ushercakes

How to grow your LinkedIn company profile

- Post a fake job, fully remote, 6 figure salary

- Get legitimately thousands of job applicants on LinkedIn to apply

- When they apply, auto select the "Follow <companyName> on LinkedIn?"?

- 90% of applicants don't notice, and auto follow

No joke. That is the playbook. Do we really think 97,000 people are following DuckDuckGo because they're interested in hearing their marketing and culture posts? (no offense to DuckDuckGo, they're not the only one to do this)

It's not just you - this is widespread.

I run a SaaS to help site owners get their content indexed. We're seeing an influx of users, I think a lot of the issue is simply because of AI.

New web page additions were pretty linear over time, and then AI copywriting tools came out. Suddenly page additions basically went "hockey stick"/vertical.

Now, you can publish thousands of pages in a few minutes, and it's created a huge backlog in Googles crawl queue, thus increasing overall time to get indexation, disproportionally affecting smaller sites.

Marketing is more important than product.

MVP doesn't need to be perfect, but the core product should work.

Get it in users hands ASAP, get feedback ASAP, or see no traction and move on, ASAP

Most of my internet dollars in the past have come from ads and affilates on various blogs I run.

My first real "somebody paying me for my product" dollar, came in January of this year. I launched IndexGuru - solves a super common issue I had been dealing with on my blogs. Posted it to show HN, and had two separate people sign up and pay me money :)

Pretty great a-ha moment. Business is doing well, but nothing to write home about, I unfortunately do not have yacht money yet.

I'm the creator of IndexGuru.

Let me tell you a story you might get some value from.

August 2022 - November 2022. Built the application.

November 2022 - January 2023. Tried to plug it on reddit wherever I could. Got maybe 6 users.

February 2023. Gave up, stopped working on it, but maintained it.

August 2023. I see a clone of my app on twitter. The guy making it is publicly broadcasting how much he's making: several thousand dollars per month! First, I was mad, but then got over it. Can't blame the guy - that's just the game. But, it inspired me to get back to work on the product. It's good enough, just wasn't marketing it as well as him, so I stepped it up.

August 2023 to now: - I have been marketing TF out of the product. I have grown to nearly $400 MRR in a matter of weeks. I know 400 MRR seems small, and it is, but if it continues at this, it will be pretty substantial in a few months.

My marketing channels:

  1. I monitor subreddits related to my product. I try to give helpful responses. Every other response or so, I'll merely mention the name of the product without a link. (Kinda like I did here). If they're interested, they can find it on Google.
 
  2. My product is very much for people that own websites. A huge niche of website owners is the #buildinpublic community on twitter. So - I've been responding to people on twitter, being heavily involved and sharing any info I know. People click on my profile, they see the link to my site, and click on it because they're curious. Then, the landing page either works or it does't.

TLDR:

- I worked on an idea that was good. Did bad marketing. Somebody did the same thing I made, but did good marketing. They made a ton of money. Don't be like me. Market.

- Plug your product on reddit. Don't be super egregious. Provide value. Don't plug it every single time you comment. Reddit is super unforgiving in this - mods love to ban self promo users.

- Get involved in the relevant community for your niche. I found it on twitter for mine, and it's been working great.

Hope that helps!

edit: formatting

- Perceptions matter. A lot of Americans think it's best here. Those that say how bad it is here, tend to not be the types that would be qualified for EU visas (i.e, you're not going to move to EU on a skilled worker visa if you're an unskilled, unhappy worker in the US) - Family matters. People leaving family usually emigrate for more money, and US -> EU isn't a more money situation most of the time. - It's not so easy to just emigrate. You need to be highly qualified or have ancestral ties. If you're highly qualified though, you can probably earn better money in the US. For the wealthy, US is subjectively "better".

I think ultimately it's just a matter of opportunity. If people are generally comfortable with their life, why would they move? They will only do it if a fantastic 10/10 opportunity presents itself; there aren't many 10/10 obvious opportunities to emigrate to Europe for.

You can airdrop now if the phone is an iPhone and the laptop is a MacBook of some sort.

I also am a sucker for notes, I use the native apple notes, but this probably works for any syncing note client

- Just add the link in notes - Open notes on laptop - Link is there

This is one of those topics where I knowingly bury my head in the sand - at this point, I'm in too deep, I don't even want to know.