⚡ IL - Swipe File / 7 ways to build virality into your product

Today I got my hands on a great resource (I already previewed it), which will help a lot of our readers. It's called Swipe - a collection of conversion, signups, and revenue strategies for SaaS and bootstrappers.

Gene (the maker) launched Swipe File on Product Hunt 3 days ago and sold 94 copies. I reached out to Gene to see if he could cut us a deal and he did.

The thing is, there are only 6 copies left in the first price tier, then it doubles in price. My guess is they will be gone within 24 hours. If you want to grab a copy before the price doubles, follow this link and use code "letters25" on checkout to get additional 25% discount.

This might be old news to most of you, but if you link to the intents page, twitter will popup a 'Follow' button that should make it more likely for people to actually follow you. Check it in the action here

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1. Create a Two-Sided Reward
Create an incentive for initial users to invite their friends to use your product. Paypal and Dropbox are 2 companies that did this extremely well. Paypal offered $'s for every person you helped sign up to their platform. Dropbox offered extra storage for every new member you helped bring into their storage service.

2. Appeal to Users' Vanity
Appealing to a users' sense of vanity and competitiveness encourages them to spend more time using your product or service. Indie Hackers does this well by allowing users to accrue points. Linkedin also did this well in the early days by showing the number of connections you had front and center on your profile. This incentivized users to start thinking about inviting more people to connect.

3. Build for Collaboration
Build for collaboration between users. Apps like Google docs allow you to "Share" files for collaboration purposes. Slack allows you to "invite people" to new workspaces.

4. Embedding
Create the ability for others to embed your product within your website. This is especially true if you are building products with user-generated content. Twitter does this well for embedding tweets and news. Stripe and Gumroad also do a great job of this allowing users to embed payment widgets within their websites.

5. Incorporate Social Sharing
If your products produce artifacts from user-generated content, you should incorporate social sharing that can link back to your product.

6. Artifacts Shared via Messaging
Utilize things like SMS and text sharing as a viral opportunity. When using Lyft for example, users can click a “Send ETA” button which is actually a viral feature. Pressing it prompts the user to send a tracking URL to another person, which in turn spreads the word about Lyft.

7. Signatures
Attach promotional signatures to all messages that are sent relating to your product or service. You can create your own signature for Free using the HubSpot email signature generator. Hotmail’s signature line at the end of every email helped them grow from 20k users to 1.5M users over the course of 4 months in the early days.

• Customer DOES NOT give a damn about your programming language - you do.
• You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
• Twint is an advanced Twitter scraping tool written in Python that allows for scraping Tweets from Twitter profiles without using Twitter's API. It utilizes Twitter's search operators to let you scrape Tweets from specific users, scrape Tweets relating to certain topics, hashtags & trends, or sort out sensitive information from Tweets like e-mail and phone numbers.
• Link to Text Fragment (by Google) is a chrome extension that allows creating a special link to the currently selected text on a page via the context menu
• Open Startup List - startups that publicly share visitor analytics, marketing experiments - even revenue.
• Airtable Database of 140+ (and growing) tools and services. Filter them by purpose and price to find useful tools and services!

Please go through all of them. You will discover many new places to post your startup.

• 100+ Places to Launch/Share your Product
• Awesome visibility (Github)
• List of 100+ startup directories you can submit your business
• 18-best-places-to-promote-your-startup-for-virtually-nothing
• 152+ directories to submit your startup

P.S By the end of 2020, I will make a single huge list by collecting stuff from every resource I can find.

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