How AskCory got its first 100 users

Meet Vítor Soares.

Vítor is a serial entrepreneur currently working in Lisbon, Portugal, as entrepreneur in residence at Build Up Labs.

Vítor's entrepreneurial spirit ignited in 2016, when he took the leap to start building startups. While there were challenges along the way, these experiences fueled his passion for innovation.

Vítor is a co-founder of AskCory, an AI assistant that creates custom marketing tactics tailored to your specific goals leveraging the Bullseye Framework.

The story told by Vítor

Myself and the studio CTO, João Pereira developed AskCory.ai to empower startups to leverage the Bullseye Framework, a powerful customer acquisition tool we've been using internally at Build Up Labs since 2021.

AskCory guides you through a series of questions to understand your business goals and target audience. Based on your answers, it delivers validated marketing tactics designed to help you achieve success.

Through user discovery interviews using the Jobs To Be Done approach, we realized AskCory could fulfill the needs of a wider audience, including freelancers and marketing agencies managing multiple client accounts.

AskCory was created in the 4th quarter of 2023 (it was called Catapult initially), where we created a working prototype within 1 week, the goal being to bring it to Web Summit to receive feedback mainly from marketing professionals.

By gathering the information from the first interviews, Web Summit prototype demos and some more feedback collected through Linkedin and X connections, we had positive data showing that people would pay for our unique selling proposition.

Gaining the first 100 users of AskCory involved marketing in various ways.

While AskCory itself helped us identify optimal channels in the long run, we also used it extensively to put the Bullseye Framework into practice and develop a data-driven understanding of our target audience. This meant employing lean tactics with a limited advertising budget to test various approaches suggested by AskCory.

Ultimately, this data-driven approach optimized our spending and established a strong foundation for future growth.

Marketing tactics that worked for us

Our main promotional campaign revolved around social selling, mostly using my personal profile. Platforms like LinkedIn and X were used to establish connections with potential customers by engaging in community discussions and offering insights. I did this for 5-10 hours a week to start.

Additionally, we tested the effectiveness of online advertising by experimenting with Meta Ads (primarily for data points) and Google Search Ads. This was made easy because AskCory has the ability to create social media posts and ads for you - example below.

Launching on MicroLaunch also turned out to be a great success! Not only did we receive the Product of the Month award, but we also got recognition and validation that our product is a great tool for marketers and makers.

We just recently launched on on Product Hunt.

I have been actively engaged with the Product Hunt community with the hopes of getting a following that in turn would upvote AskCory on the launch date. But didn’t get featured 😕

We find that Product Hunt is not very transparent about how products get featured, as we saw we had enough upvotes and comments to be top 3 in the first 4 hours after launch.

I wrote this LinkedIn post to explain the issue in detail:

Product Hunt is just a launch lottery

Listing the platform in directories, participating in in-person events, long-tail keywords (SEO), and PR opportunities are also part of some low-hanging fruit marketing strategies we apply.

Speaking engagements have proven to be a success for partnership opportunities but also to reinforce the social selling strategy. We have been invited to some in-person events where we get the opportunity to talk about AskCory, but we have also done podcasts.

Regarding directories, below is an example of when we were featured on Awesome AI Tools which resulted in a significant increase in sign-ups, including paying customers too.

In terms of SEO we leveraged freemium tools like Ubersuggest and Semrush to identify long-tail keywords with decent search volume in the USA market and low competition (SD).

We organized these keywords into clusters to develop a basic yet strategic backlinking plan within the website.

We utilized Scalenut initially to generate drafts for a set of 5 blog posts, manually refining them for quality.

Due to AskCory’s recent ability to create blog posts, this is a great option for our SEO efforts.

Below an example of the results of one of the pages we created targeting niche keywords.

Examples of other SEO articles on our website:

• How to figure customer acquisition cost (CAC)

• Mastering Marketing Strategy: Definition and Examples

• A Deep Dive into the Bullseye Framework Channes

Regarding PR we have previously been featured mainly in Portuguese newsletters and media - Startupt, Link To Leaders among others. This strategy has proven to indirectly help social selling strategy and is good for social proof on the website, but in our case, it did not get tons of traffic as Portugal isn’t also our target market.

Doing all of the above it took us roughly 3 months to achieve the 100th user (but in the first month we were just trying to get quality feedback, not quantity). This helped us gain valuable knowledge and insightful feedback.

We are currently at +1000 visitors a month and this number is steadily increasing.

Marketing tactics that didn’t go well

Engaging with marketing agencies and freelancers on X wasn’t as effective as we had anticipated. We realized that X was not the best platform for reaching these professionals.

While we also tried to promote AskCory to indie hackers we realized it may offer them short-term benefits but it doesn’t align with their long-term vision (at least at the moment).

Meta Ads weren’t great either, as it was hard to avoid a ton of junk clicks.

We also tried to run some experiments with issues in marketing-related newsletters and an influencer-promoted post on Linkedin, but our budget for that was just too low (less than $100 spent).

Any questions, feedback, or advice for Vítor? You can find him here:

• LinkedIn

• X

• AskCory

Another recent product that Vítor co-created is GrantsFinder. It is an innovative AI-powered platform that simplifies your search for funding opportunities.

By providing a brief description of your project, GrantsFinder’s intelligent system can identify relevant European grants and tenders that match your needs. This eliminates the need for searching for it manually, saving valuable time and effort.