Growing gSweets 📈 – Oct. 25, 2020
A transparent look at what goes into growing a small indie SaaS company.
The top-level numbers:
Starting # of users: 59
Ending # of users: 73
Growth strategies used
We were still working through some bugs, so weren’t pursuing mass-adoption just yet. Users needed a private link to access the app, and we were trying to onboard new users one at a time.
I started tracking my outreach by attaching Bitly links to my messages so that I can track clicks to the Chrome webstore. This week the channels I used for outreach were:
PersistIQ (Cold-emailing)
LinkedIn
Twitter
Youtube
IndieHackers
Direct relationships
This week I mapped all the clicks generated and also how many installs we saw each day. The results are below.
Although it can be hard to draw conclusions this early with such small numbers, I expect this will be a lot more helpful to analyze successful channel acquisition as we scale our efforts across these channels.
New promo video
We launched a new promo video that we think does a good job of demonstrating the gap between what users have come to expect on the market – and where Google Docs is today. It got 68 views last week.
Personal outreach
This week, one of the channels with the best response rate was Twitter DMs. I used search filters to find users in my target audience. I searched for users who tweeted about ProductHunt launches for similar products like Grammarly. I received positive replies from 8/40 Twitter users.
I’ll continue this effort this week continuing to search for users of Notion, Google Docs and other Chrome extensions.
Other notes
This week we had to make an important prioritization decision about whether to focus on building billing infrastructure for our launch or introducing new shortcuts that users are asking for. We decided to continue to build out valuable features. We can always introduce payments later, for now, we’re optimizing for a great product.
We squashed a nasty bug last week that meant our pop-up wouldn’t show up. We can now try and scale more aggressively.
We’re going to be making our extension public this week. That means any Chrome user will be able to find the extension, not just users with a direct link.
We’ll be launching our website soon so get ready for that. If you want a sneak peek, reply to this email.
Feedback of the week:
That’s it for this week!
Onwards,
Jer & Christoph