Hey,
Thank you for taking the time to read, and for your potential advice.
In the case of a digital product MVP, without funding, how do you generate relevant traffic without breaking the bank (as you don’t want to over-invest from the get-go)?
For context, here’s what I know about how to generate traffic:

  • Personal network
    • Pros: Free, and quick exposure
    • Con’s: One trick poney, Usually a low match in terms of potential customers
  • Virality
    • Pros: Awesome, free, recurrent
    • Con’s: Completely out of your control or what you can do in early stages
  • MVP sharing spaces
    • Pros: Free, Wide exposure
    • Cons: Very low relevancy, I feel like all of the known MVP-sharing space is filled at 99% with people sharing their own MVPs. Everyone wants to talk, no one wants to listen.
  • SEO:
    • Pros: Long-term traffic building
    • Cons: It takes such a long time, has no guarantee, and doubtful future with incoming AI search engines. Also is a debatably too big investment when just testing the water with an MVP.
  • Ads:
    • Pros: Effective, potentially more relevant, Quick
    • Cons: Costly, can take a while to fine-tune for good targeting/costs.

In my case it’s not a “have been working on it for 3 years mvp”, it’s literally a 2-week free product, put three links on a couple of subreddits and I am getting a new user a day. My current plan would be to ask users to register their email if they are interested in a paid pro version, put a small amount of $ into ads, and only continue and build the pro version if I can get 100 registered interest.

But I wanted to know what is your usual process for this, how do you handle it? I would love to hear from people who have serially launched digital products, if you have a pattern in how you do things, regardless of the industry for the product.

And as a related question, are there things you can do as a non-marketer person to build up coverage in a way that doesn’t involve throwing money at it and that is value-adding, ethical, and non-spammy? I am happy to spend some time and energy, I am just not sure how to go at it.

Thank you again, and have a fantastic day!