Monierate hits 200,000 average Monthly visitors one(1) year after launch
On May 9th 2023, my friend Jeremy Ikwuje posted an idea on his WhatsApp status about a data aggregator platform that makes it easy to gain visibility into the Parallel or black market price of USD <>NGN. I jumped into his DM and said, “Let’s build it”.
Our first-year KPI for success was “5000 visitors”, this wasn’t a mistake, we wanted to build what people needed and didn’t want an expectation that would leave us disappointed. Looking back, it feels like we were not ambitious enough (but those numbers looked ambitious back then 🫣).
In the first month, we only had 30 visitors who were us and our close friends, fast forward to today, we average 200,000 visitors and have been growing at a speed of 78% MoM, 2500 newsletter community and an open rate of 72.37% and a global reach of 165 countries. The rest they say is history.
Building @monierate has been a huge learning curve on how practical marketing works when you think from the first principle: the whole point of marketing is to get the attention of those who will pay for your product or service.
OUR UNUSUAL MARKETING APPROACH
Your main objective as a builder is to farm the attention of your customers and users to know and engage with your product or service. How you do that is a combination of guerilla and unscalable strategies in the early stage to gain profitable attention, especially with little or no budget.
Then you evolve to building a brand when you have a consistent revenue source and continue to make your current product or service more efficient. You can not understate the value of early adopters of your product or service, their satisfaction will make them your first set of ‘word-of-mouth’ evangelists.
We rely heavily on word-of-mouth and outreach to niche communities of Fx traders, digital assets traders and students (we double down on the student community cos they are always eager to share with their friends).
Additionally, we created laptop stickers and reached out to event organizers where there is a large gathering of students and shared them there, sometimes we gate crash tech events and share with participants.
Jeremy and I leverage every opportunity to be on podcasts and Twitter(X) space to promote the values and benefits of the Monierate platform to users and customers alike.
Someone volunteered to join the team cos he loved the product and started working on our TikTok channel (this is the best platform as of 2024 to gain organic traction fast) and we have gotten over 15,000 page views in 3 months.
We resisted the urge to add feature(s) to the platform and only implemented what enough customers needed and were willing to pay for. And for every other feedback from customers that we couldn’t implement, we added it to our product roadmap.
Early enough, we made sure to identify and differentiate between our users and customers, which was crucial for sales objectives. (Users are people who use your product or service, while customers are people who pay for your product or service).
Something I and Jeremy did early on, was reach out to everyone on our contact list with a predefined caption for them to post on their WhatsApp status, We did that for a month and there was significant awareness of the platform. I wasn’t worried that some wouldn’t post it, you only need a few to post anyway but if they all do, it's all love. (Don’t be scared to ask for a favour, the worst anyone will say is ‘No’.)
I have consistently and shamelessly kept posting about Monierate on my WhatsApp status, to keep it spicy I use memes and caption them with “monierate.com” (people want to laugh, I provide them with something to laugh about via memes and get them to see what I do long enough and it becomes top of mind. They will easily suggest it whenever someone needs to check currency rates).
We published valuable blog posts with reread value and high discovery. This is a long-term approach to being relevant and easily discoverable. We pick topics with low keyword difficulty, high search intent, good reference content, reread value and write on them. This approach is working tremendously.
WHAT OUR REVENUE SHAPED INTO!
Our revenue source evolved as we understood Monierate’s value to customers better. We had planned to make money from Google ads and donations but decided against it to maximize good user experience and opted for sponsored blog posts and copywriting. Now, we have Sponsored Banners and Buttons; Rate Listing; and Currency API among others.
Everything gets clearer with motion or in this case action. We didn’t wait to build the perfect revenue wheel, we found revenue source as more people used our platform.
We currently serve over 42 platforms on @monierate and have multiple services businesses can take advantage of such as our API tool, newsletter dedicated audience, media platforms and ads space.
OUR LONG-TERM VISION
We have been bootstrapping, intentionally not spending any money on digital marketing and have enjoyed amazing organic growth, and grown as a team of 5, with the business post-revenue.
Our singular objective is simple; to capture the African financial data market and be in business on the way there.
It’s still day one with monierate.com and we’re excited for what day 2 will look like.
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If you are a business and you’re interested in working with Monierate, reach me via mail at olayinka@monierate.com
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A third-party session on ‘How to Build A Customer Magnet (Without Ads) Using Thousands of Website Traffic: Featuring Co-founder, Monierate.
