>We have a $0 paid advertising budget and we don’t have an affiliate program either. We pretty much ignore all the best marketing practices.
This is very impressive, but I am not sure it generalizes to the average bootstrapped startup.
Not sure how they're missing this, but they are not ignoring best practices. Content and SEO are fundamental marketing practices. This post and their entire blog is content and SEO. I guess they think it sounds cool to say "we don't care about marketing", but they are marketing the same way most bootstrappers people would tell you to.
I guess the marketing best practices they ignore wouldn't be best practices if it did :)
Still, it's nice to see that the model can work. As a happy customer, I'm pleased to see that the model is sustainable. When a product decides to stick to word-of-mouth alone, incentives are very aligned for them to make the user experience good enough to tell other people about (as I have).
They would find forums with questions about address correction, and provide great answers that DID NOT require using their software.
Then just put their site in the profile or at the end of the post in a tactful way.
I started using them based on the expertise in these posts.