Ask HN: Getting users
In the what startups are really like topic, a few people wanted pg to expand on this, so I figured it'd be a good standalone topic.
What was your strategy in getting the first 1,000 users?
What was your strategy in getting the first 1,000 users?
Organic SEO scales stupidly well, incidentally, and if you're a bootstrappy type of person you can turn the revenue it brings into AdWords or other paid acquisition strategies, then use the revenue that brings to improve your organic SEO, then...
It really helps if you either write very well, have a unique positioning for your blog/articles/whatever, or have some sort of unfair advantage that everybody else on the Internet can't match. In my case, the unfair advantage for the last two years has been my CMS, which lets me outpublish organizations with budgets next to which mine would be rounding error. (An old buddy of mine, ex-military, on the subject of unfair advantages: "A fair fight is the result of poor planning".)
Can you elaborate? I don't understand this in the age of Wordpress and Drupal...
I would love for the answer for customer development for Matasano's product to be content development, but, like you, our blog is inside baseball. We're popular, and there's some overlap between our readers (security people) and our customers (firewall operators), but not as much as you'd think.
For services work, content has been a clean win (also: surveys, giving away posters). I'm not seeing how to do it with the product. I read your stuff and I always feel like there are a million things we're doing wrong.
It is very easy to go from downloading bingo cards to selling software to write them. Customers come in wanting to play e.g. American history bingo, customers realize the free set doesn't have exactly the words from their lesson, customers are told if they want to customize a few sample cards all they have to do is sign up for the free trial, ... you get the general idea.
Edit to add:
Incidentally, I know nearly nothing about firewalls or what the concerns of firewall operators are. I imagine they sound something like How Do I Set Up A Firewall Which [Insert Distinguishing Feature Here]. I further imagine that there are a wide range of distinguishing features which could be enumerated automatically or semi-automatically, for example, set up a firewall which allows $APP_NAME by opening up $APP_PORT. Have you considered writing an article or two about that general subject? How about writing an article or two thousand? (You can, of course, interdisperse it with more hand-crafted, higher level content.)
So it really doesn't matter what you do if you're not targeting your market correctly. You have to be honest with yourself and figure that out first. Blogging on your blog isn't as good as being a good member of the relevant messageboard for your particular community, for example. (At least not for your first 1,000 users.)
For us, it was cold calling on the seller side and PR on the buyer side. Turns out that the tech blogs have been much more willing to write about us than the gaming blogs. I don't get that, but hey, whatever. YMMV depending on your initial vertical.
(Weirdly we did cover the digital distribution stuff a fair bit, but I think that's twofold. Firstly, most of it is from major gaming players and impacts the rest of their strategy, which fanboys will leap on. Secondly, digital distribution is still New and Exciting.)
I strongly suspect this is not the case, because I have always been limited primarily by "number of prospects I can reach with my marketing" and not "number of elementary schoolteachers in the United States". (Over two million, incidentally. The Bureau of Labor Statistics will tell you all manner of fascinating things!) Nor does the percentage of teachers in the population matter very much at all, because I never address marketing to "the population", I address marketing to e.g. "the people who are searching for [bingo card activity for kids]".
Post launch: more personal networking (esp with influentials - either in person or virtual) and getting good write ups
However, before you sign up even your first user you need to make sure you have a strong viral loop going (assuming your product is suitable for it) so that every user you obtain is likely to send you even more.
IMHO it's not actually hard to get 1000 users, it's actually harder to obtain the first 50,000 users. After that you probably are reaching the inflection point and it gets easier (assuming good viral loop).
funneled into the classic "sign up to know when we launch" holding page
Edit: formatting.
WP Themes like http://themeshaper.com/wordpress-domain-parking-theme/ are your friend... takes 20 minutes to set this up.
Add to the list of emails u get from this page the email address of everyone you network with about the idea/startup. That's kinda cheaky but it's done a lot.
When u launch go through the list to spot any pr, media or VIP people -- offer them a beta. Then just launch and email blast everyone with the information.
I've also used Adsense to get initial users. For my keywords, they cost about $.10 a user, and about half of them bounced. But, it provided me with a demographic that I wouldn't have reached with Mechanical Turk.
This avenue may not fit your startup because no one may be searching your industry. I mean, if your startup is Twitter, you're not going to get very far bidding on the keyword "microblogging".
It worked with our startup because people were already finding our competitors using search (our competitors literally created the search market for us because of their large scale media buys offline), and the volume allows us to scale.
Every product launch I've been a part of has basically used some form of bribery to get users. Of course, my background is all enterprise software. We have either shown people how they are losing money by not using our product or how they will miss out on making money by not using our product. Maybe bribery is the wrong word. What's the word for bribing people with their own money?
I haven't had any "viral" products yet, so I'd personally like to hear about how that works for people :D
I think people in the enterprise world generally refer to that as "getting your salespeople to make a convincing business case".
Incentivizing.
Pretty much what Greg Mcadoo(sp?) from Seqouia said yesterday I think.
No idea why you' consider this bribery, lol. You're either saving money or helping them make more. Bribery is a (usually criminal) way of giving something for a favor.
My point was just that we've found that the best way to motivate people to use our products has been to illustrate that they're missing out on an opportunity by not using it. Since I do all enterprise work, the fastest way to do that is by showing them how it affects their money, not that our solution is cheap or expensive or anything like that.
Government?
Discount.
Anyway, to cut a long story, since Woobius is a naturally viral tool (see http://danieltenner.com/posts/0009-how-to-make-your-applicat... ), it spread from that initial kernel, with effectively no marketing.
If you don't have strong connections to potential users of your product, I would advise building a different product.
One way to resolve this problem is to ask yourself what would happen if someone who just joined my application thought it’s great and wanted to invite 20 of their friends/colleagues? If you can’t provide an easy way for that person to market your application for you, you’ll lose out on your best inviters.
As a user, it really annoys me when inviting others is a hassle. Ideally the process should be almost effortless.
I might be up for sending some HN people their first users if you are getting desparate (see my profile for contact info), but I doubt my audience of MySpacers really matches with anything that anyone here is doing.
Your leverage with paid search will depend on your longterm earning per customer and your cost of customer acquisition among other factors. I would suggest you read Sean Ellis' blog. He talks a lot about customer acquisition: http://startup-marketing.com/
It really depends what kind of thing you have, but there's almost always some list out there that it belongs on.
What I really suggest is marketing your thing by integrating it into something popular. If you create a plugin or addon that connects something huge (like Firefox, phpBB, MySpace, Facebook, iPhone) with your thing, you get to get to drink the water from the elephant's eyes.
Convincing 1,000 to give your thing a shot is not particularly hard. Once you have access to those people it's not hard to sell some of them on something else (if necessary).
What didn't work: approaching any kind of famous blogger (zero responce), google ads (huge money drain).
via our blog talking about what we're doing and why (= good for SEO, engagement of community)
PR though you'd be surprised at how little an effect this makes typically though, you gotta really target / be lucky. Tip: DaringFireball = iPhone app sales.
Twitter - great to engage users of competitor products (sorry) or people musing aloud wishing your product exists (it does! they just haven't found it!)
Spin off sites - I really love these. Do a simple project (= 1 days work) that'll get on the reddit home page or become a mini twitter hit. works really well for getting users, then convert them from the spin off site to your site. if you're a good product manager you can make this work wonders. this might be a widget (duckduckgo style) or a tshirt or mugs, or an actual service.
I'm talking about handwriting a note to someone influential. If your market is teachers, write to the department heads at a local High school. If they like it, they'll spread it to their teacher friends.
Handwriting the notes is a PAIN (it will literally hurt your hands), but it is much more effective and personal than a cookie cutter email or a mass mailing letter.
Unfortunately, this method isn't scalable, but it will give you a good start.
Perhaps, if you cheat? Let somebody else hand-write your notes. (Although you still need to create the content.)
Unfortunately my product deals with a very specific market and by the time we have 1,000 "users" we'll be billionaires.
I'm still trying to figure out how to create a SaaS product that provides water or food . . . because everyone needs that.
If you are mass market then get the blog mentions and organic SEO.
Right now, CustomerFind.com is a Twitter application that automatically follows users on Twitter. You specify a set of keywords, and then automatically follow users who have a tweet mentioning one of those keywords. Presently, on average of ~15% of users will follow back, with good keywords typically generating a 30% follow back rate.
Unfortunately, there's really no way to know if those users are real customers who will use your product/pay you. So I'm working on evolving the service. How many of you would be interested in the next iteration? The idea is to create personal conversations with customers. I am considering the following features for candidacy.
1. You get a list of users who have a tweet mentioning any one of some prespecified keywords.
1a. You have an option to auto-follow these users.
1b. You can filter the list by geography, user popularity, and emotional inflection of the message.
2. You get a CRM tool to enable you to personally engage with users. Sachin: you noticed someone is looking for "sell videogames"? You then have an opportunity to start an @reply/DM conversation with them, within the product. This coincides with Seth Godin's philosophy of permission marketing: you get to reach out to people who really want to hear what you have to say.
2a. You get automated notifications to encourage you to follow-up with more messages. Following up is critical to any good sales methodology.
2b. Each sales/conversation thread contains the user's information, and other facts mined from the tweeting history to help target the conversation.
3. You can type in a competitor's screen name (or your own!), and figure out the most popular words or phrases that its followers are tweeting about. Helps you do better targeting for your own list. For example, you type in @TheNorthFace, and learn that people are talking about "cheap snow jackets".
Anyone interested? Note: if you object by saying "that's too many conversations to keep up with!", I'd like to note that's a problem that you desperately want to have.
-Zack
- monitoring keywords (and combinations thereof - can be done via twitter search RSS)
- when match is found bring it up t my attention via iPhone push and/or some notification for desktop (AIM?). Time is of the essence.
- built-in translation (google translate is just fine), ideally bidirectional
- allow me to easily ignore the lead or quickly pick one of the templated tweets to reply with on the iPhone and desktop