Marketing is a crucial part of any business. Without marketing no matter how great the product is, it cannot survive. Businesses with a bunch of customers must have done marketing in form of word-of-mouth or a simple chat. When a business is built with enormous money or with a fan base, it’s a lot easier to acquire a new audience. Businesses that are bootstrapped, and run by solo entrepreneurs usually struggle to push their products in a wide range. From our introduction post, it should be pretty evident that we were on a mission to build a system for managing the marketing side of products. Although there are a plethora of tools available on the internet for similar purposes, our goal is to build a tool to manage more than one project developed by indie hackers and small businesses who struggle to manage their product’s market. After quite a research we have listed a few options that could help you market your software at a very minimal or no budget.

1. SEO

Search Engine Marketing (SEO) should be the primary source of marketing a product if you are without a budget. Many small businesses underestimate the power of SEO. It starts with tweaking the product website with the right keywords and other functionalities so that you get the best impression of the project. Some websites, for example, clearly demonstrate the product’s features in a list and also with a detailed description of each and every functionality. Though it could look a bit elaborate, it could boost your traffic through search engines. Invest quite a time in designing your product’s website with a sharp eye. Look at the product competitor’s website. See what, how and why they emphasise certain features or content. This should really be a starting point for getting a product out there.

2. Joining forums

Forums are a great way to share your product. They help you understand and brainstorm more about the features and things one builds. Moreover, if you are keen on getting a few customers onboard, they are the way to go forward. There are lots of communities for SAAS products. As HelloKea is a SAAS product, I would like to share some online forums and communities in which I would personally share and get feedback. All these are generally a free way to promote SAAS products and get initial customers.

1. Reddit - A Subreddit for discussions on software as a service and other small business online forum
2. SAAStr - Community for sharing ideas and views about startups and SAAS product
3. Indiehackers - A Community for indiehackers. Online community for small and indie products
4. Roast My Startup - Another online Reddit sub-forum for discussing and commenting on your product.

There are also a few directories where you could post more about your product.

5. Robingood - Post your startup or product on these websites to get discovered.
6. Startup Videos - Videos are a clear way to share knowledge on services
7. Youtube - Post more online videos on documentation and new features
8. Startup Collections - A directory on a list of SAAS products

Publishing content could really help people discover and understand products. And, they are also a way for creating more backlinks which internally is SEO.

3. Blogging with excellent content

One of the most effective ways of marketing is creating exceptional essays and posts that intrigue end users. Generally creating a user base through writing interesting posts could naturally convert to a strong user/fan base. Most businesses which lack resources for producing content use a technique called evergreen content. These are posts which could stand in test of time and has a very minor change required. A good example is writing a classic post on a science article. These contents rarely change and could help boost traffic for a long period of time.

4. Social Media

Social media marketing is popular for quite some time. They are the easiest ways for mingling with users and communities in general. Sharing useful related content and engaging with users would help to build not just a loyal follower count but also a loyal customer base. In our introduction post, we did mention building a tool for social communication and we are working hard. Try engaging with all users on different social media platforms. At times, these platforms behave more like helpdesk/support systems in scenarios where a query needs to be addressed quickly.

5. Email Newsletter

Newsletters are classic in providing updates on things that are happening in general with products, companies, and features. These are the ways to help you understand your customer base better. People who are shy on social media usually use this for providing feedback by replying to emails. And, this happened to us lots of times. Regularly sending emails to a bunch of people with interesting content related to the product could help build a faithful base. There are different types of newsletters one can use to promote content. Two types are more than enough for starters. First and foremost is the newsletter for providing updates. The other one is building a newsletter on product tips. The second one is more like tutorials. Whenever new subscribers opt for this newsletter, they receive emails from the start rather than the latest ones.

6. Focus on niche markets - initially

When someone starts a business, they typically have a grand vision for their business. In most cases, it could be expensive to market and capture all the dreams. In scenarios like that it could be better to stick to the main market in which one believes their product could be more successful. This would leverage the effort to push something to market. Capturing the first few customers is always a bit of an issue for more startups. Most small businesses fail due to a reliable customer base. Join online forums and communities on a niche market to test and push your product. They could be beneficial in tuning the product for a wider audience. Reddit and Facebook groups are a way to promote business without a hassle.

We are working so hard to make the product work for indie hackers and small businesses. Our first focus is to build a product with proper functionality. We did build a changelog functionality first to start off. After a few responses from our users, we started focusing on the helpdesk email system. We will be writing more on this in our future posts. As I am the only software developer to work on the system, things will be a bit slower but steadier. Once we have a basic version ready, we are going to focus more on the above-listed points to get a sustainable user base from marketing.

Most customer support systems have a great functionality called Tickets. Tickets are the general term used in customer support software for managing communication between customers and the company.  It’s a pretty decent way of managing the enquiries from the customers. And, most businesses are accustomed to the way ticketing works. When choosing a supporting tool for handling enquiries, it’s often important to look for more than a ticketing feature. Things get harder when a business or startup starts thinking of every query as a ticket. People using your product often expect a reply from a person or team in the company in an interactive way.

Choosing your swiss army knife

For budding entrepreneurs and small/medium size businesses, it’s common for an employee to wear more than one hat. They could be involved in building the system, managing support & handling customer enquiries. It’s literally hard to reply to a sales pitch and product support. Would you? If you consider a sale or a new customer as a ticket, there is a very high chance of losing a potential buyer. Tickets are designed to suit very well for supporting product queries. A plain old inbox style of email reply is what is used for responding to a new client. Take indie developers as an example. There could be 2-3 team members handling all the work from building/marketing/sales. Switching contexts with different applications could be tedious. HelloKea could rescue you from that.

Tickets & Classic inbox layouts for email accounts

We are building an inbox layout that suits multiple email accounts. The key thing about the design is the behaviour of the email accounts. When you select an email account to answer sales or other queries which don’t fall under the ticketing genre, the UI behaves automatically to a classic inbox design that you are familiar with.

As you can see in the above image, a classic inbox style is shown on page one and the ticketing style is shown on page 2. You could see the list of email accounts created. The accounts shown are based on the permission of the team members. The User Interface (UI) changes dynamically based on the type of account selected. If the selected account is a team account, the ticketing option UI is automatically shown. Based on the selected permission, one can provide perform certain operations. Eg: Customer support emails could be shared among the team to answer their requests.

On the other hand, email accounts like  [email protected] or [email protected] are generally used for querying about the products or the company. For these accounts, a classic email style would give us most of the functionality of an email client. Though we haven’t decided whether these accounts could be converted to a team account in the future, we are brainstorming.

Final thoughts

In our first introduction post, I mentioned the support for social networks and scheduling posts. I am investing most of the time in whether to integrate social network communication in the same UI. But for now, we have finalized releasing the first version with full support for email accounts and shared inbox functionality. Also, with the diagram, you could see that we are in the early stages of deciding on our UX. Things can change over a period of time. This post is to share our journey on product updates and development.

Small businesses often need a way to communicate with their customers. It’s no doubt that email is proven to be one of the best ways of communication. Most small businesses use alias email accounts to forward emails to one single account for simplicity. Things could get into chaos when your team grows.

Initial running cost

In any business, it’s always better to have multiple email accounts to address certain parts of your operations. A classic example is having one for sales, service, support and so on. If you are starting this as a side project or with a very low investment, it’s quite hard to pay a monthly fee for email accounts and a support system. As many entrepreneurs forget, it takes at least 2-3 years for a business to become profitable. Keeping the operating costs low during the beginning stage is crucial. For solo founders and people bootstrapping their businesses, it’s wise not to be a spendthrift. Soon we will be posting a blog post on the running cost of our product.

Understanding the pain of indie hackers and startups

Hellokea is still in its initial stage of onboarding customers. We, as a company, know the pain of running a business during its first phase of building and marketing. This is exactly the reason why we keep our costs low. We believe startups and indie hackers are in the same boat. Building a successful SAAS business for fun and profit is hard, and we are trying to help businesses to make their communication with their customers and product marketing a lot easier.

Startups could have multiple products, which internally have multiple email accounts for management. The same goes true with indie hackers who build side projects. With this in mind, Hellokea tends to have a clear distinction for all your products in a single account. This gives more flexibility and ease of use.

Building a SAAS product has never been this easier with plenty of open-source software, community, and software libraries. Every year it gets better for individual developers to create new products, thanks to web frameworks and tools. The issue with most SAAS products is marketing them. Think of an individual developer creating software from scratch and trying to sell it. As the whole market is flooded with SAAS products with cheaper plans, it’s hard to sell unless there is something unique about the product. But, there are also copy-cat products that are being sold with huge marketing and improvisation. Over some time, people forget the original one as the new ones are better and more user-friendly. To achieve this state, companies and businesses put a tremendous amount of their initial investments and energy into marketing and customer support.

Can you survive the global competition?

Selling a product with large banners and TV adverts is old and expensive. An indie developer cannot afford or imagine such a thing without financial backing. Given the rise of digital advertising through different social media platforms and content marketing, it feels feasible to push your product. As the global market is expanding on the software front, the rise of new competitors with investors’ backing would smash adverts in any form. Though it’s not impossible, it is a hard task. The secret to beating them is with the right tools and strategies. Plan a significant amount of time for building your network and marketing strategies. Remember, the good thing with indie developers is flexibility and time. All you need to do is to utilize and prioritize your time when building a product.

Have you thought of customer support?

Every indie developer should acknowledge the fact that their project/product is not only used by the software developer but also by common people who have no idea about how most of the software work. People who are not tech-savvies are going to be your large user base, and they need proper documentation, videos and above all email support. A key to a loyal base is the ability to reply to them in a swift and quicker way. It is an essential thing to handle all customer enquiries (including the ones you feel silly about) with an appropriate response. It might seem overwhelming initially, but with the correct tools, you could automate the replies and answers.

Rise of social-media marketing

Whether you are socially active in real life, social networks could help boost your productivity. It also helps you understand the users’ views and add followers to your product page which internally helps your reputation. I really don’t want to have a blog with SEO-based topics. ‘HelloKea’ is designed for handling all social media interactions to some extent. Features that could assist in handling all your communication and management related to the projects. As there are heaps of social networks, I am thinking of integrating them one by one in Hellokea. The first and foremost is Twitter integration. Facebook pages, Google pages and Instagram are a few networks planned for the future.

Content Marketing

Content marketing has a huge role to play in your product reach. They do let people understand the ongoing development and the prices at some point. Moreover, content marketing is widely used to reach through search engines.

Writing is one of the best ways to explain your product to a wide audience. Customers do follow regular updates through your blog. And, it does help your build your skills in writing. Clear writing could provide a way for you to analyse the product defects.

Product releases

Have you ever logged your product progress? Usually, versions are used to track and add changes to the product. This is common among software developers when building a product. But, there should also be a way to track the changes and notify your customers about the progress you have made. In Hellokea, I am thinking of an option to handle the version and release progress. These releases should be shown in some form to your users to know about the updates.

As of now, these are the items that are planned for the release of version 1.0 in Hellokea:

• Option to create multiple products
• Twitter integration
• Email support and inbox for handling customer email enquiries
• Editor for composing tweets and threads
• User roles and permissions for managing teams

When these features are provided for each and every product/project, it would be a lot easier to manage. Team management would be an apt feature when the project matures.