My entire marketing strategy (+ December 2021 updates)

Tony Dinh

@tdinh_me

Hello everyone! This is Tony 👋

First of all, happy new year! 🎆

I wish you and all of your loved one’s health and happiness in the new year!

This month’s issue is late because I was on vacation 🥳

I did not take a break after I quit my full-time job in September.

In December, I reached 3K MRR with Black Magic.

I finally have the confidence to take things a bit slowly, take care more of myself, and go on this vacation I really need.

So what happened in December? In this issue, I’ll write about:

Magic Sidebar’s launch stats
My entire marketing strategy for the launch
What’s next in 2022

Let’s get to it! 😄

🚀 Magic Sidebar is launched!

After 2 months of beta testing and waiting for Apple to approve the iOS app, I finally launched the latest product of Black Magic: Magic Sidebar on Product Hunt! 🥳

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

WE MADE IT!

🥇 #1 Product of the day (for the whole day)
❤️ 1,038 votes
💬 330 comments
✍️ 29 reviews
🌐 25,946 website visits
👥 431 new users (trial)
💳 4 new paid users

I'll report back in 14 days to see how many % convert!

Thank you, EVERYONE! I'm so HAPPY!!! ❤️❤️❤️ https://t.co/XGWeTWGFAu

3:21 PM - 17 Dec 2021

With the overwhelming support from you all. We have reached:

🥇 #1 Product of the Day

🥈 #2 Product of the Week

🥈 #2 Product of the Month

Thank you, everyone!

Super grateful to have your support! ❤️

📈 Launch Stats

As of now, ~17 days after the launch, here are the stats.

Before launch:

👥 1,660 active users
🤝 248 paid users
💵 $2,164 MRR

Launch day (16th Dec → 17th Dec):

👥 2,091 active users (431 new trials sign up)
🤝 252 paid users
💵 $2,228 MRR

17 days after launch (now):

👥 2,845 active users
🤝 292 paid users
💵 $3,141 MRR

I wish Paddle give me a better charts so I can zoom in around the launch period 😅

As you may notice, a huge chunk of customers come some time after the launch. That’s because I have 14-day trials, and people usually take time to assess if Black Magic is worth the purchase.

I ran the numbers for those who signed up for trials within the launch day to see how many converted after 14 days.

The conversion rate is 3.2%, which is a good conversion rate according to people on my Twitter 😄

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

So today is the end of the 14 days trial from the Black Magic's launch.

14 people out of 431 new sign-ups I have from the launch subscribed to a paid plan.

That's ~3.2% conversion rate.

This is ok, I think 🤔

8:23 PM - 30 Dec 2021

I’m more than happy to declare that this is a successful launch! It’s also my best launch ever on Product Hunt! 😸

🎡 My entire marketing strategy

Let’s just get right into it: Here is how I do marketing and all things that contributed to the success of this launch.

1. The background

Before the launch. Even before the beta program. Even further than that. I built an audience on Twitter. From this tweet, you can see that I had 13.9K followers when I started the beta program 2 months ago.

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

A completely new Twitter Web experience! ✨

Coming out soon....... https://t.co/s4BvwbtcKx

10:17 PM - 16 Oct 2021

That’s not a small audience at all, and the success of the beta program and the launch are heavily affected by the existing audience I have.

That’s what you should do, even if you don’t have any product at the moment: building an audience.

(I plan to write about my journey building an audience on Twitter at some point, this issue is already too long! – Stay tuned! 😊)

2. The free users

I have ~6,500 free users before the beta program. Most are people who use the other fun features of Black Magic like Profile Progress Bar, Real-time banner, etc.

After 2 months of beta program, the total free users was ~9,800.

Free users require a lot of resources to serve (server cost, support, etc.), but there are a lot of potentials to convert a lot of people to paid customers.

The launch announcement also helps to gather more attention/support, which is extremely valuable!

So, if possible, you should offer some free features or free tiers of your product!

3. Offer free beta & build in public

It almost feels wrong to consider this as marketing, but it actually helped me a lot during the 2 months of running the beta program!

The beta was not actually “free”, it was an invite-only beta. I ask people to reply to my tweets to get an invitation.

So you could say I traded the beta memberships for some Twitter engagements, which translates to more visibility to the product, which translates to marketing!

Here is an example:

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

Magic Sidebar now can also help you:

– Get tweet inspirations for your next tweet!
– Identify your best time to tweet
– Bookmark your favorite people to keep in touch with them

Reply "👋" below for an invite code! 😄 https://t.co/q3arkKkSCD

1:30 PM - 25 Oct 2021

This was not the only “marketing” tweet. In fact, I have a long list of 20+ tweets like this in a super long thread here. Each one shows off a feature and typically gets about 100 likes.

With this strategy, I was able to recruit a lot of beta users, gain visibility for the product even without a proper marketing landing page.

4. Things to do during the launch day

Product Hunt gives me 24 hours to do whatever I can to get as much attention to the launch as possible. Here is what I did:

Tweet! and tweet, and tweet! (there were more tweets 😂)
Sent an announcement to existing Black Magic users & subscribers
Wrote a long article on Indie Hackers (reached #1 on IH that day too!)
Ran a giveaway ($191 worth)
Announced the launch on my LinkedIn
Posted a thread on how to make the most out of Black Magic.
Told my friends in person

As you can see, that was a lot of content and activities for a 1-person army. I took a few days before the launch to prepare all the content needed.

It was unfortunate that there was a very popular Web3 product the week I launched, so I lost the #1 weekly and monthly spot. But I’m very happy nonetheless and wouldn’t change a thing if I were doing it again.

#2 is good enough for me! 😄

Can you copy this marketing strategy?

Probably.

I don’t see anything I do here that cannot be copied by others, so I think you can totally do it.

One thing that will definitely help is to have a good product and have a reach the product’s target audience. In my case, I have an audience on Twitter, and I build a product for Twitter. It’s a perfect match.

Good luck!

🥰 So, what's next for Black Magic?

My target for 2022 is to grow Black Magic to $10K MRR.

However, I will take things a bit more slowly now that I have reached profitable and have good recurring revenue.

To be honest, during the launch and the last 2 months running the beta for Magic Sidebar, I was a bit burned out. I enjoyed it, but there is no way I can continue working at that rate for a long time 😂

As they said, entrepreneurship is a marathon.

🎆 What's next for me in 2022?

BlackMagic.so is not my only product. I’m also developing DevUtils.app.

I’m a bit ashamed for not releasing a new update for it for the last 2 months 😅

In 2022, here are my priorities:

New updates for DevUtils every 2 months or so.
New features/improvements for Black Magic every week (it’s easier to iterate more frequent for web app/SaaS).
Doing marketing in between.
Tweeting and sharing on my Twitter and this newsletter.
Chilling

I have a long list of items in my backlog for both products and I don’t think I will ever run out of things to do for both of them!

Stay tuned for a new update for DevUtils in January! 🥳

❤️ That's all for now!

I hope you learned a thing or two!

If you like what you read here, please share it with your friends. I will greatly appreciate it!

Until next time! 👊

Tony

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Tony Dinh @tdinh_me

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My entire marketing strategy (+ December 2021 updates)

Older messages

$322 → $2K MRR in 60 days by building in public

My Best Month Ever: $23,109 revenue (+ November 2021 updates)

Just two things

I turned down a $40,000 cash offer. Here is how and why.

Oct 2021 Updates: Vietnam, DevUtils 1.12, and Magic Sidebar ✨

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