And then, one day, everything changed. In a comment to a Facebook post about how teachers dealt with feedback, Danielle dropped the link to our product with an explanation of how she used it. Teachers started to respond, asking for more details, they checked out the program, and came back to share their newly found discovery on social media. Our growth was almost entirely organic since that day. This one comment released an avalanche of word-of-mouth marketing that fueled the growth of our business from its first few users to thousands of customers a couple of months later. It was surreal, but we had tapped into a highly active tribe. Once we understood that, we didn’t need to do much when it came to marketing our product: our users would do most of that for us. Signups surged on that day, and there has not been a day without at least a few dozen new subscriptions ever since. Online teaching influencers discovered the product, talked about it through their channels, put links on their blogs, and our landing page started to receive more and more visitors. (Location 191)
Having always been an avid reader and an admirer of the bootstrapped founder and indie hacker community, I write this in the hope that it will encourage founders and founders-to-be to start, run, and sell their own bootstrapped businesses. (Location 221)