Solo founders: what marketing actually moved the needle for you?
by•
I build my app alone after my day job, with no ad budget. So far the only thing that really worked for me is writing short, personal posts on Threads. One story about my family got over 300k views and brought more signups than everything else combined. Posts that explain features barely get noticed.
But I can't tell if that was luck or something I can repeat.
What's worked best for you as a solo founder? Paid ads, content, communities, cold outreach, something else? And what did you try that turned out to be a waste of time?
19 views
Replies
Honestly the waste is easier for me to name than the win. About $190 of social ads sent people to a web checkout: roughly 230 opened the payment form and 0 paid, largely because the ad opened inside the social app's own browser, where there was no saved wallet. And search ads on the generic keyword brought mostly teenagers making a song for themselves, while every payer so far has been 35 or older. Both taught me what your Threads post suggests too: who the message reaches matters more than how many. A family story reaching 300k is a real signal, I'd post a few more of the same kind before calling it luck.
Honestly, cold email, by a mile.
That's how I got my first customers. But what really worked was cold emailing potential affiliates instead of customers. That's how I got my first few affiliates, and one good affiliate keeps sending you customers, so it was a way better use of my time.
I've tried loads of other stuff too, like Facebook ads and Google Ads. I've spent thousands on them over the years with very little to show for it, and never got them working in a way that scaled.
SEO works too, but it takes ages to kick in. So when I launched, I used cold email to land the first customers and get things moving, and worked on SEO in the background the whole time. Cold email basically filled the gap while SEO caught up.
If you've got no budget, I'd pair something quick and hands-on like cold outreach with something that builds over time like SEO or content.
David, I wouldn't put the family post down to luck. personal stories beat feature posts for me every time too, you just won't hit 300k on each one, so it's about doing them often enough. biggest waste for me was the website, thousands of visitors and hardly any signups. what actually paid was dming about 20 people a day who'd already been commenting on posts from apps similar to mine, since they'd shown they cared about the problem before I ever messaged them.