

Ask YC: Source of users for early stage startups - jyothi

When in early stages esp in an online B2C model one usually faces the following issues "together"<p>- You need real users to evaluate your business, to dictate your product/features/presentation etc.. in effect evolve the idea.<p>- Your product might not be mature or tuned to generate good ROI.<p>You have little money to spend it on paid marketing, with low ROI it obviously seems too pricey or risky. But it becomes critical to prove that your startup brings value, it works (for a VC it would be mostly - you can make money)<p>So you need traffic (significant - lets say 3-4K hits a day).<p>What are some smart ways (preferably deterministic sources) you have found to achieve the reach you need ?<p>Google/Yahoo/MSN search. Digg, Stumble Upon.. more.. ?
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webwright
Create a persona of the audience you think would like you're offering. Coders?
Single moms? Rap enthusiasts?

Find out where they spend their time online and hang out there. If it's a
forum, post a lot and have a signature link back to your site. If it's a blog,
comment a lot (intelligently) and eventually drop a note to the blogger for
some coverage or feedback.

SEO, SEO, SEO. As part of your persona thinking, figure out what your
audiences searches for and be high in those results. Don't guess. KNOW. Do
keyword research.

Social media aggregators (digg, etc) require that you be funny, controversial,
or useful. If you can tweak your initial offering so that you (or better yet,
your ever-changing content) can meet these criteria, you can perform well.

Word of mouth/virality. If having 10 active users doesn't result in growth,
you should improve your product until it does.

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ivankirigin
We're targeting single coding hiphop moms. It's going quite well.

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bayareaguy
If you can afford it, buy some users from an existing service by having that
service offer your service to their users for "free". You'll probably have to
pay the existing service a fee for this (unless you have some connection or
you've found a service that is a true synergy with yours).

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szferi
In our case Google AdWords, online directories and SEO helped a lot. But the
most valuable reference marketing was a lot of friends who are active in
forums and chat rooms and can recommend your site in a proper context.

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bfioca
TechCrunch is a good place to start. They're widely read and will generate at
least that many visits for a day or 2. At that point its up to you to keep
those incoming users and get more. Having a way for people to tell their
friends (or some kind of other social/viral feature) helps, but the best thing
to do that will actually ensure you get on TechCrunch in the first place is
have a great app that people want to use. RescueTime currently gets >50% of
what we got on TechCrunch every day - and we don't have any SEO and aren't
doing any marketing or PR.

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jyothi
Thanks Brain. I am a big fan of RescueTime and I totally see how it could
retain 50%(which is extremely good) users from the initial boost it got from
techcrunch.

However unlike RescueTime which attracts a very high daily active users, we
have a product discover & research site <http://www.reviewgist.com>. We would
definitely work on to improve the engagement levels and plan it before we do
PR but as you see the predominant traffic would be consumers and we would
still have to deduce alternative sources.

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secorp
Easiest ways that we found are to buy AdWords (or equivalent) and try out a
few campaigns and to buy users from an existing source. Be mindful of the
quality of these users because they may not match the exact demographic that
you are looking for unless you are very particular (willing to pay $$).

We also found that it is both more difficult and more valuable to organically
grow a user base that finds good utility in your service. These users
typically need more word-of-mouth (including via respected blogs) or viral
messaging. A good way to get people in the door is to offer a free basic
service coupled with a clear path to upgrade later to a premium service when
you've ironed out your business model and service offerings.

Last, we've found that a good way to keep people interested in the service
itself is to keep the technology open source. This builds a very involved
community, ensures that if the service is valuable that it can continue, and
provides excellent references later on when you will be asked if can support
large numbers of users.

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mkull
+1 to SEO

Best way to get early free traffic is with good SEO. Organic traffic is free,
optimize for it! (read semoz!)

Submit your site and it contents to every online directory / listing service
possible. Submitting our product data to Google Product search (froogle) has
worked out great for us (tons of free traffic)

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iamelgringo
You could try Mechanical Turk. From what I hear, you can post a "visit my
site, fill out a quiz and get a nickel" link. And, you can let people opt in
to give their email address to keep them updated on the site.

If you craft the Mechanical Turk job well, you could probably get 5000 visits
for a nickel each.

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jyothi
Thanks for responding. I have the same question, does this traffic stay ?

We have used stumbleupon to get 80-100 hits a day. This traffic usually has a
low bounce rate of 20-30%. However when we took the same page and bid on
StumbleUpon network for paid insertions it sure sends traffic but visitors
hardly stay. Bounce rates hit 90%.

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iamelgringo
I'm not sure if they stay or not, but if they like your site well enough, they
might give you their email address, and allow you to email updates regarding
changes to your site.

I'm not saying it's a sure-fire way to get permanent users. I'm just saying
that it's a cheap way to get a couple thousand users to hit your site. Whether
they stay or not... Doesn't that depend on if they like what they see, not on
how they got there in the first place?

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jamescoops
Learn about SEO

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simianstyle
I would say to aim for getting a cult following like in the early days of
craigslist or facebook.

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merrick33
We offered a free product until we could justify charging. More importantly a
high profile blogger took notice and spread the word, and we had also
optimized our site for search engine visibility.

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ajkirwin
3-4K hits a day is significant?

Did you miss out some zeroes?

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mkull
Absolutely depends on what you are doing.. 3-4k hits (unique visitors) a day
for an ecommerce website at a 1-2% conversion rate is 60-80 orders. I with an
ecommerce startup. With that volume I'd be driving a lambo.

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ajkirwin
Unique visitors? Sure, that's good.

But that's not what 'hits' usually refers to, I think.

And with an ecommerce startup, sure, that'd be great.

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jyothi
I meant to say 3-4 unique visitors. We are an e-commerce site - a product
discovery and research site - <http://www.reviewgist.com>

That should do for us for now. For any kind of AB tests and even to get some
money trickling that can be promising enough.

