Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?

[VvdHout]

Hi everybody!

Early testing and working with MVP's is super important but I am struggling figuring out how to get some traffic to the website that can be converted to feedback.

What are your thoughts? Any methods or mediums that have worked for your particularly well?

I appreciate all the help.

Take care,

Valentijn

[codingdave]

You should have at least a few interested parties who you can ask directly for feedback on your MVP. If you don't have that, how do you even know you are writing a product people want?

Once you have made those few people/groups happy, ask them to tell other people. You should be able to get a couple dozen initial consumers that way. Again, if not, you might not have written the correct product.

After you get that far, you start marketing and growing traffic when you are ready to scale up.

[VvdHout]

Hi!

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I had found a few that gave me some feedback but they are not exactly the target audience. Also, the MVP is like really, really minimal so it is just for testing the initial assumption(s). Hence, I am kind of starting from scratch unfortunately. Any suggestions on the best way to go about it when you just want to test sign ups and conversions on a landing page?

Thanks again!

[pascalxus]

I've posted on hacker news (avg 5-15 page views), Reddit (avg 2-5 page views) and Quora (no pages views that can be tracked anyway). Most of my Product hunt launches are completely dead, getting almost 0 traffic, although there was 1 that got 200 upvotes and nearly 400 page views).

It's darn near impossible to get a steady stream of traffic unless Google decides to give it to you. It seems like, Most success stories I've heard on indiehackers typically are due to Google giving them a steady stream of traffic in the hundreds or thousands per day.

[muzani]

I launched a product. We got got a thousand downloads on the first day just by posting in one FB group about it.

In the long run, about half the downloads came from google searches. One trick is to completely forget about branding. E.g. if you wanted to promote a habit building app, just call it "Habit building", not "Habitly" or some custom name.

We were on 5 newspapers and several blogs. Nobody reads newspapers, and they brought us about 3% of traffic. However, about 10% of our total traffic (and about 90% early on), came from people linking newspaper articles. Blogs, one of our suppliers, Facebook groups.

HN, Reddit, Quora actually seem terrible direct ways to get traffic, but awesome indirect ways for it. You can't actually shill yourself, someone else has to do it for you.

[VvdHout]

Hi!

Thanks for sharing. Yeah I totally get you. Have been very dependent on Google with another project of mine and it's not great. But right now I am more trying to figure out how to just get a bunch of (target) people in front of my MVP (which is really just a landing page) for another idea, just so I can start to talk to them.

I feel a landing page is probably not enough to post on HN or PH but paying Google for ads is also so, so. The other thing I have been trying is going to related subreddits and that seem to bring in at least some feedback (maybe not super specific to what I am doing, but in general).

[Data_Junkie]

So no matter what you do, your success is entirely in Google's hands ? Is that what you're saying ?

[pascalxus]

it depends on the business model of course. if you're product makes more than 5000$ per month per customer you have other options available to you.

And, virality is not unheard of, even this day and age, but incredibly rare. I'm just saying, in many indiehacker success cases I've read, they're getting significant traffic from Google.

[raviojha]

I can relate to this. Not a product, but a blog I run gets just ~20 (out of ~200 page views/day) of traffic from HN, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter combined. Rest is organic and most of it is via Google searches.

[xenospn]

Facebook groups are a good source of traffic, so are Instagram story links, if you can find someone with more than 10k followers to send them your way.

[147]

I help B2B SaaS companies scale their marketing. I can't really directly help you without knowing what your product is. I'm going to assume it's https://courseroot.com/ since it was a recent submission by you. In this case, it's a B2C product.

Upon landing on your site I immediately see typos / grammatical issues. I suggest you get somebody that's strong in english to help you proofread.

There's a lot of suggestions in the comments to go to your target audience and ask them. That's pretty solid advice but I don't think it's nuanced enough. It's super important to also consider at what stage of the funnel a potential user is at.

For instance, say I run a cloud CI service like Travis or Circle. You could naively say that I should go talk to developers / engineering teams because it's a tool for developers. While developers are the correct target demographic, you have to think about the funnel.

Do these engineering teams even know what CI is?

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Do these engineering teams currently researching different CI tools?

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Do these teams already use a tool like Jenkins?

Marketing that targets people that don't even know they need a CI tool is far, far, different than marketing that targets teams that are currently looking for a solution and far, far, different than teams that have a solution in place and have to go out of their way to switch.

Does that make sense?

So if we're talking about courseroot, I suggest you think about what stage your ideal user is at.

Do they know that they have a problem? (e.g. Do they know that these online courses can help them advance their careers?)

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Do they know they want to take online courses?

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Are the already taking online courses?

If I told you to talk to your target audience and you just talked to people that are already taking online courses, already know what set of courses they plan on taking, it might be hard to extract useful feedback. But if you talked to the same demographic but they know they already have a problem (need to find online courses), that's where you'll get the most useful feedback right this moment.

[VvdHout]

Hi! Thanks for the elaborate reply. It's actually for a different idea that I am playing around with and am just trying to see if I can find people to talk to to get a lay of the land and or throw a landing page in front of them. But you feedback is still very valuable; the principles translate also outside of Courseroot (and it's good to have feedback on Courseroot as well haha). I'll see how I can use this for both projects.

Thanks again!

[raviojha]

A bit of a cliche answer, but I'll still go with this: depends on the target audience. Find out who can most benefit our of your product? Developers? Sales? Marketing? General netizen?

Next, figure out where they spend their time on. For eg: to target devs, post on communities like HN (as Show HN). Reach out to community driven blogs and be an author subtly marketing the product. In fact, an interesting story on what you went through during the product building phase, that challenges you solved is exciting enough to intrigue a developer.

General netizen? Share on platforms like reddit (specific subreddit), twitter (would be good if one of your users which high reach can volunteer for this).

Is it a B2B product? Offer the product at a discounted rate to initial users and in return, you can ask for promotion through their site/social media (a bit like testimonials). For eg: I got to know about mixpanel by seeing the badge on the footer of certain website I used.

[raviojha]

I read this again now, and I see way too many typos, can't edit it anymore though. Please excuse the messed up grammar and totally unrelated words in between.

[VvdHout]

Hi! Thanks for the elaborate reply. All great suggestions and will consider what is best for my MVP. If I happen to figure out a great medium I'll let you know!

[muzani]

Who are you building for? You should already have a market asking for the thing you're building.

They wouldn't lie around waiting for you to do something. They've already hacked a solution together by now.

All you have to do is go to the people who built those solutions and tell them about your MVP.

[VvdHout]

Hi Muzani,

So I do not even want to get to building at this stage. I just want to get a landingpage in front of the right folks, collect some emails, and see if I can talk to them. I have some broad ideas on products I'd like to work on but have made the mistake in the past many a times before where I just start building something people do not really care about. So right now I am trying to figure out the best way to just get in touch with these people. I have done some AdWords (freaking expensive in the market I am in) and going through subreddits which seem to help. Next stop is trying to find some people on Quora that seem to experience the problem.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!

[seanwilson]

For https://www.checkbot.io/, I got started via posts on Reddit, Hacker News and Product Hunt.

[world32]

Nice site & product. Can I ask how successful these posts were in driving traffic to your site?

[VvdHout]

Addition:

I have been working with AdWords for some targeted traffic, although it is quite expensive. Maybe it is still the go to option but would love to hear your thoughts and experience.

[pryelluw]

This question is too broad and you provide absolutely no context.

What is the product?

What is the target market?

[aiyodev]

Wouldn’t you know what the product and target market were? It’s your product.

[xenospn]

Who is this product for? Find that person and ask them to use it.