Most Free Promotion Advice Is Nonsense. Here’s What Worked For Us
Guys, I can’t stand those articles on free promotion anymore because they are just full of bullshit.
Advice like “Create email marketing campaigns” or “Do affiliate marketing” is just a waste of time. The advice is good, but very general and impractical. Where to get emails for sending out newsletters, and how to distribute an affiliate program?
So let’s do this differently. I’ll just tell you what we at Letterly actually tried and how many installs we actually got.
Oh, yes, it’s important to mention beforehand:
- Here I’m not talking about ASO (App Store Optimization). All the results below already include organic installs.
- We’re not considering Android here. We’ll focus on Apple as an example.
App Downloads Graph
In this article, I’ll show you what caused the various peaks in this diagram.
The peak at the launch is explained by the fact that App Store prioritizes displaying a new application to understand its performance. Also, of course, we told our friends and shared on our social networks that our app has been released. Subsequently, the traffic declines and stabilizes at around 10–20 downloads which is the impact of ASO.
Hacker News
There are two ways to promote on Hacker News:
- Describe your product in Show HN. Just make a short post in this section, that’s it. Here’s an example.
- Share interesting tech articles on your website. Example.
We only did the first one — Show HN. Our post didn’t do so well on Hacker News (10 upvotes), but it briefly hit the top spot. It led to some installs. It’s clearer on the graph:
Result on peak day: 55 installs.
With Reddit, you can make a post that gets quite a lot of views. For instance, here’s my post that got 34k views.
I tried subreddits r/Entrepreneur and r/SideProject.
One of the issues with Reddit is that it’s labor-intensive. You need to have high karma (rating system based on upvotes for your posts and comments) and avoid getting banned. And to do that, you have to write other posts and comments that don’t promote your product but spark interest among readers.
Another issue is that in our case, we hardly noticed any impact on installs:
Result on peak day: 26 installs.
Product Hunt
We launched Letterly on Product Hunt on Saturday. We grabbed the #1 product of the day. In short, we simply planned ahead and gathered a lot of people ready to support us.
Yes, it’s worth it, we finally started seeing significant volumes.
Results were:
- Saturday: 203 installs (launch day)
- Sunday: 181 installs
- Monday: 330 installs (included in email digest where we were #1)
- After a month: 109 installs (mentioned on PH Twitter)
In this article, I don’t mention money, but I can say these weren’t empty installs. A fair percentage of them later became paid subscribers.
Newsletters
It’s hard to influence this channel, they usually decide who to talk about. After hitting #1 on Product Hunt, we started getting noticed by some AI-related newsletters.
One of the most noticeable is Superhuman. Its impact was significant, it helped prolong the effect from Product Hunt:
Result on peak day: 168 installs.
Betabound
This was an unexpected find. The idea of the platform is that you launch there before you launch your app. You can send a Testflight link there or a landing page with pre-registration or just a survey form (which we did).
The advantage for people is that they get early access to products.
There is an audience there! I recommend Betabound for building an initial email list to whom you can send the app as the first users.
Result: 300+ emails
We can’t track how many people installed the app, but we received feedback from them and saw more installations on mailing days.
Directories
Oh, you’ve probably seen those people selling “List of 9999+ app directories.”
Well, that turned out to be bullshit, practically none of the directories brought even a slightly noticeable result.
Result: no
Betalist
You might think Betalist is like ProductHunt on a smaller scale. I didn’t see any spikes on the day of posting on Betalist. The only thing that might help understand the scale: in Google Analytics we had 670 referrals from Product Hunt and 53 referrals from Betalist.
So, for the sake of 50–60 people, you might want to try, but don’t expect much.
Result: almost unnoticed
Conclusion
We still have much left to try. I hope what we’ve already tried will be useful to you, helping you allocate the limited resources more effectively.
This article was very quickly written with the help of Letterly app you just read about. I recorded my ideas and got a well-prepared draft, which I then manually enriched with numbers and details.
I would also like to say that this is my first experience in writing articles, so I hope I will be able to continue sharing useful stories with you.
Good luck with your startup!
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