How can you generate more traffic and leads for your start-up building micro apps/tools?

If you are a tech startup founder, you need more traffic, leads, and clients. The startup market is huge at this moment, and you probably have a lot of competitors. You pay a lot for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Tiktok, and so on, so you need to be creative and build alternative customer acquisition channels other than classic ones.

Examples of traditional customer acquisition channels:

• Advertising;
• Referral marketing;
• Cold sales;
• Networking;
• and so on;

Let’s discuss how you can create alternative customer acquisition channels by building micro apps/tools connected to your startup.

First, let’s take a real example:

Shopify is a leading e-commerce platform that provides businesses with the tools and resources they need to create and manage an online store.

That means Shopify’s customers are e-commerce business owners (customer persona), and Shopify provides a solution for businesses looking to sell products online, by simplifying the process of setting up and managing an online store and supplying a wide range of customization and security features.

So, starting from these points: your customer persona, market, and the problem you solve, you can attract clients by building helpful tools for them.

In our example, Shopify has a tool for creating a free logo with excellent SEO (they appear with this tool on the first page on multiple keywords). Based on my research, there are millions of searches with related keywords from this area, like: “create a free logo”, “logo maker” and so on.

That is an example of a customer acquisition channel based on micro apps/tools.

The Methodology

Based on this, we can create a methodology to launch micro apps/tools that helps us to gain traffic and leads:

1. Find out what your customer profile is;
2. Find out what problem you solve with your startup;
3. Search related problems for your customers;
4. Pick a problem and find a technical solution;
5. Define what success means for us with this app; (time, allocated resources vs. output, traffic after x months, Google position after x months, etc.)
6. Build the product in-house or outsource to a company that can make it fast and efficient (pay attention to SEO, page speed, and UX);
7. Launch your product; (try to maximize the awareness by posting the launch on all platforms like ProductHunt, Twitter, Reddit, and so on)
8. Continuous Improvements by posting articles using AI to boost your SEO, following your competitors and keywords, and trying to talk about the product everywhere;
9. If you have a budget, you can try some paid ads for short-term results; (it’s essential to understand that you need time to gain good positions in Google)

So, let’s make a simulation! 😀

We suppose we have a refurbished phone startup (like https://flip.ro/) where we buy, repair, and sell phones.

1. Customer profile: people that buy second-hand phones;
2. What problem do we solve? We make the phone selling and buying process easier;
3. Related problems: When customers buy a phone, they need to compare all competitors;
4. Success: 6 months:

• Appear on the first page of Google on “Samsung s21 specifications”, “iPhone 13 vs. Samsung S22”;
• 2k redirected traffic to my app;

1. So we can build a micro-app where users can compare phones for free through a web app;
2. This is a simple app, so we can make it very fast because we need to optimize our go-to-market time. At this point, we need to research the competitors and what keywords we target.
3. Now it’s time to launch our app on multiple platforms like ProductHunt, Twitter, Reddit, and so on)
4. Create articles like: “What is the difference between Samsung S21 and Samsung S22” and “Where can I buy iPhone 14 second hand?” and so on, based on Google Keyword Planner; And also on phone launches, you can make paid ads to capture the trends;

About me

My name is Ilie Andrei, and I am very passionate about building tech products and streamlining the process of developing and validating ideas. I am the founder of INNTECH — a web & mobile development company focused on MVP Development and building micro-apps.