Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?

You should have at least a few interested parties who you can ask directly for feedback on your MVP. If you don't have that, how do you even know you are writing a product people want?

Once you have made those few people/groups happy, ask them to tell other people. You should be able to get a couple dozen initial consumers that way. Again, if not, you might not have written the correct product.

After you get that far, you start marketing and growing traffic when you are ready to scale up.

I've posted on hacker news (avg 5-15 page views), Reddit (avg 2-5 page views) and Quora (no pages views that can be tracked anyway). Most of my Product hunt launches are completely dead, getting almost 0 traffic, although there was 1 that got 200 upvotes and nearly 400 page views).

It's darn near impossible to get a steady stream of traffic unless Google decides to give it to you. It seems like, Most success stories I've heard on indiehackers typically are due to Google giving them a steady stream of traffic in the hundreds or thousands per day.

I help B2B SaaS companies scale their marketing. I can't really directly help you without knowing what your product is. I'm going to assume it's https://courseroot.com/ since it was a recent submission by you. In this case, it's a B2C product.

Upon landing on your site I immediately see typos / grammatical issues. I suggest you get somebody that's strong in english to help you proofread.

There's a lot of suggestions in the comments to go to your target audience and ask them. That's pretty solid advice but I don't think it's nuanced enough. It's super important to also consider at what stage of the funnel a potential user is at.

For instance, say I run a cloud CI service like Travis or Circle. You could naively say that I should go talk to developers / engineering teams because it's a tool for developers. While developers are the correct target demographic, you have to think about the funnel.

Do these engineering teams even know what CI is?

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Marketing that targets people that don't even know they need a CI tool is far, far, different than marketing that targets teams that are currently looking for a solution and far, far, different than teams that have a solution in place and have to go out of their way to switch.

Does that make sense?

So if we're talking about courseroot, I suggest you think about what stage your ideal user is at.

Do they know that they have a problem? (e.g. Do they know that these online courses can help them advance their careers?)

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If I told you to talk to your target audience and you just talked to people that are already taking online courses, already know what set of courses they plan on taking, it might be hard to extract useful feedback. But if you talked to the same demographic but they know they already have a problem (need to find online courses), that's where you'll get the most useful feedback right this moment.

A bit of a cliche answer, but I'll still go with this: depends on the target audience. Find out who can most benefit our of your product? Developers? Sales? Marketing? General netizen?

Next, figure out where they spend their time on. For eg: to target devs, post on communities like HN (as Show HN). Reach out to community driven blogs and be an author subtly marketing the product. In fact, an interesting story on what you went through during the product building phase, that challenges you solved is exciting enough to intrigue a developer.

General netizen? Share on platforms like reddit (specific subreddit), twitter (would be good if one of your users which high reach can volunteer for this).

Is it a B2B product? Offer the product at a discounted rate to initial users and in return, you can ask for promotion through their site/social media (a bit like testimonials). For eg: I got to know about mixpanel by seeing the badge on the footer of certain website I used.

Who are you building for? You should already have a market asking for the thing you're building.

They wouldn't lie around waiting for you to do something. They've already hacked a solution together by now.

All you have to do is go to the people who built those solutions and tell them about your MVP.

For https://www.checkbot.io/, I got started via posts on Reddit, Hacker News and Product Hunt.

Addition:

I have been working with AdWords for some targeted traffic, although it is quite expensive. Maybe it is still the go to option but would love to hear your thoughts and experience.

This question is too broad and you provide absolutely no context.

What is the product?

What is the target market?

Who is this product for? Find that person and ask them to use it.