I recently had this brilliant idea to spend two hours every day for the rest of the year building a tool that solves one small problem for people working on digital products. My first step was posting the idea on social media and asking what people struggle with. The response I got was surprising!
To give some context—I’m not a social media beast. I’m more of a consumer than a creator. This time, to make the project successful (and to challenge my comfort zone), I shared the post in three places:
- dev.to – I’ve had an account there for a while, though I wasn’t a regular publisher. Over time, I got around 3,000 followers, but each post usually got a few hundred views. This time, I got 33 views.
- Substack – This account is brand new, and the post was my first solo publication. It got 80 views.
- LinkedIn – I promoted the Substack post on LinkedIn. I’ve been on LinkedIn for 11 years but hadn’t posted anything until recently. This was my second post, and in a week, the message reached 450 people. Of those, 60 actually opened the Substack article.
So, my idea reached around 500 people in total. Of those, 110 opened the article, and I can confirm that at least one person read it thoroughly—I got one comment replying to my question about missing tools. That’s a total conversion rate of about 0.2%.
Another way I tried to spark engagement was direct conversation. I reached out to a group of around 160 former coworkers, asking them about the tools they miss. Three people responded, which gave me a 2% conversion rate—10 times higher than “on the Internet”! Then, in chats with three other friends, I got four new ideas—half of my total responses so far.
Lessons and next steps
These results are not great, but I didn’t have any expectations. I’m aware that marketing is tough, and I’m out of practice. I pulled back from social media a long time ago, hardly commenting or posting. I imagine the content algorithms barely recognize me. In the end, though, it was an experiment: I gathered data and learned something. That’s what experiments are for.
Bully more people personally
I’m convinced that if I ask folks directly about the struggles they face, I’ll get plenty of high-quality answers. I believe I maintain a good enough relationship with at least 50 ex-colleagues who’d help me if I reached out.
Try to reach a much broader audience
With a 0.2% conversion rate and minimal social media influence, I’d need to reach half a million people to get 1,000 answers. That’s arbitrary, but it’s a big enough sample to see patterns and decide where to focus. So, how do I get that kind of reach?
My idea is to appear in one of those popular newsletters about online product development: TLDR, sidebar.io, or Bytes. Each one has hundreds of thousands of subscribers. If I manage to get featured, I might collect hundreds of answers from people I don’t know and couldn’t reach otherwise. Of course, it won’t be easy. Just publishing a post with a survey link isn’t enough—I need to create something worthwhile.
That’s why I reserved a new domain and I'll fill it with something unique: wishihadbetter.tools. Stay tuned!
Top comments (0)