Hello everyone! I'm Anton Viborniy and in this article, I'll tell you how we gathered subscribers before the making of the product. When a startup has just been created, the founders don't know exactly what the users need. And there are some hypotheses that need to be tested.
To test hypotheses, you need users. To attract users, you need money. A standard startup doesn't have money for advertising, since all the money goes to development. So, we have to find ways to make promotions for free.
Our startup Apiway.ai operates in the B2B segment. We help people integrate different software for free in two clicks without programming. Our target audience is digital marketers and digital entrepreneurs. We understood that digital services with which we plan to integrate have our audience. Also, business schools have.
We decided to make joint online conferences on
marketing automation.To the first conference, we invited 6 speakers in this field. Each speaker represented a business academy or digital service. They have their own subscriber base. The condition for participation in the conference was to make a newsletter on their own database. Thus, we got free registration, and speakers performed for free on someone else's audience. It's beneficial to everyone.
To increase the number of registrations, we involved information partners. The conditions are the same: newsletter through the base, post on social networks and the announcement in the blog. But here it's important to understand the "weight category" of the info partner. Big guys like AmoCRM, Bitrix, Tilda won't make the newsletter. The maximum that they can do is to tell about you somewhere on social networks. But there were info partners who simply included the announcement of our event in their newsletter. For example, Ecwid company informed about us in a blog and newsletter. We got 40 registrations just like that. Thank them very much for that.
That's how the email looked like: