Thread by @hrishiptweets

21 lessons in marketing after 4 years of growing my own startup from 0 to $1mn in revenue 🧵

1) Marketing starts much before you even build the product.

You should start building your audience & letting people know about your product, much before you actually start building the product.

2) Launch day success depends on how well you prepared for months before.

For eg., if you launch on @ProductHunt, you must have:
- list of people (can be beta users) that can support you
- list of channels to talk about your launch
- content of posts & timeline to post

3) Launch on multiple channels, you can never surely know which one works or doesn't.

Plus, there's only incremental effort to launch on additional channels, when you are already prepared to launch on one channel.

4) Launches only give you an initial boost, what really matters is what you do after that.

When you get a traffic spike on launch day:
- Find ways to capture users permanently eg. email lists, twitter followers
- Find ways to engage users & make them come back eg. newsletters

5) After launch day, find a reliable & sustainable acquisition strategy.

For instance, I got 1000+ subscribers over 2 days when I launched my newsletter but I had to figure other ways to consistently increase the email list every week.

6) Organic traffic is the best kind of traffic you can get.

SEO gives you consistent & reliable traffic.

7) Focus on SEO from day 1.

Get the basics right:
- Add relevant tags to your page - title, meta, h1s, h2s
- Optimize these tags & your content

8) SEO takes time to show results. But your traffic grows exponentially if you have put in consistent efforts.

For instance, Flexiple's organic traffic has grown 360% from 4.6k to 22k in the last 6 months.

9) Side projects can become your marketing department & even their own companies.

For instance, when we launched @RemoteTools in 2018, we closed 4 client deals for Flexiple & made 10x the money we invested. In fact, Remote Tools has now become an independent product/company.

10) Email lists are evergreen.

Newsletter is one of the best ways to reach your users regularly, on a channel they can never do away with.

11) Distribution is key.

A great product or content piece with poor distribution is worth nothing.

12) Ideally, you must spend 90% of your time on distribution & 10% on creation.

13) Build a distribution engine.

Sporadic efforts on distribution yield 0 results. Your distribution efforts have to be consistent, almost like in auto-mode.

14) Try as many distribution channels as you can. You can't know for sure which one may or may not work.

15) There's absolutely no substitute to talking to real users or customers. The insights you gain are priceless.

16) Listen to everyone, but prioritise & execute what makes sense the most.

Don't rush to execute what every user asks you to do. Collect feedback from everyone, make sense of it & implement solutions to problems most users face.

17) Social media is a huge channel which you can't afford to ignore in 2020s. This is where most of your current & future users hang out and is also a great platform to build your audience.

18) Social media users are seeking real connections with real people, not brands. Build your own personal account, not that of your product or company.

19) Share your personal story, experiences & updates on social media. Nobody wants to just see links to your latest blog or your feature announcement.

20) Communities like @IndieHackers, @RemoteClan & specific subreddits are great places to talk about your product or content. But start by giving something valuable to the community & then reaping benefits.

21) Marketing isn't always about acquiring customers right away. Build trust with your audience by providing value selflessly. They will surely support you when you need them the most.

That's it for this thread!

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