Five students from North Macedonia raised more than €400,000 to develop a marketing tool for the American social network Reddit, the largest aggregator of online communities. It’s called Howitzer and is mainly aimed at entrepreneurs, startups and Growth Hackers.
The tool helps find and target potential customers on Reddit and their direct contact, resulting in an average response rate of 40-45% and an excellent conversion rate.
Launched in March 2021, Howitzer closed its first pre-seed round last month, raising €400,000 from high-profile investors such as Budapest-based Day One Capital and business angels Mergim Cahani, founder and CEO of Albanian search engine and content platform Gjiraffa, and Matei Pavel of Konk Media, based in Romania.
“As traditional online ads become more expensive and less effective due to ad fatigue and the use of blockers, Howitzer introduces a new way to reach audiences in a personalized and authentic way at scale. Using Reddit metadata, the algorithm understands which users are in your potential audience, extracts them, and sets up personalized direct message campaigns. Bernat Nasca of Day One Capital wrote in a Medium job.
Howitzer plans to use funds from this investment round for team expansion, product completion, and growth and marketing.
How to Master Community Marketing
In an interview with The Recursive, Howitzer co-founder and CEO, software engineer Nikola Velkovski, explains how the team came up with the idea for this marketing tool.
“Before working Howitzerwe worked on a mobile application called Beer money, which aimed to group the microtasks of the most popular platforms and allow the operation of several platforms at the same time, via the mobile phone. After finishing Beermoney MVP, we decided to launch it, and Reddit seemed like the best place, because there are 2-3 subreddits related to this topic, with several million members who were our potential customers,” Velkovski told The Recursive.
The team then tried to grow the product organically by commenting and posting, but every comment and post on the topic was deleted and the account was banned from that subreddit because Reddit has a no-auto policy. -promotion, explains Velkovski.
And that’s when the howitzer concept was born.
“I wrote a script that fetched all the members of these subreddits and, based on the keywords, it filtered potential users. Then I sent a personalized Reddit message to all these users, and the result was: over 2,000 downloads on Google Play in less than 14 days. That script was actually the beginning of Howitzer,” Velkovski tells The Recursive.
After that, Velkovski and the rest of the team decided to focus entirely on creating the script into a complete marketing tool for Reddit.
“We are currently starting to expand and spread globally, first among startups, growth marketers and crypto/NFT startups, then the goal is to develop Howitzer into a hacking tool universal growth tool for social media marketing agencies – commercial brands, dropshippers, etc. “, Velkovski tells The Recursive.
The team is also working on Howitzer 2.0, a significantly advanced version of the tool, and there are plans to launch it on Product Hunt next.
“In the next 6 months, we are focusing on Reddit, and later we plan to expand to other platforms, such as Twitter, Discord and other similar platforms, where the ‘Platform Outreach’ paradigm can be applied,” concluded Velkovsky.