Ways to promote for free/ with low budget
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Hey ProductHunters! Your advice is needed
As a small startup team (2 people) with no extra budget, we're doing our best to promote the product in all the possible free ways: content marketing/SMM on Linkedin, Instagram, TikTok, joining product listings and running some email campaigns. It has some outcome but all of these approaches are mainly for long-term results.
Young companies' owners and other professionals, what strategies do you use for low-cost promotion? Is it worth investing in Google ads/ Ig ads?
Thanks!
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What worked for me partially is treating directory submissions as an actual channel with a process instead of something you do once in an afternoon.
I'm solo with no ad budget either. Over the last ten days I've submitted my product to 147 launch platforms. 26 listings are live, 35 have a scheduled launch date, and the rest are sitting in review queues. Nothing was paid for.
Honest version of the results, because I think that's more useful than a success story:
Directories do not send you users. Almost none of that traffic converts. What they send is indexation, a handful of backlinks, and occasionally a newsletter with real reach behind it. Treat it as an SEO and discovery play with a 2-3 month payoff, not a launch tactic.
Only about 40% of the live links were dofollow. Plenty of platforms make the link conditional: a top-3 finish on your launch day or keeping their badge on your site forever. 87 of my submissions required putting a badge up.
Decide up front whether you're willing to maintain that.
Four platforms that were advertised as free had quietly become paid by the time I filled the form. Pricing pages lie more than anything else on these sites. You only find out at the last button.
I deliberately did not spend time on the big ones. Product Hunt, Show HN, Indie Hackers, Uneed are all filled out and parked, because they're one-shot and worth nothing without an audience ready that morning. Do the small ones first as practice, then fire those when you have people to rally.
On ads: I haven't spent a cent yet, and at the pre-traction stage, I don't think Google or IG ads answer the question you actually have. They buy you clicks, not the knowledge of who your product is for. Cheaper experiment: get findable, then read which listings actually produce a signup.
The tracking spreadsheet I kept for all this turned into the product I'm working on now (submitmap.com), so at minimum, write down what each platform demanded. That record is worth more than any single listing.