Marketing plan for Lists Kit
jasonleow • 24 Jan 2024 •
Progress updates on Lists Kit so far:
- First ever Github commit was on 30 Oct 2023, about 3 months ago.
- That’s an 86 days of unbroken daily commit streak!
- Made a total of 359 commits for Lists Kit:
- 245 commits on the ListsKit.com repo
- 49 commits on beta repo,
- 22 commits on the blank boilerplate repo,
- 43 commits on Keto List
- 15 beta users, some built sites, some didn’t.
- Zero paying customers so far.
I’ve been building Lists Kit long enough. I’m at the point where continuing to build it even with my beta users isn’t enough. It’s now good enough for a first launch. And it needs to get out there in the wild to know if this is even a business.
So I’ve decided to launch this week. To be honest I could have launched in December last year, but I held back because of the holiday season from Christmas to New Year.
Marketing plan
- Launch on Twitter this Friday 26 Jan.
- Maybe Devhunt too on Friday if it’s not backlogged.
- Get more users, actual paying customers.
- Get more feedback.
- A few weeks/months later, launch on Product Hunt.
- Launch on r/SideProjects
- Join Chris Osbourne’s (@KintuLabs) Profitable Directories community
- Find Facebook groups or subreddits for info directories founders
- Build side projects and free tools like SaaS Starters to demonstrate the value of Lists Kit
- Get backlinks by posting on other directories and sites
- Marketing long game - Try SEO, research key words, write blog posts.
- Try selling on Envato, Appsumo and other marketplaces.
I’m trying not to put too much hopes in the Twitter launch this Friday. It might end up being a flop, like Sheet2Bio. More likely it will get a few sales maybe, and then die off. A runway success feel unlikely. I don’t know why I feel so negative about my own product, but so far, I’m not getting great signals for product-market fit. I’m getting feedback but polite ones. A few tried it and didn’t get back. I’ve not seen live sites done. Maybe channel-offer fit isn’t there, where channel is my Twitter audience, and offer is a plain HTML boilerplate.
But I owe it to myself to at least launch this.
And the outcome from a Twitter launch isn’t the only thing I should measure the product’s potential against. I got to try market it in other places, to more relevant target groups.
Onwards!
Comments
Good work Jason. One thing that springs to my mind, from an SEO perspective, is that if I build a directory site, I would expect that each “item” would have it’s own page too, not just a modal popup. It would be good to be able to have domain.com/category/item1 as a page URL, and the same for tags too. Also, whats to stop me copying the demo site source code and using it?
@phaidenbauer Yeah let’s do this! 💪
@tao Thanks for the feedback! Yes I got that from beta feedback too. I made a page template for those who prefer each item to have its own page. They can also use that for category tags. Yes anyone can copy the source code, but that would be stealing as it’s meant to be for sale, so they better not get caught haha. I’m betting on customers who want to do the right thing (as I learned from selling Carrd plugins, which can technically be stolen too). Actually all types of boilerplates can’t stop people from pirating or cloning, not even the nextjs ones. So it’s not possible to prevent.
@jasonleow I’ve got a few Domains now lying around doing nothing. Some even got some code in some git repos. Reading from other creators always nudges me in a way that I should be launching something, too. Maybe writing more consistently will bring me a muse to finally get my ass of the chair 🙈