Feb 2022 - Supermeme.ai is launched.
Feb 2023 - 100,000 people have signed up
For 3 indie hackers who have been operating out of a WhatsApp group, this number is extremely encouraging. Especially in a world where the cost of acquiring a customer is through the roof. While we boast about our $0 marketing spend, it's not like we had the money or knew how to spend it.
When we started out, we never operated with the goal of "Hit 100k signups in a year". So it's not like we had a plan. So I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert and write an e-book on "Ultimate Guide to 100k Signups in a year"
While we were reflecting on this milestone, there were broadly three things that we feel contributed heavily. This is a retrospective introspection on how we got to 100,000 signups in less than a year.
Viral loop built into the product
We built an AI meme generator. Anything memes have a viral loop built into them. People naturally want to talk about it, share it on social media and get their friends to try. Remember, this was the pre-ChatGPT era so the AI buzz was limited to a few circles.
Once ChatGPT came on the scene, the meta buzz around Generative AI helped us. Social media influencers started mentioning us in their "AI tools to watch out for" and growth started compounding from there.
People were also searching for "Supermeme" on Google which started driving a lot of organic traffic towards us. That brings me to the next topic.
Accidental SEO
I've always run away from SEO because I just never understood it properly. I was responsible for the website and I just did what I felt like.
What I didn't realise was Google rewards common sense. Supermeme.ai started ranking on top for "AI meme generator" and other variants of the keywords.
But, we are not leaving things to chance anymore. We've started understanding the benefits of SEO and we're actively going to invest in it this year. Our target is to start ranking for "meme generator" variant keywords.
Founders' Personal Brand
Between Nico, Ramsri & I - we have a combined audience of ~100,000 people across all major social media platforms. We built it over a period of time through different avenues and we leveraged it during our initial days of Supermeme.ai.
This really helped push the product beyond our initial circle and get some eyeballs. Since we had almost no overlap in the audience, we were able to get it in front of many people at once.
As I write this blog post, I realise that our personal brand was our underrated advantage. We would've eventually gotten to this number but it would've taken us significantly longer to break out of our initial circle.
We're extremely grateful to everyone who shared, liked and commented on any Supermeme.ai post. You helped amplify our brand.
Way Forward
We want to be more intentional about how we acquire users. Staying true to our goal of democratising meme creation , we want to be the default meme generation tool for the internet.
We'll continue to invest most of our effort in building the right product that can engineer word of mouth. That alone won't be enough. We'll spend more time this year on key marketing activities like SEO, content creation and building social proof.
Hopefully, the "1,000,000 users with a $0 marketing budget. How?" blog isn't far away.
