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Civic Tech · Di Pierro Creative Original · Brazil · Aug–Oct 2026

From zero to 2,598 visitors in six weeks

How we built a search-first growth engine for a civic-tech product — with less than R$20 in paid media. A nonpartisan map of women candidates in Brazil’s 2026 elections, built from official TSE data and designed around discovery rather than paid reach.

01 · The challenge

How do you make a brand-new product discoverable during an election — without relying on paid media?

The official TSE data existed, but discovery didn’t: the experience assumed you already knew your candidate. The opportunity was to turn that dataset into a discovery product — searchable by state, office, party and cause.

Time
Six weeks from launch to the first round of voting.
Team
One person: strategy, product, data, brand, content, measurement.
Legal
Electoral rules constrained paid promotion of candidates.
Budget
Organic-first; under R$20 spent on Instagram promotion.
Neutrality
Explicitly nonpartisan, to earn trust across political fields.
02 · The hypothesis
If official electoral data becomes highly discoverable pages built around search intent, the product acquires users organically — without paid media.
Official TSE data → Candidate + state pages → Search indexing → Organic discovery → Candidate discovery

The dataset itself became the content engine: every candidate, state and electoral category is an entry point — 62+ static pages, sitemap, IndexNow, and llms.txt for AI assistants (GEO) from day one.

03 · Results

Six weeks of growth with almost no paid acquisition

2,598
unique visitors
3,824
page views
907
Google + Bing clicks
< R$20
paid media
14,275
Instagram views
251
Instagram → site taps
34
AI-assistant visits
7,134
female candidacies mapped
Launch week
≈100 visitors / week
Election week
1,500+ visitors / week
Peak day
≈390 visitors · Sat, Oct 3
Mobile
60% of all visits
04 · Search as the growth engine

Search beat paid reach

ChannelImpressionsClicksCTR
Bing6,48277512%
Google70413219%

IndexNow became an acquisition enabler for a new domain: Bing clicks grew from ~5 in the first measured week to 612 in the last. The branded query reached an 88% CTR. And the site logged 34 visits from ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity — ChatGPT referrals growing 6 → 9 → 13 per week — early validation of GEO as an acquisition channel.

05 · Learnings
Search-first acquisition
Traffic without paid reach.
Data as a content engine
7,134 candidacies became scalable discovery pages.
IndexNow + static pages
Cut the discovery lag for a new domain.
Instagram as trust layer
A human voice; the product easier to understand.
GEO from day one
Early presence in AI-assisted discovery.
“When paid acquisition and algorithmic distribution are constrained, discoverability becomes a product feature.”
Talk on WhatsApp →Visit the product → elasnaurna.com.brDownload the full case study (PDF) →