What are some low-key ways you have grown hobby projects? Is it just something you let happen naturally?
and read https://growthhackers.com/ to get ideas
Another trick - post your URL in Ask HN posts ;)
The book seems like it's targeted for rapid growth rather than the small/steady growth I'm looking for. Is that the case? I'd be interested in reading it either way, but I'd like to hear more.
The URL is http://www.scriptcat.io :)
You can get the gist of it from this Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/jwmares/traction-trumps-everything
But the basic exercise is to go through each of the 19 different channels and see if there's something you could do and then pick the couple that make the most sense, try those and repeat.
So for Scriptcat it'd be something like:
CONTENT MARKETING Write interesting content for port best practices, what to check, what should be open when.
FB/Twitter Ads You'd need to charge to cover the costs of this, but you could see ads like: "Do you know what your ports are doing while you sleep?"
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Partner with ISPs to get their signups using your system. Some of them have add-on ecosystems.
What you're looking for is a system where you can put X in and get Y users out of it (ideally without a lot of time and effort on your part). I think you're already a good way along the path because you've created a useful service.
25 - SMTP 1433 - MSSQL 3306 - MySQL 3389 - RDP 6379 - Redis
Cool idea! :)
https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-generate-website-traffic-wit...
and Andrew Chen has some great essays on the subject
http://andrewchen.co/the-highest-roi-way-to-increase-signups...
List of essays: http://andrewchen.co/list-of-essays/
Personal Networks, writing blog posts about what you've learned, interact with people (genuinely) on twitter (and obviously link your project in your account), Reddit is also good. With any of these respect the community and don't spam them (you don't seem the type given your post here, thought I would mention anyways)
If its technical and you know where the people are who benefit go and interact with them. Help them with something they need help with. Then get them to try it, find issues, fix 'em, rinse repeat.
It takes a lot of footwork!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741827
There's OpenHunt, it's slowly gaining momentum www.openhunt.co
Blight of the Immortals only has about 50 daily active users. We would like to grow a little to get a better idea about what people like and don't like about the game.
We've run some Facebook and Google ads and it looks like it costs around 35 - 40c a click. We only get about 10% sign-up so we are paying about $4 a user. (From what I have read that's about what to expect)
We still have a lot of cool stuff to add, but we make about $2 per new account, so I guess that means we are about halfway there :)
Congrats on the 50 active users :)
The items for you to take this up a notch are the following: 1. Update things from time to time to make it newer-ish. The game does not feel like it has changed any of the times that we have played it over the four years (has it been that long)
2. Turn based for the die-hard workers.
3. Figure out the Iron Key for paying to play for a period of time. That really worked out for getting us to have one person pay for a key and then we could all play. If a person wants to get new friends to start a separate game, then you have an in for a new key purchase.
4. Ask your users, send an e-mail out to everybody and ask them what their issues are. Ask those that love it to post on their facebook / twitter / etc.
The new Blight of the Immortals is an all new game built on the ashes of the old game.
The game infact didn't change from about 2010 when I stopped working on it till just a few months ago when we opened up a beta of the new game.
We haven't reached out to the players of the old game because we're still fleshing out the content and adding new features. We've started doing a little advertising to see how well things like the home page and tutorial are working.
When the only traffic to the site is ads, you can get a good idea of how the game stands on its own.
The only way the game will be big "success" is if we generate enough cash to do paid user acquisition.
From my perspective, the game looked interesting, but I also had a bit of trouble figuring out what the gameplay would be like - I can kind of guess from the screenshots, but it's not really enough. The trailer (while very nicely done), didn't show anything from the game as far as I can tell, and the "play now" button takes you to a registration screen. I suspect this causes a lot of potential users to bounce right there - edge cases who might be persuaded to stay if the "play now" button just dropped them as anonymous into a game (and asked for their email a few minutes in).
If I were you I would personally go to small-mid-big biz in your area and pitch them this tool. I know that Internet is the thing but real money and connections are offline....just a hint....
I think talking to businesses personally would be great, but I wouldn't even know where to start with that. Do you have any suggestions? (books, articles, personal experience?)
There is no silver bullet for this and while books and articles can be of help it will never describe what you do and feel once you are before people you are pitching your product. You have to overcome any issues with that yourself. You just have to do it. I am still sometimes anxious so don't worry. It's normal...
People will tell you to post on the Internet but they know jack shajt. You will get freeloaders and hardly any feedback from those users. Once you land 3 serious biz users those are gold mines. Better spend the time and $200 for a dinner with them.
I think going to meetups would be great! That might actually be my best bet since it's person-to-person and majority technical. It's definitely the target audience at least.
My site is http://www.scriptcat.io -- basically, it emails you if it detects a new open port. "Pingdom for open ports"
(Edit: I could've sworn afarrell's post initially asked what the project was)
Looking at some of my old stats, it's probably realistic to expect at most 10% of people to respond to that kind of email.
If you're keen to have more people use it, you need to be able to clearly answer:
What is the benefit of using your application? What does your tool do to make people's lives easier/better? How can people access your application?
Then you start with your own social networks. Explicitly ask people to use your tool as testers, find people who you think would benefit and approach them directly. Tell people why it's cool and ask them to share it - then go from there.
I think one of my issues is that the app provides a technical service, so it's limited to programmer friends who are all mostly work acquaintances. I'm not sure why, but I was hesitant to share it in the workplace. I suppose it's as good a place as any!
I think "native" promotion is the best. Figure out who your best customers could be and start watching ports on all their websites. Whenever one changes, send an automated email saying something like:
"We noticed a potential vulnrubility in your site, if you'd like to know if this happens again, reach out to me"
maybe as the other commenter said, you don't send a million emails, instead you could do a twitter account or some other social media way to do it.
One of the other comments here notes that your application does some kind of scanning for open ports. Assuming the application has some kind of integration...
That might be easy to link to, for example, Docker. A blog post showing how to "automate security validation for newly created containers" might have a broader audience that just "port scanning". Especially if you provide working code, and some path to integrate more than just your app.
The site is http://www.scriptcat.io (I submitted it to HN previously).
- invite folks you know on an "sure to open your email/answer ur slack/im/sms" message and
-- invite folks you know little bit outside of that circle
--- invite folks in forums your' involved with (give/take)
--- invite folks on ur mostly active social media account
---- you can submit to betalist.com if it's beta private only
---- you can submit to producthunt.com if it's live and ready to be used
But you want to present the best possible version of the product to your co-workers, friends, and family. So ask your one user a couple questions, along the lines of:
* What do they like about using your product? What problem does the product solve for them?
* What do they dislike about using your product? (What problems does it create, or leave unsolved?)
Beyond that, make sure that the UI is good. Then start promoting by the ways that other people have suggested.
No response yet!
Who is your one user? Do they fit any particular category? Ask them if they have friends that would use your software.