Achieving growth isn’t just a thing you get for free. This is what I got wrong.
There is a misconception in the indie hacking community, a part that most people don’t talk about because it doesn’t fit the premise, and that is: that acquiring users costs money. When reading through indie hacker posts, the common thing you read is that if you build a valuable product, you just have to “launch” it and users will use your product (and if they don’t use your product, you should just start building a new one). When digging into what “launch” refers to in their vocabulary, it is typically something organic, something you can easily do for free. For example, do a Reddit post or a ProductHunt launch.
Let me bring some truth: these ways won’t make you successful. Especially if you do them half-heartedly, which you probably will as you will focus on building some new features for your product or already started working on a new one. The iPod wouldn’t have been an instant success if there weren’t hundreds of potential buyers and reporters sitting in the conference just waiting to know what Steve Jobs had to show. There wouldn’t have been hundreds of potential buyers and reporters if Apple hadn’t done marketing for its brand and the event. Let us take some inspiration from that. There is no growth for free. You can’t just release a product into the abyss and believe that thousands of people will start using it. You can’t just post a single Reddit comment about your product and believe that people will flood your sign-up page and throw money at you.
I was inspired by the book “Scientific Advertising” by Claude Hopkins, a book first published in 1923. Firstly, I thought that everything written in there was irrelevant today. Who does mail advertisements anymore? Nowadays, people say, you should do “content-marketing” (pretty much meaning that you should half-heartedly post on Instagram and think that’s the way to do business). But soon I realized the book was right in especially one sense: “Advertising is multiplied salesmanship”. As Claude Hopkins wrote it: “The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales”. Your advertising has to bring in sales. If posting on Reddit doesn’t bring in considerable sales, then it isn’t a good marketing strategy. You should then take a step back and think about other ways to reach your optimal customer. And you should be fine with paying money to reach them. If you have to rent a space at a conference, then do so if you believe it will bring in sales. If you have to pay a Newsletter provider for an ad, then do so if it will bring in sales. You invest x and receive y times as much back. The better your advertising, the better the return you get.
Don’t fall into the trap of believing that acquiring users is free. If that was true, then no company would spend money on advertising.