How I Gained the First 1100 Users for my AI-SaaS Tool

Hey there, fellow builders and makers! I’m super excited to share with you the story of how I gained my first 1100 users for PinkLion, an AI-based copilot for your investments. As a passionate builder myself, I know firsthand how difficult it can be to get a product off the ground, especially in a crowded space like the finance industry.

Investing in the stock and crypto market can be overwhelming, with so many factors to consider and so much information to keep track of. That’s where PinkLion comes in. Our AI collects and reasons on market data to help investors make informed decisions and take control of their investments.

Building a product is not everything

Creating a great product is only half the battle. You need to get your product in front of potential users, and that’s where our journey begins.

After having an initial working prototype we started with small social media ads, but the results were underwhelming. The main reason was probably that I didn’t yet know how our target audience looks like.

In the past, I have published a couple of articles on Medium in the machine learning space, which I really enjoyed. Sharing my unique Data Scientist insights felt always like a good way to give back to the community. Expanding on this thought, we decided to try publishing additional articles on Medium. We knew that the Medium community was highly engaged and interested in finance and tech, so we thought it could be a great way to get exposure for our product.

We started by publishing articles that highlighted the capabilities of our AI, such as “Extract State-of-the-Art Insights from every Piece of Text” and “How to Predict Financial News Sentiment with a Transformer.” These articles quickly gained traction and helped us gain first users.

The first Traction

As we continued to publish more articles, my old article published over a year ago started gaining a steady stream of traffic, too. Articles like “How I Used Data Science to Establish 3 Consistent Streams of Income” and “Stock predictions with state-of-the-art Transformer and Time Embeddings” seemed to resonate with our readers. This drove additional traffic to our product. Here is a month-by-month overview of how many views our articles received.

So, if you’re an indie hacker struggling to get your product noticed, don’t be afraid to try new things and experiment with different marketing strategies. You never know what might work until you try!

Publishing on Medium

I know that getting the word out about PinkLion would be critical to its success. While we have a product that is getting better and better each month, we needed to make sure people knew about it.

Our approach to publishing on Medium was simple: create high-quality content that our target audience would find useful and informative as well as content that also excites us and falls into our area of expertise. Here are the seven articles that I published on Medium, along with the dates they were published:

1. Extract State-of-the-Art Insights from every Piece of Text, published on 2022–07–01
2. How to Predict Financial News Sentiment with a Transformer, published on 2022–07–05
3. How I Used Data Science to Establish 3 Consistent Streams of Income, published on 2022–07–22
4. Stock predictions with state-of-the-art Transformer and Time Embeddings, published on 2022–08–15
5. The beginning of a deep learning trading bot — 95% accuracy is not enough, published on 2022–08–21
6. 15 Free Tools to Bootstrap Your Business End-to-End, published on 2022–11–16
7. Analyzing the Bitcoin Trend with Monte Carlo Simulations, published on 2023–02–05

Each of these articles tackled a different topic related to investing, data science, or entrepreneurship. We wanted to create content that would be useful to our target audience by sharing our knowledge, we hoped to build trust with our readers.

When it came to creating the articles, we made sure to use a conversational tone that would be easy for our readers to understand. We also made sure to include plenty of visuals, such as charts and graphs, to help illustrate our points. This made our articles which have heavy on Data Science topics easier to digest, more engaging, and helped to keep our readers’ attention.

Publishing on Medium was a great way to gather first impressions on what content resonates well with certain audiences. By creating content that our target audience found useful and informative, we were able to attract a following and gain our first 1100 users within a couple of months.

Results and Analysis — The Numbers

After publishing 7 articles on Medium, we saw a significant increase in traffic to our website and user sign-ups for PinkLion. In total, we gained our first 1100 users within a span of nine and half months. Here’s a breakdown of our results.

First, let’s take a look at our Medium stats. Our articles received a total of over 69,400 views, with an average of 9,914 views per article. We also had around 2,000 claps, indicating high engagement from the Medium community.

But what we were really interested in was how these Medium readers translated into actual users for PinkLion. Using Google Analytics, we were able to track the source of our website traffic and analyze user behavior.

We found that a good portion of our website traffic (about 40%) came from Medium, with the remaining traffic coming from social media, search engines, and direct traffic. This confirmed our hypothesis that Medium would be a great way to get exposure for our product.

As you can see on the chart, a couple of articles accelerated our user growth more than others. Especially the article “How I Used Data Science to Establish 3 Consistent Streams of Income”, published on 2022–07–22 forwarded significant amounts of traffic to our PinkLion website.

After publishing articles last and this year it is very noticeable that after 1–2 weeks the traffic that an article gets on Medium is deteriorating significantly, and stays at a low level afterward. This means that Medium is only a viable traffic source for your product if you keep posting content.

In terms of user behavior, we saw that Medium readers were highly engaged and interested in our product with an average engagement rate of roughly 70%. On average, they spent over 2 minutes on our website and visited multiple pages. In addition, we noticed that the engagement time increased in recent months, which gives us reasons to believe that the released product updates are adding value to our users.

The high engagement is also reflecting itself in the number of signups which is substantial for the amount of website traffic. (see the graph below)

Of the Medium readers who visited our website, we saw an outstanding sign-up conversion rate of around 21%. Such a high conversion rate which is even more impressive for a cold audience who had no prior knowledge of our product makes us confident that we should expand your marketing efforts to additional channels with a similar audience, which in contrast to Medium can be automated to a higher degree.

We also noticed a few interesting trends in our user data. We saw that the majority of our users were located in the United States, followed by Germany, Italy, India, and the United Kingdom. This gave us valuable insights into where our target audience was located and where we could focus our marketing efforts in the future.

Conclusion

Overall, we were extremely pleased with the results of our Medium campaign. But our journey doesn’t stop here. As product developers, we know that growth is an ongoing process, and we’re constantly experimenting with new marketing strategies to reach even more users. We’re currently exploring partnerships with finance and investing influencers, as well as experimenting again with targeted ads on social media.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned on this journey, it’s the importance of being agile and willing to try new things. As a small bootstrapped team, we don’t have the luxury of massive marketing budgets or established brand recognition. But what we do have is the ability to experiment, iterate, and pivot until we find what works. And that’s exactly what we’ll continue to do as we strive towards even greater growth for PinkLion.

💡💡💡If any of you has good ideas for other marketing activities and channels, please let us know we are happy to always improve.💡💡💡

I hope the presented insights were helpful for some of you. If you still have some time to spare feel free to check out PinkLion and leave us some feedback 😋.