Posted the free MVP to a niche AV-industry subreddit and used the resulting feedback to prioritize features.

“After receiving feedback and interest from Reddit, I built the most requested features and chose my target customer base.”

A free tool posted with genuine value, not overt promotion, worked well in a Reddit community.

“Reddit users generally dislike overt advertising, so an authentic, value-adding post can go a long way.”

Used first revenue to hire a contractor for keyword research and articles, then scaled with documentation pages and about 3,000 programmatically generated pages.

“we used our first revenue to contract a professional to do keyword research and write 3 articles for us”

Low-volume, high-intent long-tail queries convert well even at small numbers of monthly searches.

“we rank for “timer for presentations,” a query with only 134 impressions per month, yet we get 43 clicks, and a good portion of these convert into paying customers”

Google Ads was one of a short list of channels the founder names as effective, alongside SEO and word of mouth.

“SEO, Google Ads, and word-of-mouth have proven effective”

Every free timer displays the Stagetimer logo on-screen at the event where it's used, functioning as passive brand exposure (implied — described in a third-party-authored republished interview, not the founder's own direct words).

Word of mouth was one of the two most significant growth factors in the founder's own account.

“Google and word of mouth were the most significant factors in our growth”

Launched on Product Hunt on May 31, 2022 and reached #1 Product of the Day.

“2,997 page visits (+60% more than usual)”

Despite a sizable Twitter following, almost none of it converts into actual product users, since the audience there is other founders, not the B2B event-production buyers Stagetimer needs.

“Maybe 5 of my 11k Twitter followers are my users.”