1. Partnerships with incubators. I contacted all famous startup incubators and signed deals with most to place unicorn as a "perk" there. I thought it'd become a passive stream of users, but I don't think I got even one paying user out of this. I canceled all these deals.

2. Paid ads. I wasted lots of cash on google/meta/x/tt/reddit ads. No results at all for my 2-3 fig/mo budgets. Mostly clicks from bots & non relevant countries. Now i run my ads on using my own TinyAdz. It works well, I plan to spend 5% of my profit on ads from now on.

3. SEO (one of two best channels). I didn't touch it until April 2023; it was my biggest mistake. Today, I do a mix of AI-generated blogs (using @seobotai ), mini tools with @wrapifai. I manually improve winning tools and articles.

4. Cross promo with partners. I put lots of effort into this, but it turns out founders aren't that good at collaborating. I guess we all are high on EGO. The only successful collab is with HuntedSpace(by @d4m1n ). I'm still open to more collabs & cross-promos, just DM me.

5. Social media marketing. I hired a marketer & put tons of time & money into building up her brand, but then she was headhunted by my competitor. I had no choice but to try to do it myself, starting from 0. Apparently, it worked out well. If you're a founder: tweet daily.

6. Influencer marketing. I tried paying influencers. Overall, it's not bad. But 90% of influencers are fake, and their followers are fake. As long as the influencer is real, the ROI was pretty good. It costs anywhere between $100 to $1000 per tweet.

7. My own podcast. I spent around $40k on it. Ended up closing down cuz it drained my energy. If you love video calls, running a pod isn't a bad idea, but be original with the topic.

8. Conferences and speaking. I joined many programs as a mentor and promoted the unicorn platform. It brought some users, one by one. Since it wasn't scalable, I stopped completely. I do join big confs sometimes if they accept online speaking.

9. Sponsoring. I sponsored hackatons, teachers and web directories. All 3 worked out pretty well. Easy to scale. I plan to do a lot more it moving forward. I think it works way better than paid ads on google/socials.

10. Newsletter ads & Banner ads I tried Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, and many others. All failed. I paid a lot but got no results. I also tried a banner ad on Product Hunt; lost the money.

11. Internal cross promo. At least 10% of all my users came from my other products. So, having multiple side projects isn't a bad idea. Even free projects(e.g. directories). Now, the more projects I have, the more cross traffic I get. Crazy hack.

12. Guest posting. I wrote many blog articles on popular platforms(hackernoon, devto & the rest). It brought traffic when the article went viral. So it only works if it's viral. Do it if you got the viral content skill.

13. Reddit. It brought huge traffic. I didn't place any links in the articles. People just went on my profile and found them. Reddit bangers bring more traffic than anything else. Even more than twitter bangers. However, reddit users had the higher churn.

14. Linkedin. I ignored it for a while but started using it a year ago. It's such a boring place where everyone behaves like AI bot, but it drives really good traffic and has the best conversion among all channels. Be there if you're not there (in b2b).

15. Youtube. I put decent effort into it and got nothing out of it. Video production is really hard. Huge respect to Nico and Marc for making viral vids. I feel like video isn't my thing. I enjoy writing, but hate recording.

16. Insta, Tiktok, FB. These 3 were a waste of time. I guess their audience doesnt overlap with b2b nocode builder. I had random influencers driving traffic to me that had almost zero conversion to paying clients.

17. Cold emails. Hired a pro, spent money and time, no results at all. I know someone gonna come and say "skill issue". Then when I ask "show me the proof" they will say "I can't, i had nda with my client". I think it's similar to ads. Need to hide the product behind freebies

18. Directories. One of the best channels I have. They bring traffic on autopilot. It's easy to drive traffic to your directory than driving it to your main product(in most cases) P.S. my guide on ideating, building & growing web directories http://johnrush.me/directory-g...

19. Listings on other directories. Another passive channel that keeps bringing traffic on autopilot. I keep listing on new directories every day I even built a tool that does it for me: @listingbott

20. Affiliate partners. Works pretty well for the effort I put into implementing it. Takes less than a day to implement. I started with 15% and had no interest. Changed to 33% and it picked up. Lesson learned. I use @ToltHQ for this

21. Free tools Perhaps the best marketing method for devs. You have fun creating free tools, share them on reddit and social media, often it's easier to get traffic since the tools are free and as a side effect you get traffic to your main tool. e.g. uigenerator . org

22. Course I launched a directory guide where I use unicorn platform to teach students how to build web directories. Most directory guide buyers probably ended up using unicorn platform, so it's a win win for all 3 parties: me, unicorn, them.

22. Campaigns. I tried giveaways (my own and in partnership with others). Didn't work at all. LTDs on app sumo brough the craziest rude & unhappy users. Black Friday coupon sales worked really well. I'll maybe do bundle campaigns.

23. That's it. Give it a try to build a saas landing page, waitlist, web directory, jobboard, launchpad, personal page... -> http://unicornplatform.com My other 20+ projects -> http://johnrush.me