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Ask HN: Founders Advice – What are the best ways to drive users to your product?

Im a new startup founder and was wondering if any previous founders have advice on generating organic traffic to your product. Are there any specific channels you use or any strategies you can share that produced the most significant increase in traffic?

Jugurtha 2y ago
Ideally you'd have customers very early on for the very validation of your idea. Have a look entitled "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth" by Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo's founder) and Justin Mares. Unordered, indexed, playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpNwgXYhL09_afXgVjigb_kqx0EMpMaWE https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpNwgXYhL09_afXgVjigb...
bobbytang 2y ago
Indiehackers has a decent post with some resources to get started: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/relaunch-like-a-pro-100-places-to-launch-relaunch-and-list-your-product-7c67875635 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/relaunch-like-a-pro-100-pl... It's a bit of effort to go to each place, but it does drive a good set of initial users. Some of it becomes evergreen, but most of it (e.g. Slack channel post to a niche group) gets lost within a few days. The following is not intended to be an ad, but I created a series of scripts that essentially created a large repository of AI-generated blogs/articles related to each one of my products and published them to a CMS. On average, these alone drive between 100-1000 organic clicks per day. Then I turned this script into a product that less-technical founders/SMEs can use for their own website: https://www.typeup.ai/ https://www.typeup.ai/ It's not a product that makes me rich, but helps keep the lights on. You can also build this yourself with clever daisy-chaining of code/no-code solutions as long as you're comfortable with API calls, prompting, and scripting. OpenAI is a good start for generating blogs, but I recommend experimenting with the other models as well as the open source ones to get the right writing style and output that best fits your CMS. Despite search engines saying they'll de-rank AI generated content, it has not impacted traffic at all. Probably too large scale of a problem to handle for the time being.
- Jaedon_Proctor 2y ago
  This is a really great resource thank you! Honestly time to value is extremely efficient with you site so also definitely something we will explore thank you for sharing.
greyzor7 2y ago
I'm a founder working on organic channels to showcase https://microlaunch.net https://microlaunch.net which is a B2B2C platform. It really comes down to your goals. I would generally advise having a diversified approach with cross-channel marketing on social, SEO, Ads and affiliates. You'll have to adapt it depending on your use case. Don't forget that traffic acquisition is important, but retention (DAU/MAU) is at least as important.

Jugurtha 2y ago

Ideally you'd have customers very early on for the very validation of your idea. Have a look entitled "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth" by Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo's founder) and Justin Mares. Unordered, indexed, playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpNwgXYhL09_afXgVjigb_kqx0EMpMaWE https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpNwgXYhL09_afXgVjigb...

bobbytang 2y ago

Indiehackers has a decent post with some resources to get started: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/relaunch-like-a-pro-100-places-to-launch-relaunch-and-list-your-product-7c67875635 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/relaunch-like-a-pro-100-pl... It's a bit of effort to go to each place, but it does drive a good set of initial users. Some of it becomes evergreen, but most of it (e.g. Slack channel post to a niche group) gets lost within a few days. The following is not intended to be an ad, but I created a series of scripts that essentially created a large repository of AI-generated blogs/articles related to each one of my products and published them to a CMS. On average, these alone drive between 100-1000 organic clicks per day. Then I turned this script into a product that less-technical founders/SMEs can use for their own website: https://www.typeup.ai/ https://www.typeup.ai/ It's not a product that makes me rich, but helps keep the lights on. You can also build this yourself with clever daisy-chaining of code/no-code solutions as long as you're comfortable with API calls, prompting, and scripting. OpenAI is a good start for generating blogs, but I recommend experimenting with the other models as well as the open source ones to get the right writing style and output that best fits your CMS. Despite search engines saying they'll de-rank AI generated content, it has not impacted traffic at all. Probably too large scale of a problem to handle for the time being.

Jaedon_Proctor 2y ago
This is a really great resource thank you! Honestly time to value is extremely efficient with you site so also definitely something we will explore thank you for sharing.

greyzor7 2y ago

I'm a founder working on organic channels to showcase https://microlaunch.net https://microlaunch.net which is a B2B2C platform. It really comes down to your goals. I would generally advise having a diversified approach with cross-channel marketing on social, SEO, Ads and affiliates. You'll have to adapt it depending on your use case. Don't forget that traffic acquisition is important, but retention (DAU/MAU) is at least as important.