How to Find Your Early Adopters: Getting to 1000+ Users

I won't speak for Sandy, but Quibb's not (necessarily) built with the startup niche in mind. She knew the most likely people to try a work linksharing tool would be tech/startup workers, so she focused on the path of least resistance. As to how she found them and reached them, it was mining her network for a strong first group of users, and tons of emails, coffees, and follow up.

To me the useful lesson of Quibb's first 1k is that your earliest users may not look like exactly like your target market, but need to be the most likely to adopt and provide useful feedback. Especially in B2C, this is likely some subset of the tech early adopter archetype.

If the idea doesn't scale it could be a problem, especially if your revenue model is based on scaling or if you're planning on raising money.

I think the sentiment you're referring to is mostly "my idea scales but my prototype doesn't - I can't ship before my prototype scales!" and commenters saying don't let that stop you. That's definitely a mental hurdle to get over but a much more fixable problem.

The advice in this article isn't "don't worry if your plan [or product] isn't scalable." It's "getting your first 1,000 users is usually not a scalable process."

The idea is that you need to do some serious legwork, and involve high-touch, high-response tactics to nurture and cultivate your early userbase. You're tending to every plant in the garden, personally, by hand. That's not a scalable process, but it can be necessary before being able to transition into scale mode.

This advice is offered in opposition to the "build it and they will come" approach, in which you build a product, throw in a few theoretical viral loops and growth-hack mechanics, maybe go for a bit of PR pickup, and then assume the product will achieve scale on its own.

A lot of growth plots don't start off linear or exponential. They start off with a few staircases.

I believe that it truly is a problem - specifically with respect to scalable marketing and especially if the founders are engineers with a great dislike of anything marketing related (yours truly included).

We like to believe that once we launch and get a handful of users, the viral effect will take place and bada-bing bada-boom we will have a million users. Movies like social network make it look like Facebook reached its first million users drinking and coding 24/7 (I still love that movie) - but the truth is that you have to put the effort in building relationships with your users and there is no scalable way to do that.

If you have no idea where potential consumers of your product might be, you shouldn't even start building something to target them.