Interactive Guide to Your First 1000 Users

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5. Go-to-Market 🚀

Marketing/Distribution
Marketing/Distribution

What’s the point of having the greatest product in the world if you can’t market/distribute it properly to get it into the hands of users? I combine these two in one stage as I believe that channels for marketing should also lead to distribution and vice versa, for digital products given the ability to convert online leads via any outbound easier than other business models’ marketing and distribution strategies.

Marketing and Distribution Channels

Marketing and Distribution Channels

Channel Name

Status

Next Steps

Quantifiable Goal

Progress

Twitter

Active

DM Elon to give us a shoutout

1k followers on product account

Waitlist

Active

Embed Referral Program into newsletter

10k signups

r/YourNicheSubreddit

Need to Start

Draft reddit post

+300 upvotes on post

Product Hunt

On Hold

Draft Product Hunt Page, Recruit prominent founders to be our Hunter

Top 5 on Launch

There are no rows in this table

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Add New Channel

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🗣 Publicize Hard Launch on Existing Channels (Organic + Word of Mouth)

All the social media, newsletters, communities on Slack, Twitter, FB, etc., and waitlists that you’ve worked so hard to build will now be extremely helpful in all aspects of gaining traction. Positive word-of-mouth via early adopters will give others the confidence to take your product for a spin! Encourage your readers, followers, beta testers to tell others about how awesome your product is!

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😸 Product Hunt

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Product Hunt⁠

is the World Cup of your hard launch. Getting a feature on PH can lead to thousands of new leads and propel your traction to the next level if executed properly.

Open this for all things to prep for your PH launch

Launch @12am PST on Friday or the weekend

upvotes in the first 45 minutes have the most weight

Prepping the Launch

Presentation is key for PH success (example below of aesthetic + direct value add)

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Description

Keep your description simple and include the key features and numbers, people love it. I also recommend you to check what descriptions have the best product on PH. Make your description like the best products have.

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Maker comment

A maker comment is also very important. Tell about your story, why your product needs and what it solves. Include emojis and tabs in your text. Again, check how the best makers make their comments, and make your own comment like they do.

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You should definitely have the launch prepared in advance of midnight of the day you plan to launch

play around with the information like this below👇🏼

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Post Launch (taken from resources)

Add product hunt badge on website (only do this if you get a Top #10 feature)

Use important keywords on PH page for SEO

Dont spam people to upvote on PH or else we will get flagged!

You have to be really careful to not try to “game” the system.

A better way to phrase this is to ask fans to say “The best @Product X is launched today! Visit @ProductHunt to find them and join the discussion”

An Upvote from the Homepage, ProductHunt.com, is worth more than an Upvote from the Product Page

This is an old wives’ tale that’s been “debunked” by the Product Hunt team. BUT you can never be too careful!

Make sure that some people are independently going to producthunt.com and clicking on the upvote button, instead of straight to the Product’s page.

If people are unfamiliar with Product Hunt, you should send them directly to your product’s page.

Extra communities on launch day:

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www.facebook.com/groups/producthuntupvoters⁠

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www.facebook.com/groups/producthunt.exchange⁠

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product-school.slack.com⁠

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startupstudygroup.slack.com⁠

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launch-chat.slack.com⁠

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Growthhackertalk.slack.com⁠

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Other great resources

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https://demandcurve.com/playbooks/product-hunt#ibqpxpj9dbfk3fhpb2v6gg⁠

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🛬 Landing Page

The landing page is the first-impression so don’t look like a bum. You don’t want to mess this up. Psychologically, we positively correlate aesthetic to quality. Making the UI/UX of the landing page delightful is almost as important as the product itself.

Here’s

Julian Shapiro who’s helped 700+ startups redo their websites dropping some knowledge on landing pages.⁠

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This link can't be embedded.⁠

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♽ Referral Programs, Systems, Flywheels

Create internal and external systems, or flywheels, that can continuously ignite growth even as you are not directly performing outbound. Productize your marketing via implementing referral programs so that users are incentivized to onboard more people. Systems to make automated outbound efforts such as newsletters, email updates, or community engagement so that spatial repetition can engrain the value of your product in their heads. General flywheel strategies to continuously acquire new users without increasing CAC.

Here are 3 great threads from the Twitterverse to get you thinking about

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💸 SEOs and Paid Marketing

My take on SEOs and Paid Marketing is that it can wait until later. If there is true PMF, your product can go far without any paid marketing strategies for the short-term. Test to see if the earliest of adopters are willing to buy your product with lean marketing at first, then test out paid strategies.

That said, allocating a very small amount of your budge to test SEOs and ads could be beneficial in getting quality outbound results who can themselves help grow the product via their word of mouth. *See Scaling Section in

Infrastructure⁠

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