Let's start with something I got wrong in my last post. I mentioned that my efforts in growth hacking led to 1000 views. I was wrong. It was a 1000 unique visitors. As for views, we got nearly 3000 hits. These numbers are pretty decent for three days of effort. My target for today is 150 views, and I believed I had achieved that. But let's discuss marketing because I have my growth hacker hat since launch.
A big launch that does nothing
Every product aims for a significant large with huge media fanfare. From my experience, that does nothing for you except to provide a few pats on your team's back. A big launch artificially validates the product, but really what it means is that the marketing team has got skills.
From my experience, a big launch can be more disappointing that a lackluster start because, more often or not, you will witness the cliff drop in usage right after the launch boom.
But if you have a good product, the positive thing after the post-hype cliff drop will lead to a baseline load. And that is a good thing.
Sustainable marketing
Different products require different growth techniques. It was amazing to get to 1000 users for Kloudsec, which was a developer's tool. Because if I got it right, 1000 x $100 would make it a million-dollar revenue business. For a consumer platform like SharedHere, getting 1000 users is a drop in a bucket. It does nothing because it's business model requires millions of views.
To get to 1000 users for Kloudsec, I reached individually to programmers on Github through email and opened issues on Github repositories. That worked, and that was sustainable.
But there is no way that I am going to get 2M views on SharedHere by messaging hundreds of thousands of people every day to open the site. For a product like SharedHere, marketing is built into the product.