Yesterday, my co-founder @EmmeMaker and I launched our product Engagement Builder after several weeks of closed beta.
It all started in April when my co-founder realized that he has issues with engagement on Twitter. He spent a lot of time just engaging with a few major accounts from his niche. Plus, UI that Twitter offered was too cluttered for him so he decided to do something about that.
He reached out to me at the end of April and on the 3rd of May, we decided that we will do this together. I would cover marketing, and he would cover coding.
The first thing we did after that is publish the landing page and start gathering emails for our beta. We went to the great lengths to achieve at least something. At that time combined our Twitter profiles had barely a few hundred followers. But that didn’t frighten us. We knew we will have to do a lot of work, at least much more work than larger accounts, to get our validation.
Our goal was to get 20 subs in 2 weeks. We got 23 in the first 24 hours, so we decided to get 80 subs by the end of 2 weeks when we would launch beta. Instead of 80, we got 98. But we honestly wrote about it extensively. I used to write ~150 comments per day, just to gain visibility.
We sent the first newsletter on the day of launch. Our CTR was 28.6%, which was quite good. But the real power was Twitter. We managed to make a fuss around it and we got 52 new beta users, which was astonishing.
Our beta started on the 9th of June. Since then we managed to get 220 users just to test our app. This was the total amount, but the average number of daily users was 20. This was enough for us to validate our product.
Since we started our beta we were more active on our product’s Twitter account. We tweeted and tried to promote it as much as possible.
In the meantime, we managed to publish the Engagement Builder blog and we have published our first article there: How to create an attractive profile on Twitter? We got 66 reads in 24 hours which was something we didn’t really expect.
Yesterday, we decided to launch our product. We set our goals. By the end of the month, 2 users are good, 5 users are excellent, and 10 users are mind-blowing. 24 hours in and we are on 7 paid users. How cool is that?
How did the launch go?
So, the first thing we did is that we announced it on our product’s Twitter profile. Since we have 77 followers there, there wasn’t so much noise. There was no noise at all, to be fair. 2 hours after that my co-founder pushed it to his own Twitter profile, while I was going through comments and trying to say that we have launched wherever it was applicable. I was never more thankful for: the “What are your plans today” kind of tweets. 4 hours later I pushed it to my profile also. Traction started because now we already had 3 channels that were talking about it. Plus we had tons of comments talking about it also.
One good thing that we did is that we spread our timing so we could cover more people and more “times”. This made it especially successful.
6 hours in, we have sent the newsletter to our subs. We had 29.7% CTR. Everything was going well and then Stripe notification! Our first paying customer. Several minutes later the second one. After 2 hours the third one. Today we got 5th, 6th, and 7th paying customers.
Recap
“We are super happy”, as my co-founder use to say. We know that we just started and that there is a huge amount of work ahead of us. But we’re not afraid and we’re going to win.
I have missed a lot of things from this article, to keep it as short as possible. But if you have any questions feel free to reach me on my Twitter.