Last Wednesday, I wanted to experiment with Reddit one more time and see how it went. I tried to post on Reddit a few times, but all of them went cricket 🦗.
And to my surprise, This attempt was a great success 💪 🥳.
I got 30x 🤯 number of unique visitors compared to a typical boring day. And the avg visit duration is not bad > 1m10s 🤔, enough for people to finish seeing essential parts of the landing page.
By the way, here is my product for context: https://sendtopod.com - "Bookmark your article, and listen to them later on your favorite podcast".
And the best thing about this is that it converted to 76 people clicked on Signup, which resulted in a conversion rate of sweet 8.6% (from Landing page -> Sign up page).
And it resulted in 70 new accounts created.
How It started
It started pretty boringly, depressing even. On Wednesday morning, I felt that my product was a failure; it was not going well (Hint: I still don't know if it's going to be a success or not), and I began to think about buying other people's side projects, which at least validated (have paying users) and had some tractions.
But I know that I need to put on some reps even if I don't want to.
How I posted on Reddit
The first step I took was to do some keyword research. As you already know, Reddit is huge, and finding where to post your stuff is quite a challenge in itself because:
- There are so many subreddits. Each has different requirements for self-promotion
- Each of them has a different affinity toward each kind of content
My product is pretty niche. And my assumption is that its best customers are people who are interested in consuming long-form content. And even this assumption seems incorrect (more on this in another article.)
Being pragmatic, what I searched for keywords like "listen later", "PodQueue" (similar app) and see where similar content is posted, and I found a few candidates r/longform , r/longread and r/productivityApp, finally r/InternetIsBeatiful
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So I went ahead and read through each of sub-reddit rules to adhere to them while also trying to tell a story about how my product was created, hoping to make it exciting enough for people to check it out.
Here is the actual post:
Focus on what works
After a few hours, posts on LongRead, LongForm, SideProject, ProductivityApp did not gain many upvotes, but... InternetIsBeautiful got quite a lot of views and even positive comments. So I stayed active on that post and answered any comments that came across.
This post on Reddit got 40K+ views after a few hours, and eventually got to 90K+ views.
After that, what I mostly did was to keep responding to comments and messages on Reddit
Lesson learned
To summarize, here are a few lessons I learned:
- Building a SaaS product is hard, especially the mental aspect of it. You'll always be uncertain whether you should abandon it or keep going.
- Experiment with posting on different marketing channels, with different wording, perspective, presentations...
Thanks for reading, love to hear your thought and experience with reddit post as well.
If you are interested, follow me on twitter @tuancm