How I built a pre-launch campaign for my startup with 0 budget
A comprehensive case study of how I did pre-launch marketing for my mobile app without spending a cent
A few months ago, I showed my roommate a UX side project I had been working on. He, a self-taught programmer, thought it was a feasible app that could be created… so he did.
Fast forward to the present, we have launched Savvy — a bookmarking app that allows you to save a resource, schedule a due date for reviewing it, and discover more related resources.
Why Pre-Launch?
While my roommate was working on developing the actual app with a few friends, I put myself in charge of everything else — the design, the application forms, but most importantly, the marketing.
One of the key things in good marketing is to get people to know about your product. The key to successful marketing is to get the right people to know about your product. So that was my main goal — to utilise the right platforms to reach my desired audience and pull in potential users.
A pre-launch campaign was a great idea; for one, I didn’t have much going on while the app was being made. More importantly, we could…
- gather excitement and raise awareness
- start accumulating content steadily on our pages
- build rapport with potential users
Our KPI
Before starting our pre-launch, we had already set ourselves a goal: we want to get at least 50 sign-ups to our waitlist. This number is calculated as a reasonable expectation after considering our launching date, product nature, promotional channels, and budget.
The strategies are basically to promote our startup on different channels that can reach tech learners, try to lead them to our landing page, and convert the leads to sign-ups. You can imagine a funnel structure here.
Read more about how I designed our campaign and the platforms I used below.
How We Built Our Pre-Launch Campaign
1. Landing page: Direct your audience
The first thing I did was set up a landing page. This is one of the basic but essential things to do for your product. Whatever I put on social media as promotion, I’d link to this page. How I made this landing page is a story for another day, but the short answer is I followed advice from this site, and these are some key elements I included:
- Features list and descriptions
- Explainer video
- Privacy Policy
- Waitlist sign up form
- Links to our social media
I’m going to include a blog section and nest our podcast website here in the future as well; this landing page is going to become a hub for everything we do going forward. That’s the power of a designated website for your product — the audience and users will know to come here for information and updates whenever they need it.
2. Instagram: Give a visual overview
Instagram was also a no-brainer. Almost everybody uses Instagram nowadays, or at least knows it’s a huge social media platform.
However, just Instagram? No Facebook? I don’t know if I will make a Facebook page for Savvy in the future, but there is one reason why I prioritised: it’s visually appealing.
With one scroll through your Instagram profile, your visitors get an overall feel for your brand’s style, as well as information about your product broken down into individual posts. These are the kinds of posts we made on our Instagram:
- Introduction
- Explainer video (15-second clip)
- Important dates (launch, countdowns)
- Feature explainers
- User-oriented content (see top left post)
There’s the aesthetic element as well — we kept to our colour palette and design. And you’ve got to admit, an informative, nice-looking Instagram page can’t do any wrong for your brand.
3. Reddit: Connect with niche communities
I personally use Reddit on a regular basis. The really awesome thing about Reddit is how it splits up into many subgroups (called ‘subreddits’) that are dedicated to a particular topic, like r/marketing and r/uxdesign. The user base is also huge.
Thanks to that specificity, you can find potential users for your product. I guarantee there’s at least one subreddit that has a community of your target user demographic. Here are a couple of ones that we frequented:
- r/userexperience
- r/startups
- r/sidehustle
- r/sideproject
- r/entrepreneur
After I identified the ones I liked, I made a couple of posts that were mainly based on my experience working on the product (since self-promotion is usually banned) and lightly mentioned it at the end.
Granted, this isn’t the most efficient marketing strategy. It takes time and effort to write down your experiences and attract readers, and this isn’t even direct marketing material.
But you can share your story. Your product needs a story so that the audience can feel its authenticity. More importantly, people reading those stories are essentially people who like tech (because of the subreddit I posted on), so the audience is actually my target users.
And doing this on Reddit means it’s easier to see reactions and interact with people who have read it. For a new and upcoming product, any feedback that you can get is everything.
4. Medium: Blogging the startup
Similar to what I mentioned about our Reddit strategy, I also published a story on Medium about my design process. The aim of writing on Medium is similar to Reddit: I want to share my story with people who like tech and have the potential to become my target users.
Other than simply publishing the post on Medium, I shared it with a local UX design community and a Taiwanese UX design Facebook group, which brought a lot of traffic to the story.
5. LinkedIn: Create a professional profile
To be frank, Savvy’s LinkedIn page was made for my colleagues and me to say we worked here. LinkedIn is the platform for pretty much anything business. There is probably no other site for a better professional online presence and for making business connections; sooner or later you’d need one anyway.
However, it’s not a platform for lots of self-promotion; ideally, LinkedIn content is informative and resourceful. You want to make your product known, but not at the expense of getting a bad rep.
I’d say that making a decent LinkedIn page with one or two posts to establish your presence would be enough at the pre-launch stage. There’s time to develop more original content in the future.
6. Twitter: Build your brand personality
If LinkedIn is the top choice for a professional online presence, I daresay that Twitter is the top choice for a casual one — though I think it takes a bit of practice to get used to the post formats.
Still, Twitter is great because it:
- has an enormous user base
- lets us communicate with users quickly
- builds our brand’s personality
What I mean by the last point is, you don’t have to write in “marketer” tones all the time in your tweets. I see the character limit as a test of flair: how can you stand out in this sea of mini-blogs? We’re still working on our “voice,” but we’re definitely here for the long run.
I also love the sense of community on Twitter. More often than not, I read informative posts with insightful discussions continued on in the thread. This is when I thought of establishing a tech-learning community around Savvy — an app developed by tech learners, created for tech learners, and made to unite tech learners.
7. Email: Stay in touch
When all’s said and done (the ads have been placed, the app has been launched), you need a solid medium to bridge the connection between you and your users. Of course, the above platforms are all viable options for communication, but emails are the most reliable.
There’s a delicate balance to be maintained with email marketing: you can’t send too many, and you can’t send too little. Thus far, I’ve only had two emails sent to users:
- Thank-you message for signing up
- Note about our social media (see above picture).
Going forward, my email plans will only be:
- Monthly newsletters
- Product updates
- Essential notifications (e.g., changes in Privacy Policy)
I would include an “unsubscribe” option, of course, but I really want to strive for an email campaign that users will appreciate. The key to that, I believe, is bite-size, informative content distributed at a spaced-out schedule. If it’s promotional, keep it short.
Side note: Make an editorial calendar
As you can see from the stuff I listed above, I used a variety of platforms to conduct the pre-launch campaign. If you are considering doing all of that as well, make an editorial calendar or content manager to organise all the copy and visuals!
Because one thing that I didn’t realise until I started getting overwhelmed was that every post I made on each platform was very different. Twitter has its character limit, Instagram needs captions and pictures, and we have to change the writing tone for LinkedIn and Reddit. The Google Doc I was using at the beginning wasn’t really cutting it anymore.
An editorial calendar, replete with all your scheduled content at a glance, will save you so much time and effort. I use Notion — you can use whatever suits you.
The Results
So what’s the actual results and benefit of this pre-launch campaign?
Build sign-up list
In our three-week-long pre-launch campaign, the most important metric to us is sign-up.
So far, we have 58 sign-ups with users from nine different countries, and more than 60% of them are from regions outside of Hong Kong.
Build connections
Another major benefit of doing a pre-launch was that we were able to build connections for our product. For instance, after publishing my design process story on Medium, the editor of UX Collective messaged me to ask whether I was interested in publishing the story to Bootcamp. This definitely surprised me, and I gladly accepted.
After the story got published to Bootcamp, it received more internal traffic.
And we were able to get conversions from this audience. I mentioned the Savvy landing page at the end of the story, and that generated some nice conversions to our email sign-up list.
Another instance of building connections was when we met some awesome people along the way. For instance, I met Ashish (as shown below, his Reddit name is @thesecondplaceguy) during the pre-launch. We met each other on Reddit, and he kindly became one of our first users to sign up. I reached out to him to thank him for engaging with the post, and later on, we exchanged our LinkedIn accounts. Afterward, I even asked if he’d be interested in doing usability testing for my app, and he kindly agreed.
And also a big shoutout to Jordan Allmark, a brand designer in UK. He’s been very helpful and gave me many insights during the pre-launch. He also kindly agreed to do a user interview with me. Thanks a lot, Jordan!
Social followers number growth
Finally, to those who are focusing on social media marketing, a pre-launch is a great opportunity to grow your followers. Our team shared the pre-launch campaign on our personal Instagram stories and asked our friends to help repost it. In just a few days we got 100 followers, and so far we’ve reached 800 accounts organically.
That’s it! Thanks for finishing this story. You can follow me on Medium or Twitter if you liked this read. Savvy is now available on App Store and Google Play. Go check it out!
