Hey,
Thank you for taking the time to read, and for your potential advice.
In the case of a digital product MVP, without funding, how do you generate relevant traffic without breaking the bank (as you don't want to over-invest from the get-go)?
For context, here's what I know about how to generate traffic:
- Personal network
- Pros: Free, and quick exposure
- Con's: One trick poney, Usually a low match in terms of potential customers
- Virality
- Pros: Awesome, free, recurrent
- Con's: Completely out of your control or what you can do in early stages
- MVP sharing spaces
- Pros: Free, Wide exposure
- Cons: Very low relevancy, I feel like all of the known MVP-sharing space is filled at 99% with people sharing their own MVPs. Everyone wants to talk, no one wants to listen.
- SEO:
- Pros: Long-term traffic building
- Cons: It takes such a long time, has no guarantee, and doubtful future with incoming AI search engines. Also is a debatably too big investment when just testing the water with an MVP.
- Ads:
- Pros: Effective, potentially more relevant, Quick
- Cons: Costly, can take a while to fine-tune for good targeting/costs.
In my case it's not a "have been working on it for 3 years mvp", it's literally a 2-week free product, put three links on a couple of subreddits and I am getting a new user a day. My current plan would be to ask users to register their email if they are interested in a paid pro version, put a small amount of $ into ads, and only continue and build the pro version if I can get 100 registered interest.
But I wanted to know what is your usual process for this, how do you handle it? I would love to hear from people who have serially launched digital products, if you have a pattern in how you do things, regardless of the industry for the product.
And as a related question, are there things you can do as a non-marketer person to build up coverage in a way that doesn't involve throwing money at it and that is value-adding, ethical, and non-spammy? I am happy to spend some time and energy, I am just not sure how to go at it.
Thank you again, and have a fantastic day!
Before spending 2 weeks building an MVP, you should spend 2 days (or more… however long it takes) doing customer discovery through conversational interviews with early adopters.
Early adopters are people who:
The “customer discovery” phase / method accomplishes many things, including answering your specific question.
While validating the problem, you experiment with locating and engaging “early adopters.” If you can’t manually successfully find a few dozen passionately interested early adopters to interview, then you’re gonna have a very difficult time selling something, because you simply don’t know what channels to use to find them or how to speak their language.
The customer discovery method is useful for far more than exploring product ideas, features, etc. You should also be learning from early adopters:
Even though you’ve built something, it may be very wise to go back and just try to find and interview people who fit the description of early adopters. If you can’t find any… shrug emoji.
The alternative is to simply keep trying to get people to interact with your MVP. But you won’t learn nearly as much that way as you would just asking questions face to face.
It’s easy and common to do customer discovery wrong and get bad results. Don’t waste your time! Study these first.
Resources:
Hey!
Thank you so much for taking the time to write such an extensive answer!
I really appreciate the breakdown and the steps. You have a point that customer discovery is something I need to learn to master.
I will go through your recommendations, could I come back to you if I have more questions on that specific topic?