Experience of project promotion with minimal costs

A year ago, the story of Raindrop.io began . During this time, the service was visited by 250,000 people, and the number of saved bookmarks exceeded 2.5 million. At the moment, a web version is implemented, extensions for all browsers, Android and iOS client. As before, I am alone in the project. In this post I will try to share my experience and tell about important events that happened with the project.

Promotion

The first big impetus to attendance was the announcement on Habrahabr , which in total attracted 15,000 unique visitors. But of course more important is the huge fitback I received from the community. He determined the further development path of the project.

A big surprise for me was a bunch of Hackernews + Designernews(Reddit for programmers / designers). They gave tremendous results. At the peak, there were 400 users online and in a couple of days 40-45 thousand came. In addition, records began to appear in the Western media. Plus, a call from Pinterest was waiting for me. The girl introduced herself as responsible for the takeover of companies. She admitted that they have a lot of Raindrop.io fans on the team. They did not absorb, but a similar interest from such a company was very pleasant. And all this cost me 5 minutes of time: post a link and specify a title.

Personal contact with the authors of various media / communities in the social was also very effective. networks. Letters requesting a review of the service responded and records followed that attracted quite a lot of traffic. Moreover, completely free of charge. I will not mark specific publications, if interested I will answer in PM. And write directly to the authors, you won’t get an answer from corporate emails.

Contextual advertising as well as advertising in communities yielded an incomparably low result in comparison with the above.

I cannot say anything about other promotion methods. Perhaps you will recommend something in the comments? I will be very grateful.
And now, if I may, I will do a short review of the chips that have appeared recently on Raindrop.io.

Android version

What was most requested since the inception of the service. As it turned out in practice, only 10% of the total number of active users took advantage of it. I hope this indicator will grow in the future.
I was very disappointed with the Appcelerator Titanium on which I developed the version for Android. When the application was almost ready, I had to admit that speed and fault tolerance were no good. Learning Java and writing the native version from scratch took another month and a half, but the work was worth it. In the next post I will talk more about this transition.

Browser extension

This is a fully functional version of the web version, except that it is presented in a compact form and is accessible from any browser tab. Plus you can drag (drag'n'drop) the link or image from the page and immediately save it to the collection.
In general, the extension itself can be considered as another source of new users. In my case, Opera marked it as recommended and this fact brings about 1,000 users every month.

Afterword

Opera and Google recently presented their visual bookmarks that are very reminiscent of Raindrop both in terms of interface and in terms of functionality. But do not forget that their solutions are not cross-browser and that they are still ordinary bookmarks, without preserving the content and the possibility of deferred reading of articles.
I will be glad to hear from you constructive criticism and suggestions for the development of the service in the comments!