Best free sites to submit your new start-up/project to for exposure

[Adam]

Let me know any other links in the thread and I'll add them to the list!

Site	Category	Format
Webwide Project Showcase	All, predominantly web design/dev	Discussion board
Product Hunt	All, predominantly tech	User voting
Hacker News	All, predominantly tech	User voting
Indie Hackers	All, predominantly tech	User voting
MakerLog	All, predominantly tech	News feed
Sidebar	Web design	Curated
Hoard.fyi	Web design/development	Curated
/r/webdev Showoff Saturday	Web development	User voting

 

[Gummibeer]

I've noticed that nearly all of them fail if it isn't a nerdy/hacky/dev tool.

With my photographer photo management tool for example I have conversion rates ~50% with direct engagement in the local photo communities (meetups, Facebook groups ...). If I count in the follow up contracts it's ~100-300% conversion rate.
Show me a digital marketing tool where I can reach 10%. 😉

Last Meetup for example: ~30 guests, I presented for ~15min, 11 contracts on site, 10 extended the free tier and 24 follow ups with 19 long-term contracts.

So 29 long-term customers with 15min effort. The benefit: not a single support question.

The last 1-to-1 presentation brought in 3 follow ups - all long-term.

The ones without a personal onboarding create in average 3 support tickets. Every ticket costs 15-60min in total.

So as long as you haven't grown out your local customers - go into direct marketing. It builds trust, saves time and the emotional relation makes it more difficult to reject.^^

Never forget that most times your customers aren't developers. They even fail to disable AdBlock without tutorial.

 

[Adam]

I've noticed that nearly all of them fail if it isn't a nerdy/hacky/dev tool.

With my photographer photo management tool for example I have conversion rates ~50% with direct engagement in the local photo communities (meetups, Facebook groups ...). If I count in the follow up contracts it's ~100-300% conversion rate.
Show me a digital marketing tool where I can reach 10%. 😉

Last Meetup for example: ~30 guests, I presented for ~15min, 11 contracts on site, 10 extended the free tier and 24 follow ups with 19 long-term contracts.

So 29 long-term customers with 15min effort. The benefit: not a single support question.

The last 1-to-1 presentation brought in 3 follow ups - all long-term.

The ones without a personal onboarding create in average 3 support tickets. Every ticket costs 15-60min in total.

So as long as you haven't grown out your local customers - go into direct marketing. It builds trust, saves time and the emotional relation makes it more difficult to reject.^^

Never forget that most times your customers aren't developers. They even fail to disable AdBlock without tutorial.

You're totally right! I marked all those ones as tech and ones that came to my mind since thats what many of us work in but you can't beat diving in to your niche for real engagement.

 

[Gummibeer]

And for the super first, it helps if one of the users does it. Until you know the wording, common questions, edge cases that aren't this edgy and so on.

The first 5 customers were introduced by my girlfriend because she knows all the photographer communities, is also known as a good one and has automatic trust behind her words and can tell them about her very own experience.
It's worth 10000 times what I could say in a whole day workshop because I don't know the business like a real photographer.

 

[JoyFreak]

Thank you so much for this useful thread! We need a lot more like that, ways to drive traffic and exposure of our project/website.

 

[Gummibeer]

Thank you so much for this useful thread! We need a lot more like that, ways to drive traffic and exposure of our project/website.

Have you attended local game meetups?
Or GameJams where you get attention by gamers & developers/designers? Or even hosted a GameJams?
Collaborate with a small local Gamestudio, throw in 100 bucks for pizza and drinks and you are done. 😉 (Small jam^^)
And I can guarantee you that game jams are such a great experience.

Or if you need more gamers: do the same with a lan party.
If the local Gamestudio has a multiplayer even better, otherwise all the common games.^^
With the local Gamestudio you could even do a tournament and the winner (s) will win a copy of the game and some merch.

Think outside the typical marketing game. Most times the conversion rates are enormous, the "campaign" is cheaper and it's lot more fun. 😉 And you show that you live what you pretend to be. The moment they see that there's a real person and gamer behind instead of a large company the trust increases and trust is what's needed in most services.

 

[avena]

Nice! Another one is betalist.

 

[JoyFreak]

Have you attended local game meetups?
Or GameJams where you get attention by gamers & developers/designers? Or even hosted a GameJams?
Collaborate with a small local Gamestudio, throw in 100 bucks for pizza and drinks and you are done. 😉 (Small jam^^)
And I can guarantee you that game jams are such a great experience.

Or if you need more gamers: do the same with a lan party.
If the local Gamestudio has a multiplayer even better, otherwise all the common games.^^
With the local Gamestudio you could even do a tournament and the winner (s) will win a copy of the game and some merch.

Think outside the typical marketing game. Most times the conversion rates are enormous, the "campaign" is cheaper and it's lot more fun. 😉 And you show that you live what you pretend to be. The moment they see that there's a real person and gamer behind instead of a large company the trust increases and trust is what's needed in most services.

Thanks for your positive advise. I will give those ideas a go, they seem promising :)