Grumpytext









An online content writing service that doesn't limit you.

Hey Vikas, first of all can you tell us a little bit about you and what are you working on?

Hello Everyone!

I am Vikas Yadav, and Electronics Engineer and a Developer, founder at grumpytext.com - an online blog content service w/ SEO Keyword Research for brands and startups.

Let’s talk about your startup Grumpytext - how did you get your first users for your project?

Our initial growth was mostly from word of mouth, but we’ve branched out to a few different platforms since then to try to expand our customer base. After we built the MVP we launched on BetaList, which was a great way to gain some traction in the market and build up our user base. We paid to be featured in their highlighted Monday spot and to be incorporated into their Wednesday newsletter. We got 257 visits from our BetaList launch (predominantly from the US, UK, and Western Europe) and landed 26 subscribers. Overall, it was a great success and I feel like we got much more out of BetaList than if we had invested in Facebook Ads or something similar at this stage. In addition to BetaList, we did a bunch of posting on Reddit and other forums, commenting and adding valuable input, answering questions, adding backlinks, etc., which served to boost our visitor numbers and our SEO. The various Slack, Whatsapp, and Telegram founder and entrepreneur groups that I’m a part of also helped get the word out, for which I am grateful. Something that didn’t boost our numbers but was still valuable was cold emails. They didn’t produce very many sign-ups, but blasting our product out to so many people definitely helped spread the word and increase our market presence. In a similar fashion, I also targeted content- and affiliate-marketing-related Facebook Groups in the hopes of connecting with content-driven business.

We recently published an article about adjusting your pricing model - take us a bit on the journey of finding the right pricing model for your project.

We operate on a straightforward, monthly subscription model with five different pricing options:

GrumpyText Small ($297) — Short content (500 words or less), typically used for marketing ad copywriting, PR, guest blogs, video/audio transcript or summary, email script, newsletter, or small to medium blog posts.

GrumpyText Small + Keyword Research ($399) — In addition to 500 words of content, customers get access to our dedicated SEO and Internet Marketing Division to help with keyword research. We use the keywords we’ve researched and analyzed in the content and suggest seed links.

GrumpyText Startup ($999) — Longer content (1,000 words or more), generally used for product review articles, long blog articles, academic research papers, case studies, etc.

GrumpyText Unlimited + Keyword Research ($2,999) — Unlimited services for short and long-form content with keyword research included. This is most suited to agencies and startups that outsource their content creation as well as businesses that require bulk work.

GrumpyText One Content Request ($99) — One 1,000 word article per month.

Most users are on the GrumpyText Small or GrumpyText Small + Keyword plan, so it seems like our biggest customers seem to be small and early-stage startups who are on a tight budget but still looking for content to create conversation around their product. We don’t really discriminate in terms of what kind of content we will produce, and currently offer content creation for business, education, and niche blogs, landing pages and PR for websites, affiliate content, and SEO copywriting and keyword research.

Each piece of content has a turnaround time between 24 to 48 hours, and we’ll incorporate any keywords that have been provided or do the keyword research ourselves and suggest seed links. We’ve been charging from the start and actually acquired some of our first customers from Indie Hackers. For now, we process payments through PayPal, but are looking for alternatives since PayPal has a really bad currency exchange rate that ultimately hurts our bottom line.

What social media strategies would you recommend?

Launch you MVP as soon as possible. Try out to publish it on Betalist, Betapage, betabound and submit your startups to maximum directories to gain traction and as well as for the backlinks. Post questions, help with queries on Indie-Hackers, Reddits where the most founders meet and provide some value. Quora and Medium Blog approach is also one of the best option. Lastly, don’t forget to hunt down your product on ProductHunt :)

What SEO strategies have worked for you and what strategies are a “must do” for any successful project?

Content Marketing would be the best option and getting an idea about the importance of SEO keyword research is also important. One must deploy the blog articles on their website related to his/her domain/niche industry. That would really help in long term only. As the organic traffic will always be the evergreen profit for you and as well as for your brand.

What content marketing are you doing for this project?

Simply, just publishing our own blog articles related to SEO, marketing, business and content marketing/writing on our main landing page.

What advice would you give someone to get his first 100 customers?

I would only advice you, to focus first on quality service. Serve first 10 valuable customers of yours in a long run but not to worry about getting the 100 customers first. If your service really is of worthy then definitely, it would be after the word of mouth in terms of marketing.