Blood, sweat, and tears: How we got from 0 to 500K downloads on a budget
Gili Golander is a co-founder and CMO at Bazaart. Bazaart is the most beautiful way to mix your photos into mind-blowing images.
When I started my startup journey two years ago, one word came to my mind whenever I thought about marketing: liars.
You see, coming from a UX background where the focus is on giving people a great product experience, I tended to look at the marketing side of business as something reserved to slick types – characters often played so well by George Clooney.
As time passed and I took on the marketing role for my startup (while everybody else was busy coding), I started to see marketers differently. Today, I think of them as storytellers.
When you’re marketing a startup, you don’t have a fat marketing budget. In fact, more often than not, you have no budget at all – at least when you’re just starting. Your mission is to grow, and for B2C companies it means more users.
How do you approach this daunting task? Here are some tips and tricks that helped me grow the downloads for our app Bazaart from 0 to 500,000 organically, spending very little to no money at all.
Launch into an existing community, or piggyback one
When we launched our MVP, we were taking part in an accelerator program in NYC. This meant that we were on three-month deadline, hoping to show some traction by demo day.
We chose to integrate our product closely with Pinterest, which was the talk of the town in the summer of 2012, and allow our users to do more with their carefully curated photos. Even though our MVP was very limited, the core feature of photo collage editing was already there, so it gave Pinterest users a real value.
We launched a week before demo day and were able to generate a good media buzz (I’ll get more specific later) by piggybacking Pinterest and reach a go-to market that was highly relevant for us at the time. This is how we generated our first wave of downloads and it had cost us nothing at all.
We didn’t invent this approach. Investor Fred Wilson calls it finding “entry points” in his post about marketing and mentions similar examples for Twitter, Tumblr and Quora.
Instagram launched into a community of influential design oriented Twitter users, which allowed it to generate 25K downloads on launch day as it reveal in this excellent video. Find an existing community that’s right for your startup, or piggyback one, launch into it and it’ll make for a great start.
Next:: If you’re gonna go global, plan it from the start