What I Learned: Thousands of Downloads on Zero Marketing Spending

People keep asking about how we got rapid user downloads at BluelightAI with zero traditional ad spend. What worked was gutsiness, building corporate partnerships, and a lot of caffeine.

Here is exactly what moved the needle.

Going to Conferences — Finding the Market Makers

While attending The AI Conference in San Francisco, we had the benefit of meeting likeminded individuals and companies. Many of whom had bigger war chests and established customer bases and distribution channels. If you don’t have an army of your own, make strong allies.

As a startup with an AI product, several engineers, and no marketing or sales team, building a quick corporate partnership was a miraculous breakthrough.

Building a Foothold in the Kingdom

1. Coauthoring a Technical Blog Post with an Established Company

I met the CEO of Marqo at an AI conference, and then over the next few weeks we built a pitch for his team that our paired technical solution could provide unique value to their customers.

We then hustled with them to combine our softwares into a single software integration, as well as write-up a sales pitch to prospective users!

Here’s the link to the technical blog post that was circulated on their social media to their customers!

2. Webinar with the Big Boys

Zilliz has one of the largest enterprise vector database communities in the world. When I co-presented a webinar with our CTO on improving RAG applications, our product was exposed to more than ten thousand engineers.

The link to the webinar

The takeaway:
If you are building tools for technical users, you do not need a marketing budget. You need the right collaborators, the right content, and enough persistence to keep showing up where real engineers look for content and solutions.