

Ask HN: How to get first 1000 users? - shankar1221989

Can anyone share what all they did to get the first 1000 users on board and retain them.
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soneca
I am dealing with this right now.

For me, this "post HN" or "pitch Techcrunch" simply doesn't work. To receive
HN upvotes you have to Show HN a product very specific to tech hackers crowd -
my product is a product social network, I am sure no bootstrapped private
social network would receive any attention here. Show HN small, neat, open
source projects go much better than "try my product" Show posts. And for TC
you would have to be much more high-profile than me. Like eing one backed by a
famous accelerator, funded or a former early employee of Google/FB/Twitter.

What I am doing is dealing, progressively with three bottlenecks: visitors
coming, visitors signing up and users coming back.

For the first one, Adwords is good enough. I spent $5 daily, receive about 300
clicks (1 or 2 cents CPC). This give me a constant flow of visitors to run the
relevant experiments.

For the second one, I am improving right now. I have about 4% of the visitors
signing up. I am changing my landing page and will do some tests to bring it,
at least, 10%. Don't be tempted to focus too much on improving sign up rate
right now. The only purpous of these 2 steps is to give you a good enough flow
of new users so you can test your retention (or revenue per user) rate.
Nothing more. The same advice for your Adwords campaign, create a good enough
one, so some visitors go to your website, don't try to be a master of Adwords
(for now).

And third, the goal of all your steps so far, retention (or generating
revenue, I don't know your model). For me, having 30+ new users each day is
enough for me testing my retentions with different tactics. If you need more
than this, than you might raise your Adwords daily budget, or try a little
more to improve your sign up rate. But fix your number of new users I just
work hard enough to match this number.

When you have a good enough number of daily new users, than your work on
marketing match with your goal to deliver value to your customers, and then
good enough is no more enough. This is when you must excel on testing,
iterating and improving your product. With no excuses as "only if people knew
what I am doing"....

Good luck!

~~~
6thSigma
I've seen a ton of non-hacker related 'Show HN' posts hit the front page here.
You are right though - this is a very high tech crowd and we will up vote
things that are either helpful or interesting to us. If your product's target
demographic isn't high tech, and if it isn't very interesting to that
demographic either, you probably won't do well in a 'Show HN' post. Same thing
applies to TC.

~~~
soneca
TC is worst, since you must appeal to a tech savvy audience (at least is
broader than hackers), but also you must have some credentials or contacts. At
least on HN your are valued only by your product.

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jmathai
Buy it.

You can try to get bloggers and press but in my experience you get spikes of
traffic and what you want is predictable and consistent traffic which you can
run tests against. Getting 3k signups in one day from TechCrunch isn't
terribly valuable, IMO.

You can buy it fairly cheap from Ads on Google, Twitter or Facebook. Try them
all and see which work best for you. I prefer Google/Twitter. This is both
consistent and reproducible.

Consider getting your first 10,000 users as more of a learning experience of
what the hell you think you're building and what your customers think you've
built.

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wturner
I seriously doubt this will help you but...

I operate a wiki site and I literally spent years adding content, developing
and refining to the point that it now gets a few thousand visitors a day. I am
not selling anything and none of these people pay for anything or contribute
to the site, they are just visitors. If you want a "brute force" way to
attract an audience find an area you're interested in and make a
content/tutorial/information site out of it. If you can couple that with
something to sell you might have something. I haven't figured out the latter
part yet.

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bennyjoseph
This a good reference to get you started:
<http://www.slideshare.net/mattangriffel/growth-hacking>

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healthenclave
Like PG says make an Awesome Prouduct for a core audience eg: hackers. And put
it infront of 'em (atleast initially with no restrictions and ridiculous sign
up requirements) eg post it here on Hacker News. And take it fwd from there.

Before launching publicly you should probably let atleast a few target users
play with your product and gather their feedback .

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mansigandhi
Try putting up your product on betali.st or startupli.st We've gotten about
400 beta users from there. Retention is a different matter though!

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meerita
I made a listing website years ago. I just put 50 dollars in Google Adsense
and we made around 1000 listings that night.

~~~
richardv
Is this even possible?

1000 listings, and 50 dollars invested, would mean that even at a 10%
conversion rating which I think is safe to say, for a fresh launched website
is obscenely high, would mean you were paying 0.5 cents per click. (half a
cent).

I don't think your advice is applicable to what the original posters wants.

Without knowing what exactly the OPs business is....

It's a poorly phrased question, 1000 (paying?) users, and retain them for what
duration? Are you just wanting 1000 MAU, or just views... With 1000 users,
depending on your signup, this could mean a factor of 1:20 of users to views.
Both of which could be irrelevant to your actual businesses main metric which
is sales?

To the original poster, try and clarify what you are asking...

~~~
meerita
No, I told the poster to try AdWords, to see if the product has some, gain.
Our history was different and, we go a lot of listings because: our product
doesn't requiere registration and its really easy to publish, and there were
people posting and reposting the same ads on different states so that's why we
got a lot of traction the first day. The problem? next day the ratio of people
was null, and so on but we got indexed and without spending another dime we're
growing. It's a nice experiment we did, we're not interested on the listing
business.

------
treskot
Build something incredible. Pitch to top tech blogs like Techcrunch and you
will have your first 1000 users in no time.

To retain them. Constantly improve your product.

~~~
ibudiallo
This is like saying "A good leader Always leads by example". Sure it sounds
nice, but it doesn't give you any example.

