So you built your Web App. Now what?
Or, you built your web app, and you don’t know what next. Neither did we.
Or, we’ve built it, and they didn’t come :(
TL;DR
(123 words, under 1 minute read)
- Marketing doesn’t have to be black magic. It can be science’d up and become a proper playground where a techie can feel comfortable in.
- Go to tigertiger, seriously, stop whatever you’re doing right now and do it (but in a new tab). It’s an awesome resource full of practical recipes to hack growth. Whenever you ask yourself “what can I do now to get more traffic?” go there and get an idea and implement it (*** We’re not affiliated with tigertiger in any way. We just think it’s a damn good resource. Promise).
- Analytics, analytics, analytics. Before doing any growth hacking, be sure you’re able to measure every aspect of your experiments. Experiments are worthless if you don’t know if it’s working or not.
“A developer walks into a marketing bar…”
If you’re anything like us, you know very little or nothing about marketing. If you are anything like us you probably think that marketing is expensive campaigns on Google Ads and black magic. And, if you are like us, you desperately want marketing to become something affordable and understandable.
When we started working on dumpstr.io, we focused on the tech side of things (getting our MVP out there). We didn’t really invest time in thinking how will we get traffic or market our app. We knew we should, but deep inside, we didn’t want to. We wanted to continue and do what we are good at — development. Not only was this next stage out of our comfort zone, it was so unclear, that it looked like black magic.
There are a lot of ways to perform marketing. For us, we looked for something that answered two categories:
- Does not require a lot of funds.
- Leverages our current set of capabilities as a team.
Growth Hacking our way to a decent user base seemed like a promising path for us. But, most of the resources we found just weren’t practical enough.
Turn black magic into science
“Magic’s just science that we don’t understand yet.”
- Arthur C. Clarke
We figured that in order to turn what looked to us like magic into science, we required:
- A practical methodology to perform experiments (recipes are great).
- A way to measure what worked.
The methodology is the textbook growth hacking stuff — test some growth channel, see if it works, improve, iterate.
But what do you do? How do you execute that?
And then we stumbled upon tigertiger. To be clear — tigertiger was the first serious resource that helped us actually get started on practical growth hacking. It’s not the only one, but it’s a great one.
Our first test: A Chrome Ext.
Our first experiment was a recipe from tigertiger we felt suits us and was relevant for dumpstr.io, a Chrome Extension (yay!).
The thought of bootstrapping a Chrome extension in a couple of days to test the Chrome web store as a traffic source was compelling to us. Also, we wanted to test another idea of ours — building a small “detached” satellite widget with a different name to appeal to other crowds — this is how we came up with Note to Self — a minimal take on our MVP :)
Of course, there’s no point in experimenting if there are no qualifiers and indices.
Metrics
Basically, you want to measure everything. Everything. But analytics software are complex, and you won’t be able to master this process in a day (we’re using google analytics for now). In the Chrome ext. case we started by tracking the basic metrics that will show us whether this channel is working, and how well. The bare minimum tracking that we insisted on having before publishing the extension was this:
- Impressions vs. Installs — provided by the web store.
- How many users got to our site (visits) via the ext.
- How many users signed up for an account via the ext.
Of course it would be good to have deep funnel analysis of every action the user makes, but having these basic numbers is enough to get a picture of how well this channel is performing as a traffic source. It’s important not to get drowned in too much information here. Have a few numbers, and make sure they are the right ones!
Why are we writing this?
We wanted to share the relief and newfound energies we discovered when realizing that getting traffic doesn’t have to be witchcraft, but could actually be a series of practical tasks and recipes to be tested and learned from.
It’s still a learning process for us, and if you’re reading this, probably for you too. So get out of your comfort zone and hack your growth. We’ll keep you posted with more adventures in growth-land.
