[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.