A big part of our work with companies that want to launch is discovering the right acquisition channels. Last month I spent some time researching acquisition channels used by companies in the plugin niche. After analyzing 26 companies, I found 7 channels that show the highest potential for scalability. These are actual interviews with the founders/CEOs of those companies, and each quote is traceable to an actual web page.
Big names like Amazon, Shopify, or Apple have their own app stores where you can make various tools & participate in their ecosystem.
Here are the quotes for the positive mentions:
“Of course, another massive source of trials was the Slack App Directory. After our experience, I highly recommend launching on a platform like Slack, WordPress, or Shopify. There’s a whole chunk of functionality that you can essentially “outsource” to the platform. For us, that was authentication, user management, and access to the “work graph.” You also get a free distribution from the parent platform and a clear target persona you can attract. There are definitely risks involved, but the benefits outweighed the risks in our eyes. You can check out more details on why you should launch on a platform from my co-founder Andy. Google and Slack make 50% of the trials”.
Source: Andy Cook
ProductHunt.com is the number one platform in the world for launching products.
Here are the quotes for the positive mentions:
Here are the quotes for the negative mentions:
Some products start with SEO as part of their initial acquisition strategy. SEO is a set of practices with an end goal: so people who search on Google for a specific keyword can see your website first.
Here are the quotes for the positive mentions:
Ads that appear on Facebook on things like the news feed, the right-hand side of the news feed, in-between videos, and so on.
Here are the quotes for the negative mentions:
An online advertising platform by Google. Say you’re selling men's shoes and want to appear on the search results when someone types ‘shoes for men’. Google Ads allows you to do this.
Here are the quotes for the negative mentions:
“Advertising has never worked. Adwords has never worked — probably because it’s not possible to target ads by the operating system, which means ads get a lot of clicks from Mac and Android users, while my software is for Windows desktops. (my note: Most clear example of why advertising might not work for you).”
Source: Darren Devitt
“Hi, I have tried Google AdWords and Facebook Ads and ended up breaking even — i.e., the revenue from the sales was about the same as the adverts were costing me. So I stopped that as the ROI wasn’t there.”
Source: Katie Keith
There are thousands of subreddits on Reddit where your potential audience may gather and be interested in your product.
Here are the quotes for the positive mentions:
“I got my first few customers through traffic from Hacker News and Reddit. Those first few sales were a big confidence boost. Also, the posts on HN and Reddit were good initial validation that somebody would use the tool and potentially pay for it, even if it takes some work”.
Source: Latish Sehgal
“I also shared Requestly on platforms like Reddit and Hacker News, which boosted growth even further.”
Source: Sachin Jain
Here are the quotes for the negative mentions:
“A couple of subreddits also helped get the word out, but the results were not stunning.” Source : Stanislav Dimitrov
Having an existing audience from a product you own.
Here are the quotes for the positive mentions:
“Code Canyon helped me to build a small following pretty quickly that I was then able to cultivate into a much larger group through the content I was producing on my personal site, Pippin’s Plugins. I was publishing tutorials, tips, and other blog posts several times per week. While my audience started at nothing, I built this into a pretty significant following fairly quickly. Through my products and writing, I grew my site’s traffic from a few hundred-page sessions per month to more than 85,000 sessions per month at its peak. That traffic was critically important to the success of my products early on. (my note: He started from publishing on code canyon, then using that audience to create a website, and then use that to create related products”.
Source: Pippin Williamson
“I offered WPeddit to plugin customers at a discount. This got some sales coming in, and I started my WordPress theme business. I grew Epic Plugins to where it is today over a long stint of building out new WordPress plugins and releasing them into CodeCanyon’s ecosystem”.
Source: Mike Mayhem
Originally published at https://solveo.co.
