AVB@neural_avb
Paper Breakdown will organically reach 1000 users this week 🥹🚀
No AI UGC. No Ad spent. No big viral moment on X. I haven't even reached out to my awesome network via DMs to help me promote this. When PBD started I had 3k followers, my reach was dead.
This is a personal win for me. I am obsessively focused on retention and UX. I have like 5 jobs, and I take everything seriously.
I am an old school stupid brain, and my marketing strategies will turn many new-school people away. I will still mention them incase it helps someone:
- I write 3-4 paper reviews a week. On X, and sometimes on TDS. The content I write won't be possible to ship at this speed, volume and quality without Paper Breakdown. At the end of each article I give a link - that's it. It's non intrusive, but avid users will usually click. These articles and posts do well, they've helped me get monetized on X.
- Every youtube video I make, I shout out the product. 30 second showcase in a 30 minute video. I am not accepting sponsors currently. For a educational channel like mine, there is no better platform I would rather shout-out than a website that literally makes it easier to understand complex research papers. My viewers know I am a no BS person coz they have seen my journey since I had 100 subscribers (now I am close to 30k).
- I make one openly promotional post on X every day. They get 20-25 likes, maybe 1k-2k views. If it encourages even two new people to sign up that's good. I'll take that.
- I obsess over retaining existing users. I respond to every bug report, I respond to every DM about PBD. Bugs get squashed in 10 minutes. Feature requests are taken seriously. I hand out promotional code to anyone who email me they don't have money/wanna try out pro-tier. Emails are powerful.
- Since I am funding PBD out my own pocket, my motivation is to convert free users to paid users, more than increase the number of free users drastically. PBD will always have a free tier, despite that being objectively a bad idea for solo-funded SaaS.
- My paid tier churn rate is <10%. Avg session duration is 20+ minutes -> these are two stats are what I am proud of the most.
- The obsession is with retention and giving all my users the best paper-reading experience possible. I obsess over the happiness of my paid users especially, and the features we have for paid tier is UNIQUE and no other website has them (ex multi-paper citation chat). I celebrate every sign-up, I mourn every cancellation.
Disclaimer: By no means am I doing something insane here, but small wins are still wins and I will take it as a solo dev.
This is my first SaaS and I can enumerate 10 things that I could've done differently. Thankfully this won't be my last SaaS so I will be applying my newfound knowledge to good use in upcoming projects.
I am doing the highest quality "founder-led" content. Content is hard, but PBD an easy subscription for anybody who wants to read papers, and write good technical content. I am a daily user, and I actually embody both archetypes (i.e. the learner and the content-writer).
The amount of projects I work on and articles I get to ship regularly because of PBD is out there in public for everybody to verify.