Davis Baer is the co-founder of OneUp, a social media recycling & scheduling tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google My Business. It differs from tools like Buffer and Hootsuite in that it allows for posts to be set to automatically repeat at set intervals. Customers include startup founders, small business owners, bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, and social media managers.
Davis is a co-founder of OneUp, a social media scheduling and recycling application. They debuted in January 2017 in a market saturated with VC-funded companies like Buffer and Hootsuite. OneUp is now a profitable venture generating thousands of dollars thanks to its content and word-of-mouth marketing.
Maximize Your Social Media Engagement
I am the co-founder of OneUp, a social media scheduling application that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google My Business.
OneUp differs from tools like Buffer and Hootsuite in that a post can be scheduled to recur at set intervals, such as daily, weekly, monthly, every three months, every six months, or annually.
Our clientele include startup founders, small business owners, bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, and social media administrators – essentially any type of business, as well as individuals in the process of establishing a personal brand.
Here are some examples of how our clients utilize OneUp:
The proprietor of an e-commerce store has numerous blog posts, each emphasizing a distinct product he sells. He has them slated to be posted daily. However, once all the posts have been read, they will automatically repeat. Previously, he was performing all of these tasks manually. Now he has a method for consistently driving traffic back to his website and products.
Monday through Friday, a radio station used to manually duplicate and paste the same social media posts about specific programs beginning at different times. Now, with OneUp, they can simply set these posts to recur, saving them hours of tiresome work each week.
The Importance of Social Media Marketing
In 2012, I graduated from Grove City College, a modest institution in Pennsylvania, with a degree in finance. After graduating, I worked a few corporate finance positions that I abhorred. The saddest part was that almost everyone I worked with also despised their employment and endured their torment week after week, motivated only by the promise of a weekend off or those glorious 2–3 weeks of vacation each year. The gilded restraints are an actual item.
Several years ago, I had the opportunity to abandon corporate finance and join a startup founded by a former college classmate. Due to the fact that the company’s founder had only raised a small seed round from friends and family to get things off the ground, I joined to assist with marketing but accepted a significant pay reduction from my previous salary.
The budget was depleted quicker than anticipated, as freelancers were hired to develop the website and mobile app, and, amusing fact, development costs never really end. However, that position provided me with invaluable experience and taught me that it is possible to appreciate my work. Prior to that, I had never believed that my contributions made a difference in the large organizations where I was employed.
I joined my co-founder Vishal Kumar at OneUp after performing some freelance marketing and working on a few no-code side projects. OneUp was established to enhance the visibility of social media content.
When you share something on social media, approximately 5% of your followers will typically see it. Despite this, most people spend inordinate amounts of time and effort creating social media posts and only share them once across all of their social media channels, ensuring that the majority of their followers will never see them.
OneUp assists these individuals by driving traffic and engagement to the content they have labored so hard to create.
How OneUp Simplified Social Media Management for Small Business Owners
Vishal began OneUp in 2017 as a side project, on which he labored evenings and weekends while maintaining his day job.
He is the technical co-founder and has constructed everything himself using the domain knowledge he gained during an apprenticeship at a social media management firm a few years ago.
The original product began as a bare-bones MVP and underwent numerous iterations in terms of landing page copy, UI, enrollment process, flow, and functionality, all in an effort to achieve product-market fit.
The product was ultimately too convoluted and perplexing, so we stripped it down and aimed for an extremely simple and intuitive experience, so that new users can immediately grasp how to use OneUp.
Vishal launched OneUp initially on Product Hunt, where it performed well and attracted the first paying customers. This was a significant form of validation, as you never truly know if you have a decent product until someone is willing to pay for it. Some of our competitors, such as Hootsuite and Buffer, who generate millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue, did provide some validation.
The initial launch afforded the opportunity to speak with customers, iron out problems, make enhancements, and determine which features users desire.
Almost everything we develop is a direct result of customer input. For instance, one of the largest tech publications, Hacker Noon, was looking for a way to automatically post to their social media page whenever they published a new blog post – and have each post recur once a month for the next three months.
We could certainly construct this, but we wanted to ensure that we were constructing something that customers would be willing to pay for. Before developing this feature, we negotiated a custom pricing agreement and collected payment.
A week later, OneUp made it simple to import any blog, podcast, or YouTube RSS feed and have posts automatically shared across your social media accounts at your preferred intervals.
In September of 2018, we launched OneUp 2.0 on Product Hunt and finished fourth for the day with over 550 upvotes. This resulted in over 1,400 visitors on the day of inauguration and the days that followed.
While the Product Hunt performance provides excellent social proof and will likely serve as a small source of traffic in the future, it is not a viable long-term strategy for success because the majority of Product Hunt users are not in our target market.
How OneUp is Changing the Game in Social Media Management Tools
Recently, I listened to Brian Dean, the inventor of Backlinko, discuss on a podcast how he consistently ranks his content near the top of Google for target keywords.
Create something that is 10 times greater than what currently exists.
I chose this course of action for OneUp.
There are lists of the “Top 10 Social Media Management Tools” when you Google “social media scheduling tools.” How could I improve something tenfold?
Create a spreadsheet of EVERY scheduling tool for social media.
Consequently, I took the time to compare the free plan (if any), starting price, and social networks of 90 distinct scheduling tools in a Google Sheet.
It has garnered consistent traffic and has somewhat lit on fire.
Quora
We have also discovered that Quora is an excellent source of high-quality traffic.
There are numerous queries asking for recommendations on various social media platforms, so we are working diligently to place OneUp near the top of the responses. Because they are actively pursuing a solution to their problem, the vast majority of Quora visitors represent high-quality potential customers.
Monitoring manually Facebook groups and subreddits
Other manual efforts, such as actively monitoring relevant Facebook Groups and subreddits for individuals seeking solutions to their problems, have also resulted in paying customers.
This Reddit user has since become a paying customer after discovering that our image scheduling Chrome extension was the ideal solution for his needs.
Using Personalization to Wow Your Customers
Yes! I wanted to take advantage of being small and, as Paul Graham famously stated, “do things that don’t scale” by providing an onboarding experience that wowed the users.
First, I attempted to send a personalized email to each subscriber. That was an abject failure. Perhaps it was the copy I used, or perhaps I did not personalize it enough, but I received essentially no responses. I believe the majority of recipients believed it was just another automated email.
So I began to consider several strategies to make it absolutely evident that this is a customized letter from the co-founder. My plan is to use Loom to produce a little personal video in which I introduce myself and thank each participant by name for joining.
This really made a difference! This is hard to falsify or automate, which has resulted in a response rate of more than 50% to these greeting movies. The idea that someone took the time to make a personalized video greeting for them usually shocks recipients.
This has three outstanding qualities:
It establishes a positive foundation for the connection and makes the customer aware that there is a person behind the business.
Receiving criticism is made much simpler by it. You’ve already established a line of communication and at least some level of rapport. Instead of just leaving without saying goodbye, I’ve had customers take the effort to notify me that they won’t be utilizing the service. We now have the chance to determine what went wrong or what characteristics they need that we lacked.
Some folks are so impressed by the unique touch that they tweeted about it.
While it might not scale indefinitely, there is no reason why we can’t keep doing it for at least the foreseeable future. It only takes around 15 seconds to record each video.
This customization enabled us to attract Nir Eyal as a paying client. For those who don’t know, Nir is the co-author with Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover of the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.
It helped because in the private video I showed him, I was carrying his book, which I previously purchased.
Since we now have hundreds of paying clients, word-of-mouth advertising is starting to really take off, and we are getting more and more new clients every day. Profitable and 100% bootstrapped.
We wish to maintain the present momentum while making further product changes in response to client input.
Enhancing SEO
Probably my favorite podcast is the Indie Hackers one. Finding successful entrepreneurs who are willing to provide incredible insights into how they expanded their businesses is something Courtland Allen excels at. After listening to an Indie Hackers podcast, I am always motivated or have a “light-bulb” moment.
I heartily suggest Brian Dean’s blog and YouTube tutorials to anybody looking to enhance their SEO. Julian Shapiro’s Growth Guide is a fantastic resource if you need assistance with your landing page.
You may visit OneUp or follow me on Twitter at to learn more about me.
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