Marketing advice for launching AI apps

I think it would be useful to share some marketing advice for people looking to launch or promote an AI tool. Besides submitting to There’s An AI For That, what other growth strategies did you find effective?

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I’ve been 1 crypto bro for 3 years; worked for some projects and whent trough thousand of different projects with their own strategy.

I would say it really depend of the project itself;

-If you already have a product, smt that is monetizeble , then web 2 Marketing/ freemium/ pay as you go/ abonnement could be possible buisness modele, but always take consideration.
One could for example see it’s 3-5 biggest competitors and try to understand how they make money.
Also the more the project is qualitative, the more, rhe probable income/benefits might be where else than the today market, i mean by that, if you have a shit project and just highjacking otheur ai, i would milk it the faster i can, you can be disturbed tomorrow.
If smt is groundbreaking, you better find for VC to help you develop a dope products before going on the market.

-if you are in early stage, i would say that apply some crypro/w3 principles can help to fundraise.
->Revenues sharing NFT collections.
→ securities tokens…(to be Seen with a legal team)
→ NFT fidelity programme
There is plenty of ways;

Open to any suggestions/ addition / remarque :wink:
Sorry for my shit English :joy::joy:

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Totally agree with this. However, it might prove rather hard to milk, since unless you have top tier marketing, nobody will know about you. And once marketing costs start to go up (they totally will, there are already 1000+ AI projects on TheresAnAiForThat), then good luck being profitable.

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The zillion avatar apps that popped up after Pieter Levels started sharing revenue numbers are a good example. I think 90% of them didn’t make any money, just spent money on ads. Would be curious to see what the cost per click is on Google Ads for “ai profile picture” and the like.

Just checked it for “AI profile picture” and “AI avatar”. Top bid in the US is $1.05. Much lower than I expected. I guess there’s still money to be made for the copycats :grin:

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Interesting, maybe I should start my own copycat avatar maker :thinking:

Some strategies that work:

  1. Build a community: Your Twitter profile can be a good place to start, share what you’re building in public, make connection with other builders and specially with people who have other medias (example, guys like Ben Tossell, who have a newsletter).

  2. Post it on ProductHunt and other AI directories: The more exposure, the better.

  3. Reddit Ads/Google Adwords: They’re still quite cheap. If you have the budget. But try to get an expert to do them for you, otherwise you might end up losing money.

  4. TikTok/YouTube/Reels Influencers who are making stuff about AI can be a good way to get your product in the eyeballs of many people.

  5. Specialized publications in your niche: Is your app good for photographers? Writers? Scientists? Etc. Then try to get into a specialized publication.

Hope this helps. I’m currently growing Leonardo.ai which is a content suite that generates style-consistent assets, and these have been some of the strategies I’ve done to grow it to 20k subscribers.

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Based on what I’ve just learned while launching Smartynames.com, I’d recommend a solid plan on capturing your audience. I am saying this because I didn’t have one, and it hurt.

It doesn’t have to take long, but figure out what you want to do if people love what you have to offer. Give them a way to find you - be that a newsletter, a twitter account, or just your email. Just make sure it’s front and center, and they are somehow incentivized to follow you.

The rush of the launch is exciting, but trying to re-engage those visitors afterwards, when they’ve left the station, that’s a lot of work.

Andrei here is doing a great job at setting up a forum for his project to give us a reason to stick around!

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Excellent point. There are alternatives, but they’re all risky, whereas capturing the audience right away is generally a safe bet.

I haven’t shared this anywhere yet, but for TAAFT my strategy was to become top of mind for when you want to check the state of AI. Sort of like the Coinmarketcap of AI, for lack of a better comparison. So the first step was to choose a ultra memorable brand name. Then I intentionally didn’t offer a newsletter option, because I felt that no matter how cool something is, when we subscribe to the newsletter we sort of give ourselves permission to forget about it. We shelve it into the “done” mental drawer. I wanted to avoid this and instead get people used to checking the site regularly. I focused on UX so that it would be much better than a newsletter. It seems to have paid off, so far the return rate is insanely high and the number 1 traffic source by far is Direct.

But as I said, this was a very risky bet and I’m not even sure I did the right thing yet. Time will tell.

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Hey Kirill great to see you here. Was listening to a podcast that you were on a few weeks ago, where you talked about your AI project. I loved the episode, it showed me possibilities and also gave me the push to start my own project too … working on www.aiskul.com

I just found another domain name variation on your tool, I am considering it already.

Awesome, that’s great to hear!
I also just ran a few searches on the topic to see what comes up.
Take a look - Domain Name Search For: Online courses that teach people how to use AI tools and techniques in everyday life.

If you experiment with that prompt, or something similar, I think you could find even more names. Let me know how it goes, and I can help improve the results.

Thanks… I have checked them out.

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Every now and then there are “What are you working on?” threads on Twitter, Reddit and Hacker News. I found that if you reply early, you get thousands of clicks.

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Hi @andrei
DM me if you want to run Ad campaigns to get your AI tool known.
I run an Ad agency, and have an AI background.
We specialize in running highly focused Ad campaigns, and will work with you to maximize growth.

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Hit me up bro I got a project with your name on it

Hey, Crypto bro since 2016, BIG crypto bro since 2020 lol.

Just built nack.ai as an AI Chat+Image generation app for mobile, and I’m finding there are still opportunities if you’re not simply making a cash grab. But gotta balance that with moving quickly because the space is moving at the craziest pace.

Best advice I’ve seen here worth re-highlighting:

My personal action points for Nack:

  1. Looking to add an email subscription to our blog
  2. Integrate more social features want to stay engaged naturally
  3. Maybe see if we can also do forums engage

@andrei Also did amazing with this platform and made the blueprint too. If you give stuff away value for free, it’s the best growth hack. Kudos to him!

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I think if you’re a developer you can start posting how you build, what you learn along the way and get some early support. Twitter is great for that - many supportive folks for new AI apps.

You’ll validate the idea + get some early traction.

Then you need to catch that momentum and post everywhere: Reddit, hacker news, and directories (there are hundreds of AI directories out there).

Get some small newsletters to post your product. Even if they have up to 2K subs, you can get ~100 clicks.

I actually have a marketing agency specializing in AI startups. Through a mixture of submitting to 150+ directories, content generation, backlinks, social media, we can get your product in front of 3M relevant users within 3 months.

It’s an interesting question which i’m thinking about when doing CocktailWave. I think generally speaking about it on twitter where everyone’s hyped about AI - is a good way to do it.

It’s also interesting on how “theres an ai for that” helps with SEO, because it generates a ton of backlinks. That’s a bit hidden from the regular user, but as far as I understand, the impact should be huge. Not sure any other directory’s giving anything like that

And SEO is a constant, regular traffic income which is very important

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SEO is fine. But not the best way to get traffic fast. I would suggest you try out the three other things:

  • make other people share content (LinkedIn, Twitter and so on).
  • join forums and communities (Discord, Reddit, IndieHacker) and connect with people + share content.
  • plan for a PH launch and do the whole month long process.