How I'd grow Daymind

Daymind is a Chrome extension that helps you train creativity.

You will get a challenging prompt every day, designed to improve your ability to come up with new ideas.

The goal is to make creativity a lasting habit, and you should start noticing benefits after a few weeks.

But who is it for? Potentially everyone. This is a challenge; the website ends up speaking to no one. My advice would be niching down.

Find the people who could benefit the most from the app, and position the product for them without worrying about others.

Select the 5 most important audiences, and create individual landing pages that are 100% relevant to them.

In this case, Daymind would be really useful for people who make a living out of their creative skills: writers, artists, musicians, etc.

This will also help with monetization. Right now the product is free, but this isn’t a non profit so that’ll need to change soon.

In my experience, people pay easily if a product is targeted just at them, instead of at the general public. The perceived value is higher.

The main risk: people could get bored and uninstall the product. That’s why I’d use gamification to prevent churn.

For example, I’d implement a public leaderboard. Once a user wins a few days in a row, their competitive spirit won’t let them break the streak!

Another cool feature would be seeing your friends’ prompt fills, and commenting on them.

This could also be a powerful referral mechanism. If one or two friends are already using a product, I’d be a lot more inclined to use it too.

I’d extend gamification to social media too, Twitter in particular.

How about a weekly challenge (with a dedicated hashtag) that rewards the most original responses?

It would be a great way to stimulate word of mouth. Adding prizes would move it even farther.

SEO is hard when you have a new product because no one is actively searching for it. So, what do you do in these cases?

My opinion: go for broader terms that have similar search intents. In this case, Daymind could optimize for “brain training app”.

Since this is an extension, they can also optimize for the Chrome web store.

They should use keywords in the title and description, and add high-quality images. Then monitor other ranking factors outside their control like ratings, number of downloads, etc.

Being unique has its advantages too. E.g. they could pitch to websites already ranking on Google for review terms like “best brain training apps”.

Since there are no other apps like Daymind, they could easily get a spot, and quality referral traffic with intent.

This also works as a link building strategy. They can add the first link from a popular site to their pitch as social proof.

People look for context before making the decision to link to you. If they see you’ve already been featured, your chances will be much higher.

When you don’t have many commercial keywords to target, you need to double-down on informational keywords. They don’t convert as well, but they have higher search volume.

To find ideas always start with your audience. What would someone who’d use Daymind search for?

There’s definitely room for community promotion. Time to make good use of those dedicated landing pages I suggested before!

Let’s take writers as an example. Would they be interested in a way to enhance their creativity and overcome writer’s block? Of course!

Pro tip: self-promoting while adding value is hard. The best way to get attention is with storytelling.

People love to read real stuff.

What’s the personal story behind the project? How did they come up with the idea? What product benefits have they personally experienced?

An idea I’d consider for the future is a phone app: using push notifications to prompt users to commit 1x a day.

A phone app would help Daymind reach more people, and increase monetization opportunities through in-app purchases.

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