

Ask HN: How to scale an early startup to grow from 0 to 10000 to 1M customers? - cloudpre

What's the right way to scale a startup from 0 to 1M customers without lot of $$$ spend on PR and Adwords in the beginning?<p>It's difficult to come out from code incubation - directory submission,<p>Chasing PR is one way but who covers a non-ycombinator or funded startup. No one bothers to write about you or even return your email or tweet :( - that's reality.<p>Spending on adwords seems to expensive affair - doing it via forums will take ages to scale..<p>I know lot of startups would have undergone the same situation. So would love to see your comments.<p>Where or how do we start? What are the companies who have seen exponential growth?<p>If our background helps, We - http://www.Clickdesk.com - are new to live-chat space but we are lighting fast, Google-AppEngine based, allow agents to receive Chats on Skype and Google Talk, allow visitors to call from Browser without installing anything new and from local access numbers. Eg: customer in Japan calls a local number in Tokyo to reach you business...<p>Hope this post will help others.
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petervandijck
1\. Figure out how much money you make from an average customer in total.

2\. Experiment with ads and affiliates and such and keep the cost per new
customer below the one you figured out in 1.

It's really that easy.

