Since January 2023 I’ve been working on building an app with a guy I met on YC Find-A-Founder. We’ve released our MVP, made a TikTok that got over 1M views, and had a few hundred people sign up.
The issue is our sign ups have been spread out across the world, and for our app to deliver real value we need more supply.
So that’s our biggest problem right now. We started some paid advertising campaigns with Google, Apple, and Instagram. But we also decided to try doing some guerilla advertising with flyers.
Here’s what we did:
First we made flyers in Figma. We used Midjourney to generate some bizarre/interesting images and turned the best of them into flyers that included - the name of our app - a slogan - a QR code directing users to our website. Here’s one of them:
Next I went to the local print store to make some copies. Had to go through a few iterations to get the resolution and look right (images came out darker in print).
Finally I got about 50 flyers and posted them around the Greenpoint / Williamsburg area.
The results so far have been…disappointing. In the ~2 weeks the flyers have been up, 2 people have converted through them. This could be for a few reasons:
- Our ads aren’t compelling enough
- Many of the original flyers were taken down or taped over shortly after putting them up.
- I overestimate the number of people who engage with telephone pole flyers.
- The area I posted in doesn’t match well with our target user.
- Something else?
So the experiment didn’t do as well as I’d hope. Right now we’re waiting to see the final results of our paid advertising capaigns. If those don’t work out well we might revisit the physical ads and do it bigger.