Need suggestion from Marketing Guru

Yes, we’ll prepare a strategic plan and will experiment with growth hacking tactics. Performance based - of course, after initial period we love to skip to performance based pricing.
Let’s jump on a short call to find out whether it’s a fit: https://calendly.com/oos-digital-consultation/20-min

Hey @okman, in the first place, don't wait until you'll launch, start with the promotion right now. The framework is always similar:

1. first understand your target audience by running a survey/talking to students, searching for their discussions online to understand their challenges, wants, needs and the words they use and find where they are spending their time (FB groups? Reddit? TikTok?)
2. understand your biggest strength - whether it's the product itself or the CEO who loves to be in front of camera (I've recently written about it in a blogpost, am linking it bellow)
3. prepare landing pages with different types of messaging
4. use the platforms you found in 1. to deliver the message
5. run experiments to find the specific combination of messaging/channels that works
6. once you found it - do more of that thing

As per specific hacks, you can try:

• reach out to student influencers and if they like your idea, they may be willing to promote it
• go directly to universities and onboard people locally (Facebook started as a local tool for Harvard students)
• partner with other solutions focusing on the same target audience
• prepare content that they find useful/interesting based on the research in 1.
• take a look at some growth hacking tactics I've written about in this article: https://spacetime.ooo/what-is-the-difference-between-marketing-and-growth-hacking-success-stories-and-tactics/

First off - I would say start marketing now by doing customer interviews. Are you talking with college students to see what they need and are looking for before building and deploying? You should have a min. 1,000+ person waitlist in a small geographic area

Secondly - college students are a hard demographic because they have such a short LTV - typically 4 years max but typically 1-2 if that

Thirdly - straight up marketing advice

Pick a region with a lot of colleges that
a) isn't oversaturated with existing tools
b) doesn't have the brainpower to build it themselves
c) has a range of undergraduate and graduate students, preferably ones that typically go for multiple degrees (like mechanical engineering schools where a Masters is common) so you have a longer LTV

Focus on it and then once you have a playbook that works, duplicate it for another region that hits the same characteristics. My first thought is southern schools, for example, my area has a half-dozen schools ranging from communities colleges to a medical school within 30 miles but very little dev talent within the schools

Find insider influencers - not necessarily the ones your probably thinking of like athletes. Nope. go for the ones that talk to a lot of people - like the tutors at the math center. They already encounter lots of freshman and are handing out advice. I barely knew a few athletes in college and certainly wouldn't have taken their advice - if they talked to me at all. The best tutors? Oh, the whole department knew them!

Pick a social network and stick to it to grow a following by having a reputation (what's the core value the company is providing? make that crystal clear in conversational words the students themselves would use to describe your service - customer interviews to the rescue!)

• Most universities have FB groups for each class, and there are often local newsletters and group chats started and run by students for different things from selling textbooks to renting rooms
• Reddit would be the typical answer, but the local groups are often populated with older people, so that's not much use here
• see if there are any Discord channels for the school!
• you could do some guerilla marketing like creating a Tinder or Bumble account for the company - this could come off very poorly, so have a college student (who isn't an outsider nerd, speaking from experience here) make it if you go the guerilla route

Stay away from faculty partnerships. College students don't trust the school. they trust fellow students. If the college approves you there's zero cool factor I don't care how great the app is. And you'll have to jump through a bajillion hoops for pennies vs scaling quick by WOM.

Checkout this guide from Lenny's Newsletter on building a marketplace. Lots of the companies he referenced did start with college kids but were able to be used long out of college (Uber, Doordash, etc)

Good luck!

100% you need to post a lot on social media.

It's free to post, and you can create content very cheaply. You can start testing messaging and see what gets the most engagement... then refine from there.

Are you a college student now? Why not post on college forums, groups, other SM groups and try and drive engagement. The stronger the offering for a particular college the more likely students in that college are to enter.

You can make it really easy for them to refer their friends, probably at onboarding, and/or gamify the system to encourage referrals. The more people they get to use, the more points they get for in app social cred or real world prizes and utility.