Jonas Templestein’s Post

I used Big Cartel to build a living tribute to a failed startup. What you get: 1. My lessons learned 2. Ability to download mobile game APK and EXE files 3. Link to emulator to play first level of game online 4. Examples of the space junk left behind when a company fails To be fair, Hayloft may have found success if given more time, but I was hired away to turnaround a marketing agency and abandoned this project. But, when you read my lessons learned you can file "if we only had more time" or "if we only had more funding" to the reasons we didn't get traction in our first 18 months.

🚀 How Hey Email turned controversy into $5M ARR in 3 weeks Hey's contrarian launch playbook: ➡️ Premium pricing ($99/year) in a free market ➡️ Two-tier invite system for exclusivity ➡️ Leveraged App Store dispute for press ➡️ Careful curation of @hey.com addresses Results: ➡️ 50,000 paying customers in 3 weeks ➡️ 75% waitlist-to-paid conversion ➡️ 200,000+ invite requests in 48 hours ➡️ $5M ARR from launch Sometimes, the right controversy at the right time is your best marketing strategy. #startup #productlaunch #growth #marketing

Ever wondered how a startup can skyrocket to a $400M valuation with only $35k in marketing spend? Meet Linear, the world's fastest-growing issue-tracking tool, beloved by many! Check out these fascinating insights from our latest video: Founders’ Secret Sauce Karri Saarinen, Jori Lallo, and Tuomas Artman brought their Silicon Valley expertise to Linear. Their strong personal brands and networks amassed 10,000 waitlist signups in just 2 months! Lesson #1: Success starts long before the big idea. Solving a Real Problem Linear hit the sweet spot between Jira’s complexity and Trello’s simplicity, targeting small, dynamic startups. Lesson #2: Find and dominate your niche. Smart Product Development From extensive beta testing to a polished public launch, Linear’s strategic approach ensured they met real user needs. Lesson #3: Test early, test often. Organic Growth Linear’s product-led strategy harnesses network effects, spreading naturally within teams without hefty ad spends. Lesson #4: Let your product drive growth. Strong Brand Identity Linear's focus on craft and flexible goals resonates deeply, creating a loyal user base. Lesson #5: Align your brand with your audience’s beliefs. Curious to learn more? Watch the full video - https://lnkd.in/dBgwK9SV. #SaaS #StartupGrowth #ProductDesign #Linear #MarketingSuccess #Entrepreneurship #ProductMarketFit #BrandStrategy #Eleken

Imagine: You've launched a successful giveaway campaign to attract leads to your application. 📱 The response is overwhelming, but… ▶️Frequent Downtime Your app crashes unexpectedly, causing frustrated users to drop off. ▶️Slow Performance During Peak Hours Your application struggles to keep up as traffic surges, leaving potential customers waiting. ▶️Unable to Integrate with New Tools Your outdated systems can't connect with new marketing tools like chatbots or new payment methods, limiting your campaign's effectiveness. Here's how you can fix it quickly🔻 Modernize your applications to enhance performance, reduce downtime, and improve integration with the latest tools. By upgrading your tech stack, application infrastructure, and security, you can ensure a seamless user experience and maximize the impact of your campaigns. ♻️ 📲Let's make your legacy application a lead-generating magnet. Schedule A FREE Consultation Today: 📧: info@infosprint.com 📞: +91 910-053-4549 🌐: https://infosprint.com #ApplicationModernization #Legacysystems #Legacyapplications #AI #MobileApp #LeadGeneration #DigitalTransformation #CloudSolutions #SoftwareDevelopment #UserExperience #BusinessGrowth #Innovation #Technology #MarketingTools #MarketingCamapaigns #appdevelopment #CEO #Entrepreneurs #Trending #LinkedIn #Reel #InfosprintTechnologies

This might be the most counterintuitive thing I've posted here: You should make it harder for people to use your product. When Gabe Villasana and I were discussing monetizing Zenfetch, we agonized over pursuing a freemium model or going straight to a paid product. Then, I came across an excellent article where Bobby Pinero documented his learnings from making Equals freemium. This inspired us to make Zenfetch a paid product. Here's why: 1️⃣ Only users with a painful problem will pay for the product. When Zenfetch was free, we got all sorts of conflicting feedback from people who were never serious about the product or the problem we were solving. As soon as we transitioned to paid, these users disappeared and we had less users but higher quality feedback. 2️⃣ People try harder when they've paid for something. As Bobby puts it, users need to have "skin in the game" to get to the aha moment. If a product is free, you might try it but you're not committed to figuring out a way to make it work. Once you pay for something you're much more likely to invest in finishing the onboarding, reaching out to support, and importing from your existing tools. 3️⃣ Making money is good. Honestly just didn't have a third reason here but wanted to follow the rule of three 🙃 Let me know what a good third reason would be!

I'm proud to announce I just finished writing my first book! Well, sort of. It's called The Virality Playbook. It goes over how to build a consumer app that can go viral and get hundreds of millions of users. I talk about what aspects of human psychology make us get hooked onto apps, and how incorporating certain features into your app can cause them to go viral overnight. I've built several consumer startups in my life, including MeriPheri, an ecommerce app with over 200,000 users, Populus Fantasy, one of the first ever prediction markets, and 512 Media, one of the largest college sports media houses in the entire United States. During that time, I've learned a ton about consumer psychology, virality, and product engineering. I wrote The Virality Playbook to put all of that research in one place, along with a bunch of my own experiences and stories. I was originally planning to sell this, but I have decided instead to make it completely free to anyone who wants it. You can download it right here, right now. Why? Because I want to see more people take big risks and build consumer startups. B2B SaaS sucks. If you dream of building the next Snapchat, the next Tinder, or the next Spotify, you should give it a read. It could make you a billionaire one day.

I never try to change my approach. My results get them to market faster with an app that they can easily sell to their existing audience -- providing value -- with this simple approach: 1. Instant product market fit I realized that too many people are spending all their time reading headlines. SaaS doesn't take years and millions of dollars. It only takes a few posts to find the perfect idea. 2. Launch quickly I create a simple landing page that collects payments. It's a genius marketing mechanism. Customers are invested and hanging on your every post. Waiting for the next app update. 3. Monetize now I've realized that my app customers like me more when they pay me. It shows that I have earned their trust and swiping their card makes them feel good. We both win. When I learned to code, I spent one year "starting a startup" and made $0 when competing with all the noise out there. New ideas don't matter. Pick one and stick to it. You’ll get comfortable and ship much faster.

Over the last weeks, I've been sharing the Agency Lead Sharing Bot with multiple agency founders/C-levels. While the feedback is generally excellent, there are obvious concerns and some great suggestions that agency executives came up with. Solving them will be a part of our journey. I think being our product's early-stage users will help us succeed. I shared a lead for Flutter development yesterday through the bot, even though we have just a few agencies on the other side and only one that was indeed fit, so I could reach out to them manually, but we need to test the process. We do Flutter development as well, but the timeline was short, and they also required a social network focus, while this is not our primary specialization. Since I interviewed every agency, I knew exactly that we had a team that was a better fit than my own, and it turned out they were available. They've already been introduced to the client, and I'm waiting for them to start the project so that we can test out the commission payments. Startup as it is :) PS Thanks to all the agencies participating in this journey, we're on the mission to make lead sharing a predictable, low risk and easily manageable additional revenue and lead generation flow.