📈 Free Marketing Options for Founders - Issue #2

👋 Hey good people…

Having spent the last 4 weeks experimenting with a number of marketing and promotional hacks to generate awareness for Prelo, I have some feedback. yessss!

We’ll be looking at a specific element of marketing “awareness generation”. How to get your product and website name infront of your ideal customers using directory listings.

A word of warning, you need a great deal of patience to list your startup on a number of these directories, because there just aren’t any standards when it comes to your image dimensions and formats.

Before we get into that though, what’s front-of-mind for me at the moment is that we’re starting our investment raise for Prelo this month.

Yes, pitch decks, investor meetings and all the good stuff every founder loves to hate 😥. I’ll be sharing our fundraise journey right here too, so please stick around as we kick-off the process.

follow me (DM is always open) 📨

Let’s not waste time and get into it… ⏳

If you’re a founder bootsrapping your tech startup, you may just want to pull up a chair. Perhaps you’ve recently joined a “really early-stage” startup to help your “founder buddy” out with some marketing, pull up a chair…

I trawled the internet and found some pretty awesome software directories to list your startup on. I’ll setup a gofundme for coffees next month…☕☕

Here’s our curated list of software directories to get you thousands of site visits per month at practically $0 in marketing. Yes zero dollars…

The actual sites we eventually got Prelo listed on are 👇 :

Beta List, Capterra, Get App, Good Firm, Business-Software, Launched .io, allStartups .info, Beta Page, F6S, Startuptabs, StartupBuffer, TrustRadius, AppSumo, SaaSworthy and Startuptabs. 🧾

AppSumo 💪- It took me a while to get AppSumo setup, but it was one of the most rewarding listings we did in terms of traction and feedback. Saas founders I strongly recommend this app exchange.

(2000 additional visitors a day).

Patrick Morgan and Mac Markham are super awesome human beings to know at AppSumo. They’ve helped me immensely.

They’re more than just a software listing website. It’s a marketplace for launching your tech startup at a massively discounted rate for immediate customer feedback and market traction.

1️⃣ Beta List 👍- They showed us some love, and we got on the front page of their website and we were also included in their newsletter. We even got a “like” on twitter.

2️⃣ BetaPage 💪- They were extremely helpful, pushed us on twitter, retweeted our posts and gave us top spot on their newsletter. So we actually saw one of biggest results from this listing. BetaPage added approximately 100 users/day to our website.

3️⃣ Capterra 🚀 - Huge win! with the other sites we went from 0 - 1000 visitors pretty quickly. In fact we tried to setup G2 at the same time, unfortunately we just couldn’t complete the registration with G2. I’m still trying to get hold of a support person. 🙄

4️⃣ StartupBuffer 👍 - I’ve had to update this newsletter hours before our scheduled release, just to say that the StartupBuffer folks are awesome. We’ve got a retweet, a like and we’ve been featured #2 on your newsletter! We saw a spike after the newsletter went out too.

One criticism I have any at all with StartupBuffer is that I would have liked to have seen their newsletters showing the main feature images for each Startup. The visuals would’ve certainly helped our CTR.

If you’re thinking about relaunching your Startup, perhaps this list would be more suited to you.

Note - Before you get all “gung-ho” and start listing, there’s a slight snag.

The image dimensions across all these listing sites are very different. Quite frankly, it’s frustrating, no standards, and for most of the most part, they don’t have an easy way of notifying you if your startup listing failed.

Finally, if your Startup is in the SaaS or artificial intelligence space, we wanted to let you know that there’ll be no SaaS or aritficial intelligence listed in any of the directories. The closest I got when selecting our industry categorizatin was Software Technology, and Sales Automation.

Remember, these are mainly free services so you can’t knock them.

We’ve built content on startup tips that we’ll be releasing our first iteration of blogs on Prelo. The tech team have worked to create a sweet integration with wordpress and I’m looking forward to sharing it later this month.

Our help center is a series of short videos we’ve created to help our customers get the best out of Prelo. Longest video length 20 seconds!

That’s it for now

keep connecting with Prelo 🚀

Send us an email to newsletter@prelo.io 📨