The road to 1st Million Installs — HoW HaRd CaN iT Be??

Bro you have just 5000 users, how are you so confident that you’d get 100K users to install the app??

It was June 2022, We were in our 3rd year summer break at college- Summer internships were still going on (though tbh, mine was pretty chill). We had launched our prototype at Stimuler publicly and had got a few thousand users via a couple of twitter campaigns. We were basically pitching for a reality show (story for a separate day) and I confidently claimed that we would have 100k installs in a few months.. the above was their response (fully fair on their end tbh)

I was leading marketing for our app that we had been building for more than 5–6 months now. And my entire marketing CV included a digital marketing internship at a Noida software firm and a Neymar fanpage I grew to a few thousand users on Twitter — ofc, not bad for an eng college kid :p, but heading growth for a global B2C startup??

Sure, how hard can it be..

Turns out, IT IS HARD lol. For next few months, nothing moved- and infact I kindof moved to focus on building the product better. You would build and they would come, RIGHT??

Not really. For the next few months, nothing moved again!

Yet, I was confident — this is another pitch in Oct end..

Looking back at it — i was ignorant because I had 0 clue of app marketing. But this ignorance helped too! It made me believe its not that hard and i kept at it

As THE JENSEN HUANG says about startups —

You have to get yourself to believe that it’s not that hard because it’s way harder than you think.

Anyways — This week, as Stimuler turned 2 and we crossed a million installs, i thought to pen down the 0–1 journey. 3 purposes of writing this

• Mostly for new app marketers starting up in India to get some benchmarks (I dont think we are among the most efficiently growing companies, so its not at all an ideal case, but a benchmark is yet better than no benchmark)

• I think i always write so that i can look back at it and learn from it somewhere down the line. Given how marketing is, this will serve as a good piece for me to get back to how we started and how these GTM Channels need to keep evolving

• To get a partner for the next stage — Stimuler’s full-time marketing team has been 1 so far, just me :p . Now, I want to make it 2, and looking for someone who is both fun and Amazing to work with me to take this to 10Mn users, and then the remaining 90. I dont exactly know how we will get there, but i am confident we will- Soon xD! So, if you are someone who believes you’d be a cool fit for us, you can write to me at akshay@stimuler.tech and we can talk!

So here it is — an unnecessary long piece on our marketing journey so far. Lets start with Phase 1:

The Organic Only Phase — Paid Advertising is bad ehh…

When I started marketing Stimuler, my idea was clear- I will not touch paid channels. It was an excellent choice in the beginning, as i was able to explore more and more creative ways to grow the product.

For ex- We got over 500 beta-testers for the product by writing a post in a Facebook community teasing the tool and messaging everyone who commented (FB rate-banned us and the post was removed by the group too lol, but it gave us enough size to start with)

Then we got close to 1000 Users in a day when Jihan (@sourvive on Twitter), a friend from Indonesia wrote a super awesome post introducing Stimuler to her HUGE List of followers- this was my first stint with virality and also, our first experience telling us that Stimuler is best suited to be a global product. Btw, super shoutout to Jihan again :)

Since then, it was mostly ASO giving us 1000+ users in a month and thats it for the next 4–5 months.

Thats where the problem started- I got way too rigid regarding Paid marketing, and as a result, even at the end of 2023, we were still at 15000 users. In my perspective at that time, we would do paid once the product is ready — the truth is that the product is never ready lol..

My first realization was when I was getting my YC application reviewed (sep-oct’23) and multiple nice alums gave me the feedback that “all organic growth” is not a flex if the growth is so slow lol. And i should have atleast an idea if we have scope of growth when it comes to paid channels

To marketers or founders- would definitely definitely recommend to rely on organic only for first growth, but dont be rigid of not atleast running an experiment with Paid when your organic growth’s getting stagnant/ The experiment will tell you if paid works for you or not (based on your product status and bank balance xD)

Phase 2 — The early success and then the reality kicks in

Phase 2 has been the longest phase for Stimuler’s marketing (Primarily because we are only 2 year old but ok)

So, we were already at Jan’23 and had around 15000 users. I had always joked around to my cofounders that tech & product fix krte hai, users to le hi aayenge , now we had to actually bring them lol. Our first proper product also went live in Jan and so did our 1st ever experiment with monetization — it took around 8 months to roll out the final version of subscriptions for everyone but we were so excited in the beginning lol..

So yeah, long story short- we had to get users. And it meant doubling down on organic, but also experimenting with paid- and we DID do both! I created our GoogleAds account in Jan’23 after binging through a few youtube tutorials, and also doubled down on ASO & FB Communities. Re: FB communities, a quick story — so we realized that IELTS was our biggest audience base, and noone had experience in IELTS. So I gave the exam , surprisingly got a good score and once I posted about it on a FB community, we got 5k users in a day lol.. Later on during accouting, we put the exam fee in our marketing expenses xD (little more here — Linkedin post ielts)

So Yeah, the User growth Skyrocketed (atleast by then standards). Feb was our biggest month, then March, then April. We were on a roll, our CAC was low and organic was also booming up.

But then, we realized that our product was a leaky bucket and we were still not fully ready with monetization, so we halted it for the next few months. The numbers again slumped.

My biggest learning here has been about product-marketing sync. For the entire 2nd half of the year, we have been focused on syncing user-acquisition through marketing with product improvement cycles. And it has been an insane and ever-going learning curve, so much more to understand here for both me & Anesh)

And our results in the 2nd phase has been good overall (I expected way more but yeah, not everything goes according to plan) — We closed the year at more than 600k installs , were nominated for the Best App of 2023- user’s choice, and actually won the Best AI App of 2023 award by Google

Now, saying Phase 3 is weird because its just been 2 months, but yeah- sounds cool to have 3 phases so here you go

Phase 3- Diversify — Experiment, Track and Repeat

I think every marketer goes through this cycle of some intutitions and random bets, only to return to the usual framework that defines marketing all around us.

So throughout the last year, I realized that while our organic channels had options (content/ASO/referrals/organic coverage), we were very dependent on Google Ads for paid acquisition and from my limited understanding of marketing — one should never be dependent on 1 channel. (even if GAds has been cool for us in terms of CPI)

So, we diversified- we started with FB Ads and influencers — and the early results have been promising! Too early to say the data here, but the motto for this phase is clear — Keep experimenting with multiple channels, keep tracking your results and keep going towards the best possible results anyone has seen in the segment ( a super helpful resource for this is the AppMasters Youtube Channel by Steven — https://www.youtube.com/@AppMasters)

So, whats next?

I feel like we are doing less than 0.1% of what we can do with marketing — so ofcourse, there is a lot to be improved in current channels. Particularly I feel I havent given enough time to learn performance marketing, so optimizing that channel is something we are working on! Additionally, we have taken some long term bets in short form video over the last 2 months, so have to do a few things on that end too :)

And yeah, a lot AND lot of experiments! I have already mentioned multiple times that I see Stimuler as an app that can be helpful for more than 100Mn people, and the only way to reach there is keep doing new experiments (as creative as possible), track them and tweak them to meet the global best standards!!

So, yeah — a lot to do, and have to get back on that, so byee! If you are an exceptional marketer who resonates with what we do and is super experimentative by nature, I am looking to hire our 1st Fulltime Marketer- please write to me at akshay@stimuler.tech so that you can be featured in the 5Mn piece :)

Until then, Adios!

Akshay

All things growth @Stimuler