Pt 2: I have had success with guerrilla marketing?
I originally asked if guerrilla marketing works in another thread. Here are the results from my first experiment with this style of marketing!
On 3/31 I launched a quick and dirty (pun intended) tool:

With the hope that the CTA at the bottom of the page might drive some traffic to the personal finance tool i'm (constantly talking about) building.
So what happened?
TL;DR:
Nearly 2,000 people visited my meme
A little over 300 people clicked the CTA
A little over 20 people made accounts
Marketing like this feels useful! and I will continue to try things like this in the future!
First off, miraculously, we got 2nd place on the day. If you voted, thanks! If you didn't, I still appreciate you!
Here are the numbers (I use @GoatCounter for very lightweight analytics):

arrow shows launch
At time of posting, we are just under 2,000 page views. This may be an undercount, as presumably some people block the tracking script.
I think a lot of people found it amusing, but not a ton of people shared it. ~56 unique "amount" query param urls were hit, which get attached if you click the share button.
So ~2% of people actually shared via the "share with your boss" button

(this could be an undercount, for example if you just share the url)
My takeaway here is that this probably isn't very "viral", i.e the number of shares per visit is super low. To really have something like this take off, we would need a higher viral coefficient.
The end goal was to drive traffic to my main project, and here is how that panned out:

(arrow shows launch)
So around 335 visitors driven to my project!
I think ~20 people signed up for My Financé from this campaign. I am so excited about this!
There are still a ton of instabilities in My Financé, and I am still working out the kinks with the @plaid integration, so my apologies to those 20 users for any roughness you might have hit. I want the experience to be super polished, but I also want to ship fast, and that's a trade-off I'm learning how to make.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I would love to hear any feedback you might have, and am especially interested in trying to do some user interviews. if your keen to check out the tool and talk about it, I would be psyched!
Replies
Hey, thanks for sharing your findings! I voted for you, so cool that you got second place!
I'm curious, how did you manage to get the first upvotes? Like, did you post something on social media, or talked to friends, or something else?
I'm asking because I only have 1 follower here (you lol) and basically no one that cares about Product Hunt on my X account. I want to launch, but I'm not sure how to get the initial upvotes.
Purposeful Poop
@rafa_bg Hey nice to see you again!
I have no social media or linkedin, so I didn't post anything there. The first 4 hours are randomized on the leaderboard, so you'll get exposure either way! then after 4 hours it starts being a ranking.
For me, I just tried to post entertaining or hopefully value add posts in the forums. not clear how much that works, but really that is the only promotion I did. (I also asked my mom to give me an upvote, which she did around 9PM lol).
Purposeful Poop
@rafa_bg i'm certain kitty points have no impact whatsoever.
I believe a notification might go out to your followers when you launch (probably depends on what notifications they allow), but im not sure how many people showed up for my launch because of that!
This is such a fun and scrappy case study — love seeing data behind experiments like this. Guerrilla marketing in SaaS is often underestimated, but this proves how a bold (and cheeky) concept can still drive real traffic.
That CTA placement was smart, and 335 visits + 20 signups is no joke given the cost (and humor) of the campaign. Also appreciate the honest reflection on virality vs. shareability — not enough people track that nuance.
Curious to hear: would you iterate on this concept with a “next level” version or go for a totally different meme mechanic next time?
Purposeful Poop
I have a few more ideas for similar things to try in the future! One approach is making a tool that is actually useful and a bit more sticky, where the CTA gets more exposure. Another option is just something funnier or at least more interesting.
I need to spend some of my free time building out the underlying app a bit better to be able to convert those users to paying customers, but this series isn't over yet!