How we went from 0 to 10,000+ users in 4 months with $0 spent on marketing.

One of my goals when starting SideProjects.net was to be as transparent as possible with our community — if it ever came to be one. I think it has.

Regardless of whether it was discussing a new set of features, changes to our algorithms, etc., I wanted to keep everyone in the loop about everything we did. This post is no short of that. It’s always interesting to learn how different products gained their first users and I wish larger products would be more transparent about it rather than spewing vague nonsense such as “users will come organically if you have a good product.” It’s a lot more work than that.

Also: I’m well aware that 10k users really isn’t that much relative to other platforms that have had a much more successful launch and are scaling at a faster rate, but I figured that it’s something 😅. Every project’s/product’s user acquisition story is different, so I wanted take a moment and share ours.

Feel free to skip to #3

The Process

1) Finding a niche

I knew I wanted to build an online community of some sort. Side projects spoke volume to me because I work on a new one every month or so (and I’m definitely not alone here). I found that there was no real place where side projects could be shared — it’s something that other sites such as HackerNews, ProductHunt, IndieHackers, etc. incorporate, but none of which focus on exclusively.

So I had a target audience in mind that I could cater to + a product idea I could build.

2) Choosing a name/domain

I hate how overlooked this is, but you get bonus points for choosing a name that’s a real word (or words) which are memorable and can accurately describe your product. The easier it is to remember, the better.

In a cesspool of domain bots, domain leechers, and premium domains, it’s hard to find ‘the’ domain you actually want, but there’s always room for creativity.

I ended up settling with sideprojects.net because it met my criteria.

3) Seeking Validation

I ran a public beta literally the week before launching on ProductHunt. I posted it to r/SideProject and wanted to know if this was something people would use. This post alone sent in about 15(?) or so user registrations — which wasn’t that much at all, but I felt that it was enough to prove my point: there’s a market for sharing side projects/garnering feedback, but no solid platform to fill that gap.

4) Launching 🚀

It was the fun, yet anxiety-inducing part of the entire process.

Truthfully, there’s no secret formula for any of this.

After getting initial validation from Reddit, I posted SideProjects on ProductHunt on September 1st, 2019 before going to sleep that evening and it got featured the next morning — reaching the #3 spot! Looking back on it now, it seemed pretty bare. I literally used this to create the icon and Namecheap’s logo maker 😅. I don’t think there’s a reason to be overly fancy. Your project/product should speak for itself.

2 weeks after posting on ProductHunt, I posted SP on HackerNews and that sent the second big spike of users to the platform.

The keyword here is spike. ProductHunt/HackerNews won’t send you a continuous flow of users so posting on both of those platforms alone won’t keep users coming.

5) Post-Launch

You’ll probably notice that after launching, your numbers are probably going to decline. It’s normal and should be expected. Building any sort of community where you expect user engagement is difficult and we wanted to keep the momentum going, so I turned back to Reddit. I defined what SideProjects really was, and spent a lot of time narrowing down which communities we would fit under:

I didn’t end up using all of those subreddits and I also posted in some that aren’t listed in the diagram.

Engaging with respondents

I wrote this post on r/webdev asking for feedback soon after we rolled out v2 and it was actually trending there for a little while. I tried to reply to everyone, and even though I was asking for feedback, people were still curious about the platform themselves and signed up for it.

Taking advantage of Twitter

Personally I still don’t really know how to use Twitter effectively, but when in doubt, keep tweeting. We have a continuous flow of content posted to our site almost every day and we frequently share side projects from it onto our Twitter and tag their creators (if they’re on Twitter). Some of them retweet/like the tweet(s) about their project, which puts us in front of their audience.

No need to unnecessarily spam hashtags on your tweets.

Writing helpful content

Write a lot.

This article in particular sent in a surge of new users to our website which was awesome. It has thousands of reads, and unlike sites like PH/HN, helpful articles don’t really lose their discoverability over time. Googling common things like “how to get users on my website” may direct people to that article.

But don’t just write. Share it on every channel you have access to (Subreddits, HN, Twitter, etc.). That article got over 60 upvotes on r/SideProject alone!

Word of Mouth

I’ve gotten quite a few messages that start with something along the lines of “My friend told me about SideProjects.net…” or “My friend recommended SideProjects….” This tells me that the site is being referred via word of mouth and it’s an incredible feeling. Spreading things via word of mouth starts off slow, but as the product grows, word of mouth will continue amplify naturally.

How we keep our community coming back

It’s a mixture of multiple things. Some of these won’t work with all products obviously.

• Newsletter: We send a weekly newsletter at the end of every week containing a recap of some of the projects that were posted from that week. (Unfortunately we’re putting this on hold for now until we work on automating it)
• Community Interviews/Podcast: We started doing video interviews with different creators on our platform. The response we’ve gotten from people within our community has been quite positive.
• We try to give feedback on each project: This one’s tough to do sometimes, but given that we’ve been branding ourselves as a “feedback platform,” one way we’ve been able to increase engagement was by replying to virtually every project. Donji even started doing video-feedback sessions like the one below.

By replying to different projects and engaging with as many users as we can, we’re setting up a model for our users to follow.

Implementing Social Login (oAuth)

oAuth is something that we take for granted nowadays. Sites without it turn some people away. I really wish I had the stats from our site to back this, but we saw a slight increase in more users registering soon after we added Twitter/Google login support. Anything that makes accessibility a breeze to your platform will only be helpful and I only wish I had added it before launching.

Final Thoughts

We’re continuing to build tools to maximize engagement on our platform through listening to our community and expanding upon our own ideas. I don’t think SideProjects will ever reach a point where I can confidently say “it’s done”. Any good product will always be incomplete in the sense that there will always be imperfections that can be ironed out and new ideas that can be implemented.

I’ve seen so many cool products go defunct after only a couple months just because their creator(s) either got bored of them or felt that it just wasn’t worth their time or because support for it dwindled. Activity on SP dwindles from time to time, but it’s definitely not something worth quitting over.

You also don’t need a large marketing budget (or one at all) to grow anything — really. If you’re willing to spend the time and listen to people whom use your service, your product/service will grow. It just takes some time and a lot of effort on your part.

There’s still work to be done in terms of growing the platform, but for spending $0 on marketing, I don’t think we did too bad this year 😉.

If anyone has any more suggestions, feel free to message me on Twitter via @sakofchit