Just Ask
Growing your product should be attacked from multiple fronts. Our first thoughts usually tend to gravitate toward, amongst others, content, social and internal viral loops.
The purpose of this article is to highlight a couple of examples that show sometimes, great results can come from simply asking a question.
How do we get featured?
We launched our Slack app, Jukebot back in July. The app was listed in the Slack app directory which gave us access to a steady stream of signups. Being listed in a directory such as this is fantastic as you are immediately put in front of Slack’s entire user base.
As good as the directory is, people still have to know what they are looking for in order to find the app. Although Slack make this really easy, I couldn’t help but envy those apps that were featured on the landing page.
What would we need to do to get on this page? I thought I’d ask.
I had a response within 30 minutes from Slack’s excellent customer service team. They didn’t commit to anything, but let me know that they were passing my request on to the relevant team.
A couple of weeks went by and I hadn’t heard anything so I followed up.
Again, I got a nice prompt reply apologising for the delay with a promise to chase up my query.
However, I didn’t get a response and decided that maybe my luck was out and thought nothing more of it.
Then it happened.
A couple of months later, Jukebot was featured on the landing page. I couldn’t believe it. I was dancing round the house like a child!
But it didn’t end there! A couple of days later, a Medium notification popped up on my phone so I tapped on the notification and started reading. Low and behold, Jukebot was featured as one of the 5 apps to help plan your team’s perfect end-of-year celebration
This time I nearly fell off my chair!
Jukebot had 33 signups that week. Not something to write home about perhaps, but compare that to the average weekly total of 13 and that makes for a 153% increase. Not to be sniffed at.
I have no idea if my email was enough to make Slack’s apps team take notice of Jukebot. Perhaps we just had enough users that they were already aware of us. Who knows. However, it took 2 minutes to write the email so if there was any chance that it tipped the scales in our favour then it was certainly worth sending.
Sharing is caring
Last week I wrote an article about putting up a landing page for meedle. In that article, I detailed the process I had gone through which involved the use of Tailwind CSS.
Upon publishing the article, I shared it on Twitter as I usually do and gave credit to the Tailwind CSS team. Later that day, I got a reply from one of the creators of the framework.
Given that Adam mentioned that he enjoyed the post, I decided to ask if he would mind sharing. I wasn’t really expecting him to do it, but asked myself “What’s the harm in asking?”.
I went to bed and thought nothing more of it. I woke up and immediately checked my phone (a terrible habit I’m not able to shake) and low and behold, Adam had shared it.
That single tweet has so far generated over 600 views of my Medium article. At the time of writing, From Zero to Grow is a brand new publication so we’re not at our prime when it comes to followers (psst, follow us please!). This gave us a great bump and for that, I’m incredibly grateful.
I hope this article has given some food for thought about thinking outside the box when it comes to growing your product. Obviously your growth plans should include the traditional channels, but it’s definitely worth being creative.
If this has peaked your interest, go ahead and give our publication a follow. We have loads of growth ideas like this we’re excited to share with you over the coming weeks.
