How We Got 500+ Early Subscribers Using BetaList, Medium & ViralLoops

Tools and channels we used to launch our landing page.

It’s hard to launch a product and get traction.

We know it well. We’ve tried and failed many times before.

Experience taught us that you have to meet certain requirements before you start any meaningful launch campaign with a potential to go viral.

These requirements include:

Tackling problem worth solving

Clear concept of a solution

Knowing your customers’ needs

Confident branding that stands out

Beautiful design

Innovative UX

Good explainer video

A story to follow

Desirable call to action

Easy onboarding

Awesome support

System to engage and retain users

Advertising budget

Never before have we managed to be patient enough to meet all these criteria.

Until now.

After more than one year of product and business development we finally announced early beta access and launched a landing page.

And we managed to get over 500 subscribers in 10 days.

500 people ready to start a community and share valuable ideas.

Community willing to support you in your journey.

It’s a great feeling.

Choosing ViralLoops was a good call

Most of the people in our team are members of Josh’s BAMF Community, Aaron’s SaaS Growth Hacks and similar Facebook groups.

If you’re interested in growth hacking or you’re a part of these communities you must’ve heard of ViralLoops and their referral marketing product.

They are pushing out some great marketing, and after reading their article on How Robinhood app got 1 million users we decided to try the same principles for Infinity, since we’re also a few months away from public beta.

ViralLoops offers several different campaign templates, suited for different types of products and stages.

We decided to go with The Startup Pre-launch campaign.

This is how it works:

Visitor subscribes to get early access and becomes a member

After joining the campaign member gets a place in the waitlist

Waitlist position improves if a member refers more people

The setup process is pretty straightforward and easy.

After signing up, you’ll have to paste a few lines of code to implement their script and place a ViralLoops button on your page.

The next step is to quickly adjust default campaign content to your needs and it’s done.

In just 15 minutes you have setup a powerful referral marketing system to handle and respond to a massive number of subscribers.

BetaList has a big community of early adopters

After launching a landing page, we needed a few extra days to prepare everything for a ProductHunt upcoming page.

We were eager to get some traffic and see how people respond to our story so we started looking for sources similar to ProductHunt and found BetaList.

BetaList is a place where you can share your startup with the world and get early users.

We checked SimilarWeb and saw they have a huge amount of monthly traffic so we decided to submit our startup.

The submitting process with Betalist is easy:

Describe your solution

Add images, links, accounts

Quickly configure additional options

Choose a package

We decided to skip the waiting queue and see the full benefits of BetaList with the $129 package.

After waiting for a day Infinity was featured on Betalist.

Question on BetaList inspired us to write a story on Medium

First day we got featured on Betalist the question came.

You think you know the answer from the minute you started working on the idea, and you’ve already repeated it hundred times to your co-founders, friends… and yourself.

But when a potential customer asks you to compare publicly, it makes you rethink your values compared to others.

This question inspired us to answer with a story on Medium: ‘Is Infinity better than Trello?’.

Why have we decided to use Medium instead of our blog?

To be completely honest, our frontend developer made some new friends in the recent period and he likes to party, so… we decided to go with Medium 😂

It was a good call.

In case you didn’t know, Medium has an option for you to create a Publication.

Publications are a way to group stories together by many writers or by one writer around a common theme or topic.

Many companies, like Slack for example, use Medium Publications with a custom domain instead of a self-hosted blog.

We’ve achieved a good starting result

Infinity managed to gather 500 early subscribers with only 1861 visitors in the first 10 days.

Noticed the landing page 22% conversion rate? We’ve never seen this before.

Now let’s break down the numbers.

BetaList:

Visitors: 555

Subscribers: 187

Conversion Rate: 28%

Medium:

Visitors: 291

Subscribers: 129

Conversion Rate: 41%

We ran some Facebook Ads to push the article on Medium, since we didn’t want to use friends and family, or influencers’ help.

We’ve sent around 400 clicks from Facebook to the Medium article and the algos did the rest.

Views: 2363

Reads: 895

Read ratio: 34%

Fans: 21

Followers: 33

Referral traffic generated by ViralLoops and rest of the sources:

We can assign a big percent of the remaining wins to ViralLoops.

Visitors from Social media mostly came because of their sharing options.

There’s a lot of visitors with referral codes showing up in Direct traffic, so we suspect those are in a correlation with ViralLoops, but only God knows what are the actual sources Google Analytics marks as Direct.

These are the stats for clicks from Direct and Social combined:

Visitors: 710

Subscribers: 164

Conversion rate: 20%

And a final screenshot from the ViralLoops dashboard:

We decided to run a transparency blog

Two major things inspire and motivate makers to persist with their own endeavours until they succeed.

Reading how other people have done it

Failures/successes with their own experiments

Following the successful case studies of others opened our eyes to see many different paths to growth and success.

We now hope to bring you a successful case study with Infinity and inspire you.

This is just the beginning of our journey.

Interested in what we’re making?

We’re building Infinity — a flexible project management tool with an ever-growing structure.

Our goal is to help you plan, organize and manage your workflow from a single point.

We’re planning a full product launch in Q4 2018.

Get Early Access

If you want to stay updated and get access to Infinity before the launch, visit our website and signup for early access.

We’ll start sending beta access to our Closed Beta Club members starting from May 1st.