My Frugal Way to 1,000 Organic Registered Users

Week 100 of Founding Typogram

Hi friends, hope you are doing swell!

Recently, my logo design tool has reached a pretty cool milestone: 1,000 registered users. For context, we publicly launched our logo design tool in late April.

It’s been two years since I quit my job and trusted my guts blindly to start my startup journey. This community has been a massive help as a source of motivation and feedback. I want to share one frugal trick that helped me with the growth of the tool: Writing content (targeting long tail, less competitive keywords) & learning SEO.

I hated hearing about SEO when I started building Typogram since my inbox is inundated with SEO agency spam. After seeing how expensive ads can be, I forced myself to sit in front of the computer to watch Ahrefs’ videos on YouTube (which I highly recommend; it is one of the best free resources out there). If you can find a topic you are passionate about, you can start writing a newsletter or blog and ranking pages on Google. It is still one of the best ways to get free clicks and traffic. 

For Typogram, after we validated our product, I started writing a this newsletter to share our startup journey and while my co-founder worked on a newsletter on font and design. We got the idea for the design newsletter after asking our user testers (early-stage founders ) what content related to branding, marketing, and design they would find helpful. 

Similarly, you can also go on forums like Quora to see what questions your target audience is asking. And then, we used an SEO tool like Ahref and analyzed the keywords from the questions we collected (Ahref has a free keyword tool ). You’ll want to see the keywords’ competitiveness and search volume. Some keywords are super competitive, and it could take a lot of backlinks for your content to rank high, so we targeted less competitive keywords with less search volume to get us started.

So far, we have sent over 100 issues of our design newsletter. Crossposting our newsletter posts to our blog has given us a monthly 1.5K organic traffic boost. I know it’s a small number and not hugely impressive, but I’m pretty proud of it. I hope this helps, and if you have any frugal tricks to help you grow your product, please share them here.

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See you next week! If you have friends who are interested in founding startups, please consider sharing my newsletter with them.