I just spent the last five days helping a B2C app launch.

Well, it has been launched before, let’s just say, we relaunched it.

Here are the stats:

🗸 400+ new community members

🗸 76 new signups from 28 countries

🗸 45 onboarding completed

🗸 3 bugs reported

🗸 Marketing budget: $0

You may or may not think anything of these numbers, they are probably not remarkable by any standards. But here's the context:

The app has been launched before with no takers. It had six registered users - four internal team members for testing purposes and two random strangers who never bothered to verify their email let alone complete the onboarding steps. We've just rejuvenated a dead app.

We made no changes in the product.

It’s all a marketing play.

All between August 28 and September 1 (yes, I threw in my Sunday).

✅If you're curious kind, I'm going to let you in on a secretive qualitative insight:

⚙️ New users reported bugs, worked with us to resolve them, and then went back to complete the onboarding.

💡What kind of signal is this?

Repeat the playbook enough to get about 500 active users and voila, you have a mild PMF and an investment-worthy business proposition!

My strategy?

1. Find a cause to rally people around.

2. Position the app in between.

Key challenges

#1 Audience

The target audience for this product is not a homogenous group of people based on demographics, it's rather based on behavioral signals. Thus it was not possible to find them together in one place, unlike, for example, groups like doctors, architects, salespeople, yoga lovers, etc.

A subset of this audience is part of a few online communities but most of them are scattered all over.

#2 User-fit and Budget

The team is wary of acquiring users via paid ads. They have worked with Facebook ad agencies before for a similar product, who promised new users and to their credit, brought about 60% of the promised volume of users. But those were bad-fit users - never understood the product, never used it, did not contribute to product improvement, and derailed the whole project.

With this context, I have set out to build an organic growth engine (organic as in without using paid ads, not content marketing) with the following goals:

1. Attract only good-fit users

2. Get them to communicate with the team

3. Turn new signups into daily active users

I've drawn this quick diagram of the growth engine for you:

Let's dig into the details:

#1 Acquisition

I've zeroed down on a cause to rally people around and it forms the basis of the messaging. It goes perfectly with the product.

🕶️ Fun fact: The cause is an afterthought, a marketing play even though the product is a vertical SaaS. 🤔

🕶️ Examples of a cause: save earth, invest well, build wealth, raise kids well, save culture, live in nature etc. (Should align with your product)

I have made a list of different places on the internet where I can potentially find good-fit users. The message varies slightly for each audience subset but its meaning remains the same.

Each subset-message combination is performing differently and I am iterating in real time.

#2 Get them talking

I've put together a landing page that talks about how we are going to help them with the cause. It details the exact process and the steps they have to take. At the end, I have added links to the community and the app along with one-liners on how joining each helps them with the cause.

🕶️ Fun fact: The landing page is just a Google doc.🫢

With this flow, I'm attracting about 60-100 new members to the community per day (a Discord server).

Now, most communities face one of these two problems:

1. Everyone is too uptight, no one speaks a word and all messages come from the admins.

2. It gets too informal, people talk all kinds of sh*t, and there is no purpose, no clear path to the next stage.

We are avoiding both of these situations with clear 'next steps', and a balance between 'broadcast-only' and 'open' channels.

Result? People are engaging in contextual conversation, sharing ideas, supporting each other as well as following the plan set by the group admins.

This has opened an opportunity for us to plug the product into the overall workflow and promote it fair and square.

#3 Daily active users

The way the product is designed, there is a bit of essential onboarding (8 steps) before users can actively use it. On the first day (August 28), only one new user completed the onboarding. That was alarming. So I spent a few hours writing a five-day onboarding email sequence, handholding them through the onboarding. The biggest benefit of it till now has been a notable increase in email verification rates. As for the rest of the onboarding, we are pushing it via community.

Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed!

Please leave a review of this newsletter on Product Hunt and help me build the profile for a near-future launch.

Review the Newsletter 🤝

Until next time

Ankur Tiwari

Founder, Thoughtlytics

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