried to find answers for each of these questions during our journey:
In November 2023, we started exploring ideas on Twitter and Reddit. After a couple of days, we saw a trend where people were actively discussing Black Friday deals and related platforms on Twitter and Reddit.
We noticed makers and founders sharing their deals, indicating a strong interest.
This was our first validation that people were looking for listing platforms to submit their Black Friday deals.
We quickly built a landing page using a no-code tool and launched our submission service.
We started with a collection of 15+ free directories, which was sufficient to test the concept.
We validated this by offering 10 early bird slots at $5 each, which sold out within three days. This showed that
people were willing to pay for a solution that helped them list their products on multiple deal platforms.
We knew that listing products on multiple deal platforms can be time-consuming.
Our service saved users significant time by handling the submissions for them. This value proposition was confirmed by our early adopters.
We engaged with related tweets, shared our service in the "build in public" community, launched on PH, and directly messaged people who were sharing Black Friday discount codes on Twitter.
After completing the submissions for our early users, we shared detailed reports with them and asked for feedback and testimonials.
Our focus on overdelivering and maintaining open communication helped us get testimonials from satisfied customers.
Now, we cannot scale as this was a Black Friday-related submission, so we copied the playbook to AI startups as people are building a lot of AI startups. There are 100+ platforms and directories to promote them to gain traffic and backlinks.
So we started collecting AI directories to launch Boringlaunch (a directory submission service). We managed to collect 100+ platforms within a month. We reached out to our previous productized service users and a few potential customers over DM, as we thought they would trust us.
And wohoooo, they loved it! Within 72 hours, we got our first sale, and our early slots were sold out within a week. Our focus was to overdeliver as we wanted them to share their feedback and testimonials with us. And a couple of great founders shared an awesome testimonial with us.
To get 1000+ users:
- We reached out to founders to collaborate with those having the same audience as ours.
- We found creators and founders whose products or services work well with ours.
- We collaborated with a launch platform to create a bundle of featured listings on the platform with our submission services on other platforms.
- We listed our product on various platforms and directories (both free and paid)
- We tried ads on twitter (they didn't work out for us, but they may work for you).
- We shared our small wins and learnings over the internet.
- We tried, tried, and tried until something worked, and then doubled down on what was working.
Till today, we have collected 400+ platforms and directories, but we still offer a 100+ platform service as we keep updating our list every week and submit products based on the relevance of the customer’s industry and niche, so that
we can provide a 7-star service (that is our primary metric)
