How to get 45,000 pre-launch signups in your 1st 20 days | Hacker News Reader

How to get 45,000 pre-launch signups in your 1st 20 days

12 pointsbetashop10 comments

This is what we've done at Fab.com since we put up a pre-launch splash-page on March 9th.

1. Create scarcity. Require future members to request an invite.

2. Create levels of priority access. The more friends who join, the higher level of attainment. See for yourself at http://fab.com/priority-access.

3. Provide easy ways for users to share on Facebook, Twitter, email contacts, etc.

4. Target influencers on Facebook. We took out a very small ad buy on Facebook targeted to less than 100,000 people who we thought would be big influencers. They have driven the viral growth.

We're now adding 4k users per day. Do a Twitter search for Fab.com and see for yourself the activity.

Oh, and it helps to be in a sexy category that a lot of people are interested, where there is no current leading online player (in our case online design sales).

5. Regular self-congratulatory HN posts :-)

"Create levels of priority access. The more friends who join, the higher level of attainment. See for yourself at http://fab.com/priority-access.

Good idea. I guess if one was planning on launching a different kind of business (e.g. a SaaS) you could award people who refer X number of friends with a free lifetime account...it won't cost you anything except for a few missed sales.

Just don't go down the "Win a free iPad" route, as that'll bring in a whole lot of free riders that have no interest in your product and are only in it for the chance to win.

Would be interesting to know exactly how much $ was spent on the "very small ad buy" and any other paid advertising that occurred.

Along with the other commenter who noted that a previous site (with existing membership) already existed on the domain it's hard to determine if these techniques or other factors were at play here.

It would be great if I could import addresses from gmail (or other services) instead of typing emails one by one...

oh, nm, it is under "more invite options" ;)

It probably also helps that you had a pre-existing social network at the same site right?

Actually, that's turned out to be little help. Less than 4k of our new subs are former members so far.

You're only at approximately 11 times that now, so I'd venture to guess that it's a bigger deal than you're crediting it.

Most people would kill to have a ~4,000 startup base to spread the word.

How much was the domain?

Definitely keen to know this! Unowned 3 letter domains are long extinct...

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