You are not at the branding and promotions stage - you are at the UX and user studies stage.
Your user experience is ... void of any considerations for your user. No way to search for a particular set of projects, no way to see potential matches, no way to see how old a particular request is, no way to unselect a city, etc.
I would strongly recommend you avoid marketing and promotions until you have iterated several times on real user feedback. Your current product will most likely leak users so you'll just be wasting money.
Don't try to get user testing through marketing - that's super inefficient. Just pay people directly to use your product and give you some real world feedback. Much faster, cost effective, and easier to do.
To address your need for marketing - I strongly think this is a red herring.
Don't spend effort or money to grow your website until you've validated that your website actually solves a real problem and does it well. It doesn't cost that much to validate and it can save you a ton of wasted effort.
I've skipped this step several times, and I can tell you it is not worth it. You can spend a year marketing and growing your project only to realize that it's just not a strong enough value add to be a business.
Your brain doesn't want to hear rejection so it often skips this step. But listen to reason. You can spend a week paying real users to tell you how much your app sucks, or you can spend a year of your time and energy and thousands of dollars marketing to come to the same conclusion.
Comments
You are not at the branding and promotions stage - you are at the UX and user studies stage.
Your user experience is ... void of any considerations for your user. No way to search for a particular set of projects, no way to see potential matches, no way to see how old a particular request is, no way to unselect a city, etc.
I would strongly recommend you avoid marketing and promotions until you have iterated several times on real user feedback. Your current product will most likely leak users so you'll just be wasting money.
Don't try to get user testing through marketing - that's super inefficient. Just pay people directly to use your product and give you some real world feedback. Much faster, cost effective, and easier to do.
To address your need for marketing - I strongly think this is a red herring.
Don't spend effort or money to grow your website until you've validated that your website actually solves a real problem and does it well. It doesn't cost that much to validate and it can save you a ton of wasted effort.
I've skipped this step several times, and I can tell you it is not worth it. You can spend a year marketing and growing your project only to realize that it's just not a strong enough value add to be a business.
Your brain doesn't want to hear rejection so it often skips this step. But listen to reason. You can spend a week paying real users to tell you how much your app sucks, or you can spend a year of your time and energy and thousands of dollars marketing to come to the same conclusion.
Don't skip this!!!