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Mike Kulakov

🚀 Lets gather ideas how anyone can get some leads for their product relatively easily?

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My name is Mike. I'm CEO/Co-founder of a product called Everhour. Part of my daily job is product marketing and I love finding new channels that would bring me new leads and grow my business. No scam, no spam emails, no clickbait headlines, without paying for low quality leads from Google or Facebook, mostly for free or for little money. I prefer to bet on creativity or knowledge exchange. So, 1) Lets avoid obvious ideas like "SEO optimization". It's good, but in general spread over time. 2) No paid ads. Unless it's some non-obvious channel or interesting tricks to try. 3) If you say "Content marketing", please tell us where and how to spread the content to attract the audience. I'll start by sharing my experience in comments 👇

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Mike Kulakov
5️⃣ Heard about broken link building? It is a process of contacting author for a broken resource found on their website and suggesting to replace it with correct links, one you provide. But I'd like to share what else we do on top of this approach. We always do our best to present in any relevant lists and comparison websites by our primary keywords. It happens that someone wrote about "the best time tracker" or "the best integration with x" and we are not there and often this is not done intentionally. Our job is to contact the author and share insights why it would be useful for their audience to see also Everhour in there. Before making the contact, we do a mini research of the blog and if we find any errors or broken links (we use ahrefs), we include this info into our "cold email". The author will likely to spend time adding us to their article with such a gesture from our side. Win-win.
Mike Kulakov
2️⃣ I once wrote and article called "Growing Our SaaS Company To $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money. Key Lessons Learned" and submitted it to HackerNews as no other publications accepted it - https://medium.com/everhour/grow... I did not have a profile on HN (I registered on the same day) not to mention my zero “karma”. And as one would expect, the article got lost very quickly there. But next day I received a message from the Hacker News Team. They said that they noticed my article and because it seemed interesting, they would give it another chance. Namely, in the next 24 hours, they put it on the main page. It turned out that they were running an experiment in story reviewing. The article received 400+ upvotes, rose to the 2nd line in the TOP and received more than 140 comments that day. Due to the fact that the article received a massive amount of traffic from HN, the curators of Medium noticed us and distributed the story into several topics, as well as selected the story to share with readers in the Medium app, homepage, email digest, and more, which gave it a new wave of traffic. We were #2 in the popular articles of that day on Medium. This would not have happened if we published in article on our blog. As a result, for a couple of days, the article gained 2,900 claps and more than 46,000+ views. Today it's over 69k views.
Mike Kulakov
Consider submitting your story into HackerNoon.com publication on Medium. My story got 2k views from there.
Upen V
Assuming, you don't want to hear the obvious ones from your list, below approaches would work. Two approaches 1) Build a side project that drives leads to the main project - The side project doesn't have to be tech heavy. It should be able to be built using simple NoCode stack and shouldn't take more than 2-3 days. In most cases, this side project/product should be free to get more leads. 2) Get an Influencer in your niche and offer your product for free and heavy affiliate commission rate. Let the influencer market (assuming the influencer really likes your product) and let the influencer mention about your product in exchange of heavy commission (as high as 80%) for driving sales. I wrote about these in my book for 'to be founders' at https://zerotofounder.co
Mike Kulakov
Dear @upen946 , 1) Have you personally had a success experience of building a side project in 2-3 days that will constantly bring you quality leads? I've read about it many times along with stories of dropbox, hotmail and hupspot. I personally tried several times, but alas, did not achieve any significant results. IMHO it's harder than it sounds. 2) Didn't work either. Any known SaaS use cases?
Upen V
@mikhail_kulakov Both the approaches I gave a practical examples and are not from unicorns. I wrote a lot about these kind of approaches in my book for 'to be founders' at https://zerotofounder.co 1) Sometimes yes. For example, I built a small product that lists APIs using my own SaaS product Siteoly It was a good hit on PH with more than 400 upvotes and drove good traffic to Siteoly https://www.producthunt.com/prod... Make small product in 2-3 days, launch on PH and other places. If it works, its good. If not, you only lose 2-3 days. But the trick is to timebox the entire effort to 4-5 days so that you won't regret if it misfires 2) TweetHunter crossed $50K MRR with this model. They roped in influencers and drove massive sales.
Mike Kulakov
1️⃣ At Everhour, we integrate with most popular project management tools and embed time tracking controls right inside their interface. Because this is our target audience, we read and answer relevant questions on Asana forum and it constantly brings us leads and customers - https://forum.asana.com/t/is-the... **Same tactic for example doesn't work with Jira Community and we were unable to see any similar metrics from Quora.
Mike Kulakov
3️⃣ Another proven method is to write an article comparing 3 products in your niche. 2 of them must be popular and well known, while the third product is you. At one time, we wrote an article comparing "Toggl vs Harvest vs Everhour", which quickly jumped into the TOP and was giving us high-quality leads for a very long time. People searched for "Toggl vs Harvest" and find us. ☝️ The main point is that you use your competitor name to “steal” its leads. This works great because it helps to convert people who haven’t yet made up their minds about which company to purchase from. Don't think about it as putting down your competitors. Be respectful and correct. Just tastefully note the main features of your product versus a competitor.
Mike Kulakov
4️⃣ Sometimes the trial period is not long enough for users to see the value you give to their business (we offer 14-day trial). There are numerous reasons for this: lack of time, a thick layer of decision makers, waiting for an approval, etc. A small portion of users will write to ask for a trial extension directly. However, the majority will just be lazy or shy to do this, walk away to your competitor who gives longer trial periods. For our part, we do not consider longer trials (say 30 days), but that's a different story. The solution to try is to give an option to extend a trial in exchange for a tweet/facebook share. Click share button with mention and receive +7 days. There will definitely be those who will do this into empty accounts or who delete their tweets right after the extension, but this largely depends on the text and your product. Anyway, it worth trying.
Hélène SAN
Hello Mike, I'd suggest you to try Web stories? It's a new web content that you can share everywhere including your Website/Email/SMS campaigns/App. You could use Snackeet for example to create web stories which are interactive stories that can include dynamic forms, surveys, quizzes Check it out if you're curious: https://www.snackeet.com/