👋 I'm Marcus Taylor, Founder of Venture Harbour, AMA about bootstrapping & automation.

@jake_dewar Thanks Jake, appreciate the kind words! Every venture has its own unique challenges around building a user base. Two things that have been useful for us are: 1) Picking a very niche audience and/or problem to begin with and broaden over time With Leadformly, we reached product-market fit almost instantly, as the problem/audience was so specific (we built high-converting lead gen forms for digital marketers). If I could go back in time, I'd refine this further to only target digital marketers working at PPC & CRO agencies. Starting with a very niche problem & audience means your conversion rates should be be exceptionally high, as your solution becomes ultra-relevant to the right audience. It's then just a case of finding the right (small communities) where those people hang out. 2) Lego block marketing I have a rule that we only invest in marketing where the work we do today will still generate results in 3 years time. This passive approach means that everything you do is cumulative and 'builds' upon what you did yesterday. That way, I don't need to constantly create marketing campaigns to maintain a certain level of acquisition or engagement, instead I can slowly but surely build things up. This has meant we've said no to a lot of traditional marketing - including most forms of social media marketing, speaking at conferences, and sponsoring events. In general, these marketing channels create spikes - which I'm not interested in. I much prefer predictable and passive marketing that snowballs over time. Hope that helps! 👍