We tried growing in a crowded market (first 1,000 users)
Tags: webdev, beginners, productivity
Published: 2022-11-03 18:47:40

It is not easy to build a successful company. It needs a lot of time and resources. 

The key point is that it is not just about putting together a great product, but also about having an effective marketing strategy (especially in a crowded market).

Our product, [KyotoUI](http://kyotoui.com/), is a high-conversion landing page builder inside Figma. It took approximately 3 months to put together, and today we have a good few thousand users (all in less than 3 weeks).

The first step in achieving success with growth hacking is understanding that there are different channels available for marketing and you have to choose which one fits your business best.

The following is a breakdown of the channels we have used to grow [KyotoUI](http://kyotoui.com/) so far, and the truth is we could've done much better, but here it is.

Reddit

The first channel we will talk about is Reddit, which has been proven as an effective method for getting traffic and users for your product or service.

To promote your product on Reddit, you need to make sure that you know what subreddits are relevant to your business and try submitting links related to your content on these subreddits. This way people who are interested in these topics will be able to find out about your product or service and start using it themselves.

For us this was quite straightforward since this is a product created for developers and designers. I have posted across all these subreddits: /r/web_design, /r/html5, /r/frontend, /r/webdev etc. 

Unfortunately, some of them were removed by moderators. In order to avoid this, I would suggest being clear and offer more value to those specific audiences that you wish to target.

Hacker News

Hacker News is a news aggregation site that is popular among tech enthusiasts and early adopters. It has an active user base of 1 million people who are always looking for new technologies or products to try out.
Hacker news can be great to promote your product if you have created something innovative and valuable enough to get their attention. The key here is being creative with your marketing strategy and finding ways to get on the front page of Hacker News by submitting links in relevant threads, commenting on other posts, or mentioning your product in discussions.

Figma Community

Figma has a community of over 2 million members, mostly designers as you've guessed. This was perfect for us since it's a product intended for them. 
There are many ways you can grow using Figma’s community, for instance you could ask for feedback on your designs, and share your work with others, or simply just post a free version of your product on the marketplace.

PRO TIP: Add a call-to-action inside your Figma file in order to convert users to the Paid Version.

Use your social network

If you want to grow your product, you need to start by posting on your own social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Posting on these platforms will help you reach more people who might be interested in your product.
What we did besides posting on our own accounts was to make use of facebook groups, slack channels, that are related to our audience (figma/ux/ui).

ProductHunt launch

Getting featured on Product Hunt can be a game-changer for your startup, but it’s not easy to do so. It takes hard work and dedication to get your product noticed by the community. What we tried to do and had a little bit of success with was finding a hunter for our product, this, in turn, promoted the post to an additional few thousand followers. Our launch brought us 400-500 new users straight away.

Final thoughts 

If you think others would find this article useful please share it with them, and if you have not already check out our [UI Kit](http://kyotoui.com/), please do so 🙏🏻

For any questions or support for your launch, shoot an email here: office@vladalecu.com