Ask HN: How do you promote your product outside of Reddit, HN, PH, and IH?

[j-rom]

Context: I have built a free web game that has a small, yet stable group of users that plays it daily. This was mostly through word-of-mouth. I posted on Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt, Indie Hackers but those didn't really yield a significant change in traffic or users.

Is the only remaining option for growth to spend money on ads?

[az09mugen]

I never tried, but I read/heard FB, Xitter and YT also could help spread the word. But it implies you to be active in the community, by posting updates, fixes, news et al about your game constantly, and keeping people updated.

[j-rom]

Agreed. But this can be tough if you don't already have an existing following. I was thinking of including something like a "Change log" on my site where when I launch a feature, the user gets a pop-up that says something like "Here's all the things that we launched while you were away".

[ac2u]

Get a few streamers that have an audience to play it.

[j-rom]

That's a good idea. I've considered that but my game is more similar to Wordle where it's a daily word game. It doesn't really fit in with the other games that streamers typically play. But if the goal is to simply get the word out, promoting it on a few streams might be the way to do it.

[kamphey]

I do a lot of content: YouTube, TikTok, Udemy, which all have their own algos and search functionality.

...and Blogs ( which is picked up via Google Search)

[j-rom]

Do you feel like doing the content is worth the ROI? I would basically be starting from zero and from what I've heard, it's a lot of effort to go from 0 -> 1.

[kamphey]

Yes. Also my product is mostly content itself. Only recently making tools.

[j-rom]

Good to know! How do you go about promoting your tools? Is it also through your existing content network?

[harry247]

Another way someone told me is to promote things in the forum comments, like this website I hosted using esp32. I am posting here: https://esp.khalsalabs.com

For few days I will test commenting method (until this goes down due to traffic flood)