Hey Everyone!

Recently, my logo design tool, Typogram, hit 1k registered users.

It’s a big milestone for us since we are a two-person bootstrapped company with no money and mostly do organic marketing. A short time ago, we wrote a guide on what worked for us. IH has been such a helpful community. I want to share it here in case other makers find this useful. If you want more details, see the stats, feel free to check out the original post.

Background

Before we start, I would like to give you some background about my product. Typogram is a beginner friendly logo design tool for founders. Here is the timeline for Typogram’s development for reference. I think a key takeaway here is that we started launching, and tried to start developing an audience before we had a full fledged product.

  • 2021– Focus on customer discovery, product research, and content development, mini product launches
  • 2022– Launch of a pre-order landing page.
  • 2023– Public alpha launch.

For MVP and Product Validation, we tried:

  • Create Mini Product of Features Using No-Code
    We use no-code products to create mini versions of core features to test monetization. Some of the no-code tools we used: Notion, Figma, Webflow. Launch Channels: our newsletters, Twitter, IndieHackers, and product hunt.
  • Pre-Order with Landing Page
    We launched a pre-order in March 2022. At this point, the SaaS has yet to be fully developed, only the key features. We created a landing page with a demo video, offering a discounted lifetime deal on our SaaS. We wanted to test interest and monetization. Launch Channels: our newsletters, Twitter, IndieHackers, and Product Hunt

For short-term growth & traction, we tried:

Short-Term Growth & Traction

Content marketing and engineering as marketing were successful strategies. Sharing learnings and snippets of our newsletters on Reddit

  • Newsletter
    We started newsletters before having a product to build a community and find supporters. We mostly shared our startup journey and researched user interests for newsletter topics.
  • Engineering as Marketing
    We launched side projects like “Coding Font” to attract their target audience. These projects generated traffic, backlinks, and SEO benefits.
  • ​

Long-Term Growth: SEO/Organic Traffic

Targeting long-tail keywords works well

Ads and Future Launch Channels:

We didn’t invest in ads due to budget constraints. We are launching again soon. A new channel we are exploring this time: Lifetime Deals (LTD) Facebook groups. Subscribe to our newsletter to get updated learning on this!

Last Words: SaaS marketing is hard, but it is possible without money. If you feel like it, check out our logo design tool, Typogram.