Am I becoming a marketer?

Giveaways, lead magnets, the new version of me as a solopreneur

Feb 25, 2024

Let’s be honest, the most difficult part for a technical founder is to understand that marketing matters, much more than the product and building.

Last week I made something completely unexpected for the Luca of 4 years ago: a giveaway, and a lead magnet. Let’s dive in.

The giveaway

Giveaways are a great way to generate hype and “noise” (and therefore marketing) around your product.

A giveaway is when you give something out for free (or not). It’s a very old marketing technique. Have you ever seen big distribution offers like “buy this product, every week we randomly extract the winner of a new refrigerator”? (Randomly replace frequency and product).

Many variations exist, but on Twitter/X it is usually in the form of “I have created a resource that saves you time. Like, reply, retweet to get the link in your DMs”.

Last week I made a giveaway on X.

It’s not my first one ever, I’ve done others in the past. Some of them performed well, others a little bit less.

As always with marketing, the outcome is unpredictable. But if you don’t try, you don’t know and don’t get it.

The reason giveaways give you so much visibility on X, is also due to the social platform algorithm.

The more engagement your content gets, the more the algorithm will show your content to others. Because it “thinks” that the content is relevant to many for some reasons.

💬 819 comments
♻️ 29 retweets
❤️ 484 likes
🔖 344 bookmarks
👁️ 96k views

This is one of the most successful giveaways I’ve ever done.

My giveaway was a free guide on how to build and launch a Micro SaaS in 7 days.

I’ve put all I learned in the last 4 years building SaaS products as a solopreneur.

My community on X knows me, and I have a reputation as a side hustler there, but the giveaway gave me more visibility. This was the outcome (numbers you usually don’t see publicly shared)

+400 followers on X in a couple of days.

I also have my personal newsletter (that you are reading 🤗) linked in the X profile.

~30+ new subscribers to the newsletter.

Not bad for a single tweet!

Lead magnet

Later on, I converted the same guide into a free email course. One email is sent every day, with the instructions to build a Micro SaaS, for seven days.

And I’ve added the course as a lead magnet on the website of Shipped.club — The Next.js Micro SaaS boilerplate for busy developers.

So far, I’ve got 20 subscribers to the course in the last 24 hours.

This is probably the marketing with the best outcome I’ve done so far, and I have to say that I enjoy doing it!

What I realized in the last years is that when you have Product Market Fit (your product has an audience and resolves a painful problem for them) you need to spend 80% of the time on marketing, and only 20% on coding.

And that’s my goal for 2024.

That’s all for today.
See you next Sunday 🙌
Luca

Whenever you are ready, I have a couple of ways to help your solopreneurial journey.

Shipped.club is the Next.js Micro SaaS Boilerplate for busy developers, that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.
85 developers are already using it, and are shipping together in the private Discord community.
Shipped also comes with Parity Purchasing (extra discount) depending on your country, discover your discount on the landing page!