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.
I've used mechanical turk in getting initial users. You can set up a task, and have turkers do very specific actions on your site, for $.05. And, studies have been done, that suggest that Turkers are really very well educated, and are probably early adopters. If you treat them with respect, and show appreciation for what they are doing, they will go the extra mile for you.
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.
Honestly, the number of your users is directly correlated to your potential market. Patrick's bingo cards are going after a much smaller market (teachers) than Drew's online storage (everyone). Colin's online storage for technically astute paranoids is probably somewhere in the middle.
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.
Honestly, the number of your users is directly correlated to your potential market.
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]".
Games blogs are usually fairly focused on games themselves, not the meta stuff around selling and buying them. OK, at Joystiq et al we would often do stuff like sales charts and in-person reports from the Xbox 360 line, but readers mostly visit for entertainment value. Writing about a marketplace site would come across too much like an ad, I think; we didn't highlight Amazon or Best Buy's sale items, for example!
(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.)
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
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.
Evidently I've done a poor job of making a joke :D
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.
Haha totally understandable. A joke like that can easily get lost. I recently joked with a potential cofounder about creating a service "100 f*ing times more addictive than cocaine". Threw him off for a bit;) Lesson learned.
Content creation and organic SEO. If you're the guy writing things that solve problems for your users, it a) brings them into your site and b) pre-disposes them to trust you when you say that using your software/service will help them with the problem they are having. (Content ranks for long-tail terms, content draws links, links help you rank for more competitive terms, repeat ad nauseum.)
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".)
To me the use of keywords on this page look borderline splog-ish. Sure a great way to get page views but how is the bounce rate when people legitimately looking up Thanksgiving land on your page?
I have no desire to rank for [turkey recipe for thanksgiving] because, as you pointed out, there is no money in it. If Google is sending me folks who are not looking explicitly for bingo cards, then Google is doing something wrong. That said, Google is pretty good about figuring out what the page is about. See the top 8 referring keywords for that page here: http://www.pastie.org/671478
You know, I just tried to track down your email address, gave up/came to my senses, and I'll just spit it out here. Connect the dots for me. How do you go from the content you publish on your blog (the one I know about, MicroISV) to selling teachers bingo cards?
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.
Oh, the blog is more for me than for my customers. The content I write for my customers is metric loads of bingo cards: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/bingo-cards (Edit to add: Oh, I have a blog on the main site too these days. No great shakes yet.)
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.)
Pre launch:
Blogging about a subject related to your startup and twittering, funneled into the classic "sign up to know when we launch" holding page, along with personal networking should give you 1000 prime users ready for when you launch.
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).
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 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.
You are probably solving a problem, right? Ask yourself how would you go about finding the solution to such problem and go there. "There" will be some blogs, community websites etc where you can add comments whenever a relevant question comes up for discussion. This worked for me.
What didn't work: approaching any kind of famous blogger (zero responce), google ads (huge money drain).
This is really interesting for me, because I'm working on this problem right now with my startup: CustomerFind.
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.
I was a user of your service. and when I signed up, I started following so many spammers I had to kill the oauth hookup. I don't know what was wrong with it, but it kept auto following all the horrible horrible spammers and my follower list just filled up with really bad people. I had to manually go through my follower list and delete people. Good thing I didn't have thousands of followers or else it could have taken me days.
The main issue was that zack's software would automatically make me follow someone. He could probably add some basic heuristics to prevent people from following spammers. Even basic bayesian filtering would have worked. Some of the spammer accounts have completely identical tweets. It would seem kind of stupid if I had to write the software to filter my followers... I could just not use customerfind, it seems easier that way.
You should consider disabling the service until you fix this issue. It wasn't just a bad experience for me, it was a negative one... one that cost me around 5 hours of work to clean up.
I'm guessing it's because you want to be the first to respond, e.g., if someone's looking for a project management app you want to suggest your product before a hundred other people suggest theirs. ;)
No, because context is king. If I ask a question and I get an answ3er within 15 minutes I still have the right context. IF I get answer next day I may no longer care as much.
If you are making money from get go, paid search is not bad if you can get to a positive ROI after a little bit of messing around.
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/
The way we got our first users for Woobius was that some of the initial team were architects, and we had strong links with a number of architecture firms. So when the product was barely useable, we deployed it and got them to start trying it out. There followed a frantic search for a decent host when we realised that those people were using Woobius for real live projects and they'd get rather annoyed if it suddenly vanished in a hard drive crash or the like.
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.
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.
Directories. There's almost always appropriate directories to get your thing listed on. iPhone app store is the extreme example. Maybe you can create an addon for Firefox and submit it to addons.mozilla.org. Maybe you have audio software and you can get it listed on some big audio software directory or blog.
It really depends what kind of thing you have, but there's almost always some list out there that it belongs on.
I suppose saying "directories" doesn't really do my suggestion justice. Although in some cases simply listing yourself can be really effective.
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).
The easiest way is make your product appeal to the widest range of users possible. If half the people on an airplane could benefit from your product than your onto a good idea.
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.
Influencers and Media Relations. Picked industry specific niches, and leaders, invited them to participate in our early stages (at least their opinion) and began strong networking. Day of release(s) had support from these opinion leaders and they helped promote.
Direct mail. I'm not talking the crappy postcards or the fake credit cards everyone gets.
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.
