Sustainable marketing

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.

Marketing SharedHere is akin to building an epidemic

For SharedHere to succeed, my marketing efforts have to have a compounding effect. And over time, achieve an exponential growth rate. Just like Wuhan's Coronavirus. That means to say, for every one person that I talk to, he or she needs to spread the word to his/her friend.

I had done this before with Picturebook, for which I had users work to achieve growth by building in virality. Every new user has to get another friend to download his copy of the Picturebook chrome extension.

And that is what I am doing next. The next immediate feature will be a feature to bring about virality.