Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

So thumbs up for trying new things. I really and sincerely mean that.

Now I'm going to say something that will sound discouraging but has your best interests at heart: do you currently have 100 people who absolutely, positively could not run their business without UserApp? Or, as an intermediate goal, ten? If not, your only job is for you to go out, as an actual person rather than a web page, and recruit those users one at a time. Your service level can be stupidly unscalable -- forget "Here's our API documentation", you can literally offer "Give me your laptop and I will write the integration for you. Right now. I'm serious. You think I'm not serious? Laptop. Now." (My understanding is that Patrick Collison was doing this for Stripe in the early days.) If they stop using it, rather than doing deep analytics magic to discover what lead to their lack of engagement, you should call them up and say "Dude, I literally coded the integration for you. Level with me: why isn't this everything you need in user management? What can I implement for you to get you to revert that commit?"

After you've got 10/100/etc people who really like your service, you can start thinking about scaling acquisition channels. In the process of doing that, you'll likely optimize the living daylights out of them, and in the process develop intuitions for "This test is a priority for me to run" versus "This seems like it's likely a poor use of my time even if it succeeds."

At the moment, the cart appears to be a step or two in front of the horse.

I really like your advice! Others have actually told me the same and I understand "the concept". But I would like to ask you for some more advice: how can I spend my days only focusing on getting users to use us? We are already emailing every new signup offering them help etc, and some respond with questions, which we help them with. But that usually doesn't take the whole day. I would like to know some activities on how to get more of those. Cold calling?

Otherwise, thank you for your feedback. Appreciate it :)

Cold calling could work. If I don't miss my guess, though, I bet your social circle and activities already intersect with people who build apps, so I'd use every opportunity possible to ask them about their pains with user management and to tell them that they should use UserApp instead of their homerolled solution. (Be prepared to hear "I don't have any problem with user management" and "There is nothing you could offer me, not even your services as free engineers, which would convince me to let somebody else manage this core a part of our offering." If that was the only thing you heard from the next 100 people you talked to that would still make talking to them the most productive activity you could possibly have been engaged in.)

I will give this a thought and see how I can plan my upcoming weeks. I have considered about canceling my every-day growth hacks to focus more on larger "hacks", and also finding users and helping them getting started. Let's see what happens :)

Thank you for your advice!

Hey, this is sound advice.

I've a very early days version of a travel bucket list app, that I've geographically limited to one city - my own, as the place that you can fly out from. I know that I want user's who are more travel-orientated than typical as early adopters.

I've been building up a social profile on facebook, with high quality articles/links, and interacting with travel focused people on twitter. I've added links back to the application from the facebook article. And, it feels like I'm doing this right. But, it's not yet gaining much traction, whilst actually soaking up a lot of time, and I feel like I'm not in a coding-mindset if I do too much of this that day.

I've got a small bunch of users, who are seeded from friends and friends of friends. Even a couple of randoms. Today I'm sending out a site update email, and showing them what they can do to help, as well as showing them the plan for 2014, and some interesting travel information.

I hope it makes a difference, as I agree that you need a 100 or so users initially. I've been talking to an airport about physical advertising, and I think it's too early for that at the moment, but I'm working on getting it at a reduced rate.

Ultimately, it maybe that I've tried to engage with people too early in the development process, and I need to get on with development. Tricky, though as once you start engaging it feels that you really should keep those channels going.

Anyway. Basically, I'm agreeing. And this is a progress update as to what I've been doing so far. I think there's many other things I could do; actually getting permission to survey those in the arrival area of my local airport being one. There's plenty more, but my time is limited, and in a city where the startup scene is fairly new, it's pretty hard to find co-founders, though that would be a MASSIVE help.

Cheers for the post & I hope my thoughts/progress are useful to others. Thanks for reading.

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