I launched my app Startup Timer on September 8th. Today, in the beginning of December, the app has had over 20 000 users and the app's website, https://startuptimer.com has grown from zero back-links and zero Domain Authority ranking to 213 back-links and 21 Domain Authority. With my marketing budget of $50, I think that’s pretty good.
Startup Timer is a lightweight, freeware app for Windows that measures how long it takes for a Windows PC to fully start up, and it also measures which of the installed apps are making the system start slower.
It’s a very simple and straightforward app that has a somewhat small niche audience but I would say the app does its job and it does it well.
Even though it’s a simple app, developing it took me about a month. It consists of about 16k rows of code and I made it as a side project after my normal work hours.
This is exactly what I did to launch it.
Firstly, I posted it here on Indie Hackers as well as on Reddit's /r/sideproejct/.
This was mostly, to be honest, just to collect feedback about the app and the website because I want to make them better. I believe in quality and that users will see the quality as well, that’s why in everything I do, I try to make it as good as I possibly can. That is how I implement MVP: For me, MVP means a product with minimal features, but those features are polished and they work perfectly.
Secondly, I did a press release. It’s very much of an old school method but I have had some success with it before. Basically, a press release needs to be written in a very specific format and then you pay someone to distribute it to different relevant media outlets, websites and freelance reporters.
I chose the press release distribution service from EIN Presswire. I bought a package of multiple press release distributions, so the price for one was just $50. Buying the distribution for just one press release would have been $100. There are also other press release distribution service providers and most of them were more expensive. I don’t know whether you get more if you pay more, that’s why I just spent $50.
The press release got picked up by quite a few news outlets. Nothing major but everything helps. This is how the press release reads like, by the way: https://world.einnews.com/pr%5Fnews/598094733/macecraft-software-launched-startup-timer
One thing to mention is that news outlets might notice your press release but not publish it, but they might still run a story about your product, either immediately or soon after. This makes it really difficult to measure the actual efficiency of a press release, because you cannot just count the number of websites that published your press release. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
This is especially an important point in our case: the press release was sent out on October 27th and on October 31st the app was featured in a major German computer news website called Computerbase.de which provided my website with thousands of visitors. This happened only a few days after the press release, so I have to assume they saw the press release via the distribution service and that’s why they got interested and featured my product there. This goes to show that a press release can really help you even if the press release itself isn’t published by many websites.
The third thing I did was that I submitted the app to the best quality software download websites. Websites like download.com and the likes. This is a rather tedious process because you basically need to do the submission to these websites one by one, and the process is different for every website. Some sites make you sign up for an account, fill in a form and so on, while others have an email address you need to write to asking them to list your software.
It’s important to focus on quality over quantity. There are many software download websites which accept automated submissions, which means they are full of spam, malware and other junk you don’t want to be associated with.
And lastly, I did a simple cold contact campaign. Basically, I searched with relevant keywords for articles that mentioned my niche (“how to measure computer startup speed”, “how to make Windows start faster” etc.) and I contacted the first page search result websites with a good quality, hand crafted message saying that my new app would be a good fit for their existing content and this is possibly something you could say about it. And this actually worked: the app was getting featured by these websites that I contacted!
This is how I got 20 000 users in less than three months, with a marketing budget of $50. I would say that the main keyword here is quality. I worked a long time to test, fine-tune and polish my product and its website, to ensure they are good enough. Not good enough for me, but good enough for someone to actually use, share and recommend. And every marketing and promotional effort I did was also made with quality over quantity.
I believe if you work hard enough and you make something good enough, people will notice. And that being said, if you have any feedback about the app or its website, especially if there is anything I can do to make them better for your needs, please let me know!