

Ask HN: How to successfully grow a startup? - zevel9119

I am one of the co-founders of fansunite.com a social, sports oriented, handicapping platform. 2013 was a very successful year for us. We found an angel investor who believed in what we were trying to accomplish, built our basic platform, hired a designer and two coders and moved into an office space. Two years ago I thought accomplishing all that would be the hard part and once we were up and running we had made it. Now here we are with our dream becoming a reality and the hard part is only beginning…. Growing an actively engaged community.<p>Ill give you a brief rundown of what we are currently doing and then ill pose my question.<p>-We set a goal of 5% growth per week (we are hitting and exceeding this goal every week since our launch 2 months ago)<p>-In order to hit that 5% target, each of the co-founders is actively targeting individuals on forums, twitter, facebook etc. and then re-engaging them on our site. Its working but is extremely labor intensive and as our user base grows, hitting that target every week is going to get harder and harder.<p>-We are also running contests centered around sporting events, which work to bring in large amounts of new users in batches.<p>-Twitter ads and Facebook ads were a waste of money. Lesson learned.<p>-Google ad words won’t let us advertise.  Even though we are not a gambling site we use gambling terminology, which they don’t like.<p>I’m curious how others with start-ups requiring user based content and social interaction, that are further along in the process than us, have had success growing their community? What worked and what was a waste of time? What are we missing?<p>I have no delusions about “going viral”.  I believe the only way we will have success is with hard work and putting in a lot of man-hours.  I know there are success and failure stories in this community.  I’m hoping that people are willing to share, as there are learning experiences with both.<p>Thanks in advance.
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8bithero
I would have to agree with xux's points. You really do want to make sign-up as
simple as possible. Possibly even consider authentication with Facebook,
Google, Twitter? (When trying new layouts/features you should keep A/B testing
in mind)

Also, admittedly I haven't signed up so I don't know exactly how it works, but
to build on what namenotrequired said, you really do what existing members to
be the ones bringing in people. Perhaps you could make it a bit more
'personal', by allowing users to inside facebook friends, and possibly
building private league boards where a group of friends can complete against
themselves rather than with strangers. I think it's these sort of strategies
that will help encourage users to invite their friends. Although it is
important to make inviting new users as easy as possible, please don't over do
it. There are many apps that force you to connect via facebook, or constantly
badger their users to invite people. These tactics may be effective but
personally I'm against these very aggressive acquisition tactics at the
expense of your existing members' user experience.

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namenotrequired
For now you've got a method of getting people there, even though it doesn't
scale (I'm guessing you've read PG's advice on this[1]). I'd say that what
matters right now is that those you're getting on your site, are returning and
active.

Is that 5% growth in signups, or in something else? Are those members who
you've successfully brought in returning every day? Do you have any indication
of whether your members find value in your platform?

You say you have no delusions about "going viral" \- and indeed you won't go
viral in the sense that a meme from 9gag goes viral, but communities do often
depend on their members to refer others there. For that to happen, your
product must provide good value to those members.

Talk to your members, if you aren't already, about how valuable your platform
is for them. And while you're talking to them, maybe find out where else they
hang out too? You'll probably find new places to recruit members from, and
perhaps think of new ways to grow.

Good luck!

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

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zevel9119
We have read Paul Grahams advice on doing things that don't scale. We built
our current growth tactics around that article. The 5% is a measurement of new
signups. I believe you are correct in that eventually our growth will come
from current member referrals and when that begins to occur we can stop
recruiting manually. We are actively engaging with our user base on our
platform and on twitter. I believe, in our niche, they do find us of value.
The larger the community the greater value we will have. I suppose giving
members an incentive to refer friends is something we haven't tried that could
work.

thanks for your feedback.

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xux
I've a suggestion to FansUnite. Instead of asking people to enter a username
_and_ a email, why not just use email as the login name? Much less annoying.

Also, ask for Twitter handle _after_ the user finishes registration. You want
your signup to be non-frictious as possible.

~~~
zevel9119
We are working on one click social media sign up right now. So all those
issues will be non issues soon enough. The problem with using their email as
their users name is most people don't want their email address displayed for
everyone to see. Or do you mean have them fill out those particulars after
they have signed up? Either way they will have to fill that information out at
some point.

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petervandijck
1\. Instead of signups, you should measure active users (MAU). Or you'll be
fooling yourselves.

2\. Is there some way for existing active users to bring in more people? Work
on that.

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nonickyet
What is your email? Would like to contact you to share few things. My startup
has similar approach to you, but in different industry/field. Thanks.

