Jon relaunched on Product Hunt three separate times across the product's pivots.

“I launched big new features on ProductHunt 3 times - until people grew sick of me”

The Bannerbear rebrand launch specifically is described as landing well on the day.

“On Wednesday I launched Bannerbear.com which so far has had an awesome response”

Constant public tweeting about the startup's progress, sometimes hitting viral reach.

“I tweeted about my startup constantly and sometimes those tweets went viral”

Jon posted in startup communities as a way to be useful and visible without directly pitching the product.

“I posted in online startup communities giving advice in a non-promotional way”

Jon built a referral credit system to encourage existing customers to bring in new ones.

“I implemented a referral credit system that had zero effect”

An affiliate program was also tried alongside the referral system.

“I started an affiliate programme that has had some small effect”

Jon listed an open-graph-image app on the Shopify App Store, hoping the store's built-in distribution and one-click billing would drive volume.

“I will note that with zero marketing, on the Shopify app store I was getting around 5-10 installs per day.”

Shopify merchants expected apps to cost around $5/month, and the integration required messy per-store template edits, which generated heavy support load at a price that didn't cover it.

“Unsustainable levels of customer support required, at the price level expected. I was having multi-day email threads with customers, when my Shopify pricing was $5 a month.”

Jon emailed prospects cold with demo materials for the high-end/enterprise pricing tier.

“I already tried the cold-outreach approach at the end of last year. It got me absolutely nowhere just emailing people out of the blue with demo materials and such.”

Emailing strangers out of the blue produced no traction, which is why Jon switched to following up with people who had already signed up ('warm' outreach) plus content marketing.

“It got me absolutely nowhere just emailing people out of the blue with demo materials and such.”

During the 6-month 'getting into a rhythm' phase, alternating weeks of code and weeks of writing produced a large and growing body of documentation, how-to articles, and free tools (a certificate generator, a Twitter-to-Instagram tool, etc.) that consistently drove organic traffic and backlinks.

“These all consistently bring in traffic - but more importantly we have a lot of backlinks to these tools.”

Jon states directly that writing more documentation increased conversions, which is the clearest single causal channel claim in his own retrospective.

“In my case, I found that the more documentation I wrote the more conversions I got”