Ask YC: Source of users for early stage startups | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Source of users for early stage startups

16 pointsjyothi20 comments

When in early stages esp in an online B2C model one usually faces the following issues "together"

- You need real users to evaluate your business, to dictate your product/features/presentation etc.. in effect evolve the idea.

- Your product might not be mature or tuned to generate good ROI.

You have little money to spend it on paid marketing, with low ROI it obviously seems too pricey or risky. But it becomes critical to prove that your startup brings value, it works (for a VC it would be mostly - you can make money)

So you need traffic (significant - lets say 3-4K hits a day).

What are some smart ways (preferably deterministic sources) you have found to achieve the reach you need ?

Google/Yahoo/MSN search. Digg, Stumble Upon.. more.. ?

View on HN

Create a persona of the audience you think would like you're offering. Coders? Single moms? Rap enthusiasts?

Find out where they spend their time online and hang out there. If it's a forum, post a lot and have a signature link back to your site. If it's a blog, comment a lot (intelligently) and eventually drop a note to the blogger for some coverage or feedback.

SEO, SEO, SEO. As part of your persona thinking, figure out what your audiences searches for and be high in those results. Don't guess. KNOW. Do keyword research.

Social media aggregators (digg, etc) require that you be funny, controversial, or useful. If you can tweak your initial offering so that you (or better yet, your ever-changing content) can meet these criteria, you can perform well.

Word of mouth/virality. If having 10 active users doesn't result in growth, you should improve your product until it does.

We're targeting single coding hiphop moms. It's going quite well.

If you can afford it, buy some users from an existing service by having that service offer your service to their users for "free". You'll probably have to pay the existing service a fee for this (unless you have some connection or you've found a service that is a true synergy with yours).

In our case Google AdWords, online directories and SEO helped a lot. But the most valuable reference marketing was a lot of friends who are active in forums and chat rooms and can recommend your site in a proper context.

TechCrunch is a good place to start. They're widely read and will generate at least that many visits for a day or 2. At that point its up to you to keep those incoming users and get more. Having a way for people to tell their friends (or some kind of other social/viral feature) helps, but the best thing to do that will actually ensure you get on TechCrunch in the first place is have a great app that people want to use. RescueTime currently gets >50% of what we got on TechCrunch every day - and we don't have any SEO and aren't doing any marketing or PR.

Thanks Brain. I am a big fan of RescueTime and I totally see how it could retain 50%(which is extremely good) users from the initial boost it got from techcrunch.

However unlike RescueTime which attracts a very high daily active users, we have a product discover & research site http://www.reviewgist.com. We would definitely work on to improve the engagement levels and plan it before we do PR but as you see the predominant traffic would be consumers and we would still have to deduce alternative sources.

Easiest ways that we found are to buy AdWords (or equivalent) and try out a few campaigns and to buy users from an existing source. Be mindful of the quality of these users because they may not match the exact demographic that you are looking for unless you are very particular (willing to pay $$).

We also found that it is both more difficult and more valuable to organically grow a user base that finds good utility in your service. These users typically need more word-of-mouth (including via respected blogs) or viral messaging. A good way to get people in the door is to offer a free basic service coupled with a clear path to upgrade later to a premium service when you've ironed out your business model and service offerings.

Last, we've found that a good way to keep people interested in the service itself is to keep the technology open source. This builds a very involved community, ensures that if the service is valuable that it can continue, and provides excellent references later on when you will be asked if can support large numbers of users.

+1 to SEO

Best way to get early free traffic is with good SEO. Organic traffic is free, optimize for it! (read semoz!)

Submit your site and it contents to every online directory / listing service possible. Submitting our product data to Google Product search (froogle) has worked out great for us (tons of free traffic)

You could try Mechanical Turk. From what I hear, you can post a "visit my site, fill out a quiz and get a nickel" link. And, you can let people opt in to give their email address to keep them updated on the site.

If you craft the Mechanical Turk job well, you could probably get 5000 visits for a nickel each.

Thanks for responding. I have the same question, does this traffic stay ?

We have used stumbleupon to get 80-100 hits a day. This traffic usually has a low bounce rate of 20-30%. However when we took the same page and bid on StumbleUpon network for paid insertions it sure sends traffic but visitors hardly stay. Bounce rates hit 90%.

I'm not sure if they stay or not, but if they like your site well enough, they might give you their email address, and allow you to email updates regarding changes to your site.

I'm not saying it's a sure-fire way to get permanent users. I'm just saying that it's a cheap way to get a couple thousand users to hit your site. Whether they stay or not... Doesn't that depend on if they like what they see, not on how they got there in the first place?

I don't think that's the best way. Sure you get hits, but how many actually stay?

Learn about SEO

I would say to aim for getting a cult following like in the early days of craigslist or facebook.

We offered a free product until we could justify charging. More importantly a high profile blogger took notice and spread the word, and we had also optimized our site for search engine visibility.

3-4K hits a day is significant?

Did you miss out some zeroes?

Absolutely depends on what you are doing.. 3-4k hits (unique visitors) a day for an ecommerce website at a 1-2% conversion rate is 60-80 orders. I with an ecommerce startup. With that volume I'd be driving a lambo.

Unique visitors? Sure, that's good.

But that's not what 'hits' usually refers to, I think.

And with an ecommerce startup, sure, that'd be great.

I meant to say 3-4 unique visitors. We are an e-commerce site - a product discovery and research site - http://www.reviewgist.com

That should do for us for now. For any kind of AB tests and even to get some money trickling that can be promising enough.

context is everything.

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