Me (tech person) and my frined (tech person as well) built a AI app, the app works as follows: you upload about a dozen selfies and our app geenrate 150 proffesional looking headshots for linkedin, insta, fb and etc.
We have tested this app on our friend and had a public free trial.
Over all we had a log of positive feedback and happy users who have changed their profile pic.
Now we are launching our product it as paid serice (price $19).

There are 2 questions:

  1. Is the anything that we can do to attract our customers besides ads ans SEO?
  2. We have competitors (5 web sites and 2 apps) is there a method to find out how do they do marketing?
  • GarlicAdventure33@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Yeah, there’s lots of options. I found them by googling “Low cost marketing for startups”, too many ideas to repeat here. One that I’d recommend is ProductHunt.

    Would also recommend you talk to folks you know about the idea, especially if they’re in your target demographic. That’s a great way to get early feedback and adjust your strategy/messaging to match.

  • rarecowchungus@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    To answer your questions:

    1. Yes, you could absolutely go the cold outreach route. I think you have to be comfortable getting a lot of rejections and do a good job of qualifying leads. There are both paid and free options that would make sense IMO: LinkedIn In-Mail can be highly targeted but is also wildly expensive. You could also use a tool like Apollo.io. IMO the downside of cold outreach for a B2C product is that it feels kind of gross.

    2. There are tools that scrape ads and then aggregate them based on the advertiser. They are not free though and they can be pricey.
      The exception would be the Facebook Ads Library. Moat used to have a free ad search but it looks like Oracle got rid of it after they acquired the company. You could also try SEMRush which I believe has some functionality for free.

    As an aside, what justifies your current pricing? Is your tool $19 better than the free options I was able to find?: https://www.lightxeditor.com/photo-editing/linkedin-profile-picture-maker/

    • Ilyushka@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Ok. Thank you for the answer. It was really helpful. I’ll try to go with cold outreach, many answers suggest it. It feels a bit uncomfortable. But I hope I get used to it.

      BTW Our price of $19 is median price of our competitors (we have a bunch of them). I think it’s an “ok” starting point. We use computitional heavy method, and this allows us to achieve much better quality than free solutions. None of our direct competitors who use the same approach have free trial:)

  • fapp1337@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago
    1. read „Traction“ by Gabriel Weinberg
    2. ask them. Or research (meta ad library etc.)
  • BouRock@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    It is all about product. For example, as far as I understand from your product it requires a lot of social media marketing. Try some influencers or some popular pages. Youtubers and Instegrammers are best. I dont know top much about Tictoc types but I propbably will work too. However, why would I pay monthly 19 usd for a photo? Is it that good?

    • Ilyushka@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Thank you for info!

      The reasoning behind such prices are following:

      1. We have a bunch of competitors with prices ranging from $7 to $50 per photo shoot. And some of the have 100k+ in monthly revenue according to SensorTower. The most successful case in this area was https://land.prisma-ai.com/magic-avatars (not our direct competitor)

      2. It seems that people are ready to pay for professional photos, in that case you pay money to the photographer, spend 5-6 hours and get 3-10 good looking photos. Our deal - you pay $19 and get 150 photos, not getting from your couch, from there you will ideally pick same 3-10 photos. Seems reasonable deal:)