How Geckoboard got their first 2000 beta users (2010)

startupbynumbers.posterous.com

25 points·revorad··6 comments

I wrote this post almost 2.5 years ago - happy to answer any questions here.

Would absolutely love to see or hear more of your growth stories!

Will give it some thought. Is there anything in particular you would like me to expand on?

Hi Paul, I'm a big fan of Geckoboard - in some circles, your name is almost analogous for a dashboard :)

Getting to over 2500 signups in four months is definitely a great achievement, but I think it would be more interesting to hear about getting to 100 daily active users for example. After all, signups are not worth much if the users don't keep using the service (I'm sure this was not a problem in your case though).

I know there are a lot of generic blog posts and SaaS services for maximizing customer engagement, but reading real stories from founders is always uniquely inspiring.

Thanks!

Totally agree, beta signups is almost the definition of a vanity metric. That said, at this particular (very early) stage of product development I wanted to solicit as much feedback as possible much of which was gathered from usage data - particularly first time users usage patterns. Having a reserve of signups that I could drip into the app as we released new features was useful in itself.

Will have have a think about whether I can add any value above the noise of the generic blog posts that you mention, thanks for your interest.

Feel free to drop me a line for a private discussion. I'm seriously impressed what you're doing with BitDeli!

Analysis reveals they got over half their first 2K users from right here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com