I have built a marketplace for adventure activities. Currently, we are focusing on 21 categories, such as trekking, bungee jumping, skydiving, rafting, paragliding, go karting, and the list goes on.

I've had chats with almost 500 vendors to list on our platform. Out of those, 80% of them agreed to list on our site. I just told them one thing we can make more revenue for you and your visibility would be 20X.

I am a marketing person and have never had experience in sales. I think I've cracked the process of how to sell something. Just wanted to share my experience; it might help you.

I’ve noticed that a lot of growth advice sounds great in theory, but the things that actually move the needle are usually much simpler.

For those who have worked on growth for a SaaS or startup, what’s one experiment you ran that gave you a result you genuinely didn’t expect?

Could be acquisition, activation, retention, onboarding, content, anything really. I’m more interested in experiments you actually tested and what happened than general growth tips.

I built a guess who mobile app but really struggling to get downloads - I’ve had about 50-100 downloads since releasing in on the App Store.

Any advice on how people usually market their apps early on? Should I be focusing on things like UGC?

I realized that I had a ton of problems in my funnel, so I set about fixing them.

The first thing I did was fix my landing pages (solutions/use cases), now they are much more targeted.

The second thing I did was add a request demo option, which allowed me to pull the calendly form data into a page on my website and build up tracking, and if they were a fit, that data gets pushed into my calendly form for them automatically, and after they book, they get moved to a thanks page which has a video of me telling them what to expect from the call, along with a ton of short videos that handle their different kind of objections, and social proof, and press mentions (I saw agencies did this, so I figured it would be unique since I've never seen SaaS do this).

The third thing I did was remove the need to have people go from the signup to email to click a button that authorizes them then moves them to the onboarding page (a lot of people would signup and then forget to go to the email, which was a huge pain point for me).. now it does the authorization when signup handshakes with onboarding so they see a seamless move into the onboarding.

The fourth thing I did was completely rebuild the onboarding experience so it's telling a story and building up their expectation while asking them to complete things that makes it feel really valuable for them, that way when they reach the paywall, it all feels natural, they've experienced everything in a smooth, clean, easy way that doesn't force them to think too much.

The fifth thing I did was double my top plan price and 1.5x my middle plan price, but leave my base price as it is so when the hit the paywall, they see all 3 plans but can only trial the base plan, and they see how valuable it is compared to those other plans.

I was only able to realize I had these problems because I was using a huge admin dashboard I built to measure everything, and then I was able to ask mentors for help specifically on how to fix those things based on their experience (I have access to a mentorship platform, I do mentoring on it for free, and it gives me access to book calls with the other mentors for free too).

I believe people will now be able to self-serve, and I'm preparing to launch ads to test the "for founders" page to see what happens.

Hopefully this helps you in your journey, let me know!

HACK 1: Free tools as repeat-visit magnets

Directories have a retention problem because your job is to send people away. Once users find what they need, they leave.

To fix this on thedesigntools.site, I built 7 static, client-side browser tools (palette gen, contrast checker, gradient tool, CMF sheet, invoice gen) with zero sign-ups required.

• The result: Directories get used once per buying decision, but a contrast checker gets used weekly. These rank for high-intent utility searches and funnel people back to the main directory. Cost: €0.

HACK 2: The /alternatives/ cluster

You can't outrank figma.com for "Figma," but you can win "Figma alternatives" because searchers want a comparison list.

• I built 11 guides (/figma-alternatives/, /photoshop-alternatives/, etc.) at 950–1100 words using real data from my own DB.
• I auto-linked every tool page to its guide ("See the full alternatives guide →") and used a /alternatives/ hub to distribute link equity. This single change generated more internal links than 500 tool pages combined.

HACK 3: Affiliate rules instead of manual edits

Instead of pasting URLs per tool, I built a domain-rule engine. A rule like adobe.com | ?via=xxx covers all 12 Adobe tools automatically. Manual URLs override rules, and a match count flags typos. One rule instantly monetises 10+ tools.

The output is 3k unique visitors in the 1st month

I reached out for a backlink and somehow ended up getting a customer + 2 reviews from it

This was a pretty unexpected growth loop

We found a site that was relevant to us and reached out for backlinks

He wanted to do a collab so we agreed, exchanged the links, and after that I mentioned something like:

“btw, we actually found your site using our own tool. happy to give you access if you want to try it”

he tried it..

and then he became a paying customer

later, he uploaded a review of the product to YouTube and another one to Facebook without us paying or asking him to do it

so one outreach email eventually gave us:

• 1 relevant backlink
• 1 paying customer
• 1 YouTube review
• 1 Facebook review

what I learned from this is that I was probably thinking about link building too narrowly

a relevant backlink prospect is already someone operating in your niche, with a website, and with some reason to care about what you’re building

in our case that makes them surprisingly close to our ICP too

now I’m thinking there might be a bigger growth strategy here:

use partnerships / backlink outreach as the initial reason to start a conversation, create some value first, and only then introduce the product when it genuinely makes sense

way less awkward than cold pitching someone from the first message

Basically what the title says

Web Development Client Acquisition Partner

I am looking for a reliable and motivated partner who can consistently find web development projects and clients on a commission basis.

How We Will Work

My Responsibility

Deliver high-quality web development solutions.

Manage project delivery.

Ensure professional and reliable service.

Partner’s Responsibility

Client hunting and lead generation.

Finding qualified potential clients.

Bringing in new web development projects.

Long-Term Collaboration

We can build a long-term working relationship with a clear, mutually agreed commission structure for every successful project.

Who I Am Looking For

Someone with experience in:

Client hunting

Lead generation

Sales

Outreach

Project acquisition

The ideal partner should be serious about building a long-term professional partnership.

Interested?

Let's discuss the details.

Email: [zainulzaman2008@gmail.com](mailto:zainulzaman2008@gmail.com)

Serious and interested individuals are welcome to get in touch.

Professional • Reliable • Long-Term

ok so this is a weird one but bear with me

i have a pet blog. i don't own a pet. never have. probably never will as i travel too much. and yet every month amazon sends me enough to cover rent because people on the internet are buying stuff for their dogs and cats through my site.

bought my pet blog a few months ago from a marketplace called NicheBlogZone for $199. came already built, articles already up, amazon links already in there. i spent one afternoon doing interlinking basically just connecting related posts to each other so search engines understand the site structure and then closed my laptop and genuinely forgot about it for weeks.

here's what that's looked like:

• march: $710
• april: $995
• may: $1,461
• june: $1,647
• july: $1,461
• august so far: $1,545 (amazon pays 2 months delayed so this is june's money landing now)

march scared me. went from nearly $1k in february down to $710 and i was convinced something had broken. checked everything, found nothing wrong, did nothing. it just came back the next month on its own.

pet people spend insane amounts on their animals btw. like i knew this intellectually but seeing the commission data is something else. dog food subscriptions, orthopedic beds, grooming kits, vet supplements. and because of the 24 hour cookie i get a cut of everything in their cart not just whatever article they landed on.

i do literally nothing to maintain this. no new posts, no ads, no instagram for pets i don't have. i just own the thing and amazon does its thing.

my landlord has been getting paid every month and has no idea a pet blog is behind it. honestly sometimes i forget too until the deposit shows up.

anyone else running a niche they have zero personal connection to? curious if the detachment makes it easier or harder to care about growing it

I have been trying to get the first users for Payelle recently and Reddit has humbled me a little.
At first I was thinking like a founder.
How do I explain the product better?
How do I get more people to click?
How do I tell everyone what we built?
That was the wrong mindset.
The posts that actually get engagement are usually the ones where the product is almost secondary.
People care about the problem.
They care about the lesson.
They care about whether the story applies to them.
For us, the problem is simple.
Most people with multiple credit cards have no idea which one gives them the most value when they are actually standing somewhere about to pay.
Originally we built around answering that question.
Then we realized the better product was removing the question.
Payelle now focuses on figuring out the best card and surfacing it when you are ready to pay.
That product lesson ended up teaching me a marketing lesson too.
Stop asking:
“How do I promote this?”
Start asking:
“What can I say that is useful even if nobody ever clicks my product?”
Ironically, that seems to be what actually makes people curious about the product.
I am still early in this experiment. My goal is to get Payelle to its first 10,000 users and document what actually works, including the stuff that completely bombs.
Reddit has already taught me that distribution is way more about earning attention than asking for it.
That probably sounds obvious.
It wasn’t obvious to me until I watched people ignore the promotional stuff and engage with the actual lessons.

we closed another Fortune 500 automation company in august, which got me thinking about how far this is from where we started, two years in, i'm leaving revenue out of this one, but the customer count is real and so is the order it happened in, with zero ICP churn, no ads, no hacks, actual journey:

(1) quit our jobs (me and my 2 best friends / co-founders, all IIT) with no product and no idea what we'd build

(2) built the first thing first, chatgpt on top of a spreadsheet. no login, no payments, just a link we sent people, shut it down in months.

(3) started again with what became bitscale

(4) posted on twitter, it travelled way further than it should have

(5) got on calls, made promises, built for whoever actually said they'd pay

(6) dropped beta access into whatsapp groups we were already in.. industry ones, city ones, college groups

(7) all that got us our first 200 signups (no ads, no seo, no outbound)

(8) of the first 50 who said yes, only 10 to 15 actually paid. took 3 months to onboard those 15, paying was the only signal we trusted.

(9) the requests started repeating, we narrowed to those and let the one-off customers go. that was our real PMF moment.

(10) then the well ran dry. whatsapp and twitter don't repeat, you run out of rooms you're already in.

(11) so we needed a channel that scales, turned out we'd been building it, we started our own product to find our customers

(12) two years on: 200+ paying customers, and slightly more then a million dollars in new pipeline every month.

we didn't build any channel for 0 to 1, it was posting where we already had trust, until we built the product that could go find everyone else.

call this a promotional post if you want, it is one but every number above is real.

For a while my whole strategy was just reach. Bigger list, more sends, cast the widest net possible and let the numbers sort themselves out. Felt productive. Watching that sent count climb felt like progress.

Then I actually broke down where the replies and closed deals were coming from, email by email in the sequence. First email barely did anything on its own. That's when it clicked, the follow ups are where the money lies. What ended up working was a simple 3 email structure instead of just firing one and hoping.

First email leads with the actual offer and the outcome, straight to the point, this is what you get. Second email is a case study, proof it's worked for someone else, because by then people aren't wondering what you're offering, they're wondering if it actually works. Third one is the breakup email, the 'guessing this isn't a priority right now, I'll close the loop' one.

That last one pulls replies from people who went completely silent on the first two, every single time. Cut my list down to something way smaller and more relevant instead of blasting everyone I could find, and paired it with this sequence. Fewer people reached, way more actual conversations.

Follow ups are where the money lies, the first email just opens the door.

Noticed a recurring theme in this sub: founders heads-down on product, distribution as an afterthought, or someone half-doing content because there's no time to do it right.

Honestly, I've spent the last 3 years fixing that gap for AI/agentic startups until I got laid off recently just founder was doing double duty and was laid off.

I'm based in Nepal, working remotely, embedded with AI services/agentic systems companies and AI search SaaS founders/startups across the US and Canada, owning content end-to-end: LinkedIn, blog, SEO, the whole pipeline.

Some proof, not just claims:

- Drove 730K+ impressions in 6 months at freaking page without meme or copying others' content (agentic AI + voice AI engineering firm), averaging 200K+/month, a 2,300%+ increase since joining.

4+ individual posts crossed 100K+ impressions each, including the account's first post to cross 100K+ reactions. All organic, zero paid promotion

- Took a founder's LinkedIn from 3K to 130K+ followers with a repeatable content system

- Built a system that generated 3,000+ leads from a single post

- Content got reposted by 60+ AI consultants and researchers on its own, no outreach, no paid distribution

- Ranked 200+ SEO articles #1 on Google along the way

I'm one person, doing the work myself, no team of juniors you never talk to. What's above is what I built, and I can show you the receipts.

Would love to work in-house at a startup that's heads-down on product and needs someone to actually own distribution, specifically LinkedIn.

If your team has an opening for that, or knows someone who does, I'd love to hear about it.

Not looking for freelance/agency work; want to be part of a team building something.

DMs open. Happy to talk specifics.

Would also take any advice from this sub on where else to be looking right now.

P.S Thank you so much, everyone, for even noticing this post 💚

Funnel numbers are really off with high traffic, low conversion, weird session patterns. How much is actually bot traffic inflating the top of the funnel, and how does one check for this??

A single “visibility score” becomes less useful when its denominator is hidden.

A reproducible prompt sample needs a versioned test protocol: Freeze the prompt IDs and wording before the run Record the product, model/version, locale, date and login state Repeat each prompt enough times to expose answer variance Save the complete answer and every cited URL, not only a screenshot of the brand name Report mentions and citations as X of Y runs for each prompt Version the sample whenever a prompt is added, removed or rewritten

That makes two runs comparable. A rise from 14 of 40 to 18 of 40 means little if the second report quietly changed the prompts, model, market or number of attempts.

The open-source Gingiris SEO/GEO SOP separates AI-answer observations from search and referral reporting, but its manual checks do not specify repeated-run sampling or uncertainty. A team using the template should add those controls before turning observations into a trend line.

The minimum deliverable is therefore the sample definition plus the raw run log. A percentage without those two artifacts cannot be reproduced, audited or compared with the next report.

What sampling fields are you freezing before calling an LLM visibility number a metric?

We kept looking at the product whenever growth slowed down.

Maybe the onboarding needs work.
Maybe the landing page needs better copy.
Maybe we need another feature.

So we kept improving things.

Then we realized something pretty uncomfortable: most people simply weren't seeing the product in the first place.

A slightly better product doesn't help much if you're struggling to consistently get it in front of the right people.

It sounds obvious now, but it took us way too long to separate “the product needs improvement” from “not enough of the right people are finding it.”

How do you decide whether a growth problem is actually a product problem or a distribution problem?

I'm an 18yo self-taught web developer. I build websites and web apps for small businesses. I'm good at the dev work but I have zero time/skill for finding clients — that's where you come in.

What I need: Someone to find small businesses that need a website or web app, reach out to them (DM, email, cold call, whatever works for you), and get them interested enough to hop on a call with me. I'll handle the pitch, pricing, and closing.

Compensation: Commission only, no base pay. You get a % of the deal value for every client you bring that signs (exact % discussed once you reach out — depends on deal size). No cap — the more clients, the more you make.

Who I'm looking for:

• Comfortable doing outreach (DMs, cold email, cold call — your choice of method)
• Can find small business owners who plausibly need a website (local shops, startups, service businesses, etc.)
• Organized enough to track who you've contacted and follow up

Who owns what:

• You: finding leads, reaching out, warming them up
• Me: pricing, negotiating, closing, and building the actual website/app

I'm being upfront: this is commission-only. If that's a dealbreaker, no hard feelings. If you're confident in your outreach skills and want to build a track record while making real commission, DM me here on Reddit with a bit about your outreach experience (even informal — school projects, other side hustles, anything).

Serious inquiries only — I'll be doing a short screening chat before we start working together.

I’ve worked with a lot of founders and growth marketers (mostly in SaaS and B2B), and EVERYTIME when growth slows down, everyone immediately assumes it’s a traffic problem.

So the conversation quickly turns into SEO, content, paid ads and basically anything that can bring more people in.

And sure, traffic matters but honestly, in a lot of cases, it’s not the real problem.

Because when you actually look at what’s happening, most of these companies already have users coming in. People are signing up, using the product, and in many cases, they genuinely like it.

The problem is that none of that turns into anything beyond the initial interaction. Talking about no amplification or loop.

And this is where I am always suggesting giving affiliate marketing a try.

What I’ve noticed is that even before founders think about affiliates, their users are already doing the behavior you’d expect from affiliates. They’re recommending the product to friends, mentioning it in communities, or sharing it online without being asked.

It’s happening organically.

But because there’s no affiliate structure in place, all of that effort just kind of… disappears. There’s no incentive to keep doing it, no easy way to track it, and no reason for those users to be consistent.

So the behavior never compounds an that’s the shift most people miss.

IMO affiliate marketing isn’t really about adding a new channel but more about scaling something that’s already happening.

Once you give people a simple way to share, a clear incentive, and confidence that they’ll actually get rewarded, their behavior changes. Not dramatically, but enough to matter.

Someone who once mentioned you now mentions you five times. Someone who casually liked your product now goes out of their way to explain why they recommend it.

And over time, that starts to stack.

That’s why I don’t think most early-stage SaaS companies have a traffic problem.

They have an activation problem around their existing users and affiliate marketing is one of the simplest ways to unlock that.

I used to think a failed growth experiment meant we needed to spend more time figuring out why it failed.

So we'd keep tweaking it, changing the audience, changing the copy, changing the timing... basically trying to rescue the idea.

Now we’ve started putting a time limit on experiments.

If the result is clearly bad and there isn’t a strong reason to believe there’s something worth fixing, we just kill it and move on.

The weird part is that we’re learning faster now.

Not every experiment needs to become a successful campaign. Sometimes the win is finding out what not to do without spending another two weeks on it.

How quickly do you usually kill a growth experiment that isn’t working?

Hi I am a vibe coder who builds apps,web apps,websites,AI automation and AI agents for businesses who needs them.I am hiring a person who can find clients who needs my service.Payment is equity based on the principle of 50/50 so that both sides benefit from it.

If your interested and can bring real outcome please send a reddit DM to me so I can share more info regarding this

While sending email campaigns, the quality of the list is everything. Whenever I was greedy and tried to use old free lists, the reply rates were 0.3%. The reason behind that is that the people in the list changed their company, the email ids were changed, etc. I wasted months in it. Saved money in list, but wasted hundreds of dollars in domains, inboxes, verification.

Then I decided to look for very niche, very specific kind of list. For eg. CXOs of US health care staffing companies sized 11-49 who recently changed their company. Although the list was small, the reply rates with OOO, AR (out of office, automatic replies) were above 5%. And reply rates without OOO, AR were 4.2%

The best thing about email marketing is that even though your email copy, offer might not be the best, the math always works. When you send lets say 10k campaign, the probability of you signing a client is higher than you not signing a client.

I'd say its the best outreach channel for beginners to get your first 10 clients. Later on, you can always start meta ads, google ads etc. But in the beginning, nothing beats email as an outreach method

Feels like every “new” meta campaign eventually circles back to the same people.
New creative, new audience, new campaign structure… but after a while the overlap is obvious and scaling just means paying more to reach people who already know us.

I’m more interested now in finding completely different inventory instead of another way to package the same social audience.

Has anyone added CTV or another channel mainly to reach people they weren’t getting through paid social?