Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users? - sherm8n
======
no1youknowz
I looked at the other Ask HN for 100 users.

Only 1 person mentioned influencers. I'm going to recommend it again, but with
more detail.

An influencer has a particular niche/segment in the market that they are
passionate about. They may have various channels in which to communicate to
their audience, these may be facebook page/groups, youtube channels,
instagram.

These influencers have from 100 to 100k audience members. There's nothing you
need to do, apart from approach them and to find whether it's a good fit to
pitch your product. However, be aware that the influencer will be looking for
a % of sales.

What is great about an influencer, is that in some cases they did all the hard
work for you. They already created a product that the audience members
consumed and are generally happy with it. So if you have an addon product,
then you are simply preaching to the choir at this point.

Where to find influencers? Youtube, Facebook Groups, Instagram. [1] Is a place
to go, if you want to be laser targeted and have stats.

[1] [http://www.hyprbrands.com](http://www.hyprbrands.com)

\-------------------

Now for anecdotal experience. I'm in the affiliate marketing arena. I know
many many different influencers. They either have products developed for them
or they cross promote each others products.

These guys regularly generate from around $10k to $100k a month. I've met few
that have done $1m a month in sales.

Done correctly, you can position yourself to flip a switch and have over 1m
unique users read or hear about your product.

I know there is a segment on HN that generally frowns upon affiliate
marketing, but many companies such as Netflix, Groupon, AirBNB, Apple, Amazon
used them to great effect to grow exponentially.

~~~
rkunnamp
How do you track and pay commissions? Any tool recommendations?

~~~
sherm8n
Have you checked out GrowSumo.com? They were YC S15. Luke and Bryn are awesome
guys. They got us connected with a handful of influencers that promoted my
first startup – www.goodaudience.com. Then their software tracked monthly
commissions and payouts.

~~~
going_to_800
You need to mention that they charge $300/month minimum. Their feature set
seems pretty low for the high price...

------
jjoe
I did that with the cPanel Varnish plugin [1]. It's Varnish Cache integration
for cPanel WHM (duh!). I signed up on several web hosting forums and would
volunteer to help when someone posted looking for help with traffic or website
performance.

But I'd have to login to each box, spend a good amount of time on the server,
understand the business requirements, and then deploy Varnish. It was hugely
time consuming but I loved doing this. It was less about bean-counting but
rather more about helping. Also progress seemed slow at first because I would
gain one user every 2 or 3 days. But word-of-mouth buzz from people I've
helped was the thing that moved the chains for me.

The cPanel WHM platform has been moving quite fast over last few years. And so
did several things under the hood. I also wanted to build new features that
just couldn't be done on cPanel. I felt the project had potential to expand
and reach a much larger subset. And that's when I built Cachoid [2].

[1] [https://www.unixy.net/varnish](https://www.unixy.net/varnish)

[2] [https://www.cachoid.com/](https://www.cachoid.com/)

~~~
jaequery
yes, i recall your plugin several years back. think over 7 years ago! although
i had a hard time with dynamic content especially with sessions and logged in
vs logged out views. but the performance boost from varnish is pretty mind
blowing when configured correctly.

~~~
jjoe
It's crazy how time flies! Caching dynamic content is definitely tricky.
Subsequent releases of the plugin have had WordPress specific VCLs among
others. Cachoid has WordPress specific VCL too with a WP plugin so post
edits/changes are reflected with immediate purges and cache warm ups via the
Cachoid API. But the benefits of caching pages far outweigh the drawbacks. At
least for more sites.

------
maneesh
I did it with Pavlok, which is a wearable device for waking up early and
changing habits. The first 100 was done through writing blog posts, getting
email subscribers.

When we were ready with a basic prototype, we did a webinar presentation to
our email list to pre-sell it (6 months before our indiegogo). We ended up
selling about 200-300 prototypes before the webinar, and 300-400 pre-orders.

When we launched our Indiegogo, we built up a ton of press, media, bloggers,
email and social influencers, etc to announce our campaign all at the same
time to make our indiegogo sell ~3000 units pretty quickly.

Obviously it's a little different than software, but I find the launch
methodology we used works in software launches too.

[1] [http://pavlok.com](http://pavlok.com) [2]
[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pavlok-breaks-bad-
habits](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pavlok-breaks-bad-habits) [3]
[https://medium.com/@maneeshsethi/kickstarter-is-sorta-
debt-a...](https://medium.com/@maneeshsethi/kickstarter-is-sorta-debt-a-bolt-
case-study-4c879753d85d) \-- this is an article that talks about how we built
a hardware physical product without a real VC round.

~~~
primitivesuave
Maneesh, I found your journey truly inspiring in the way you automated a slap
in the face. I had actually heard about the product before seeing the Shark
Tank episode, and was aghast by their rudeness! You're clearly a smart guy and
I think you made the right decision at the end.

Would you mind commenting on the value that TV exposure on Shark Tank brought
to Pavlok?

------
mobitar
I posted this on a similar thread a few days ago. For Standard Notes [0],
here's what I did:

1\. Comment on privacy related HN posts about a privacy-focused notes app.
That would have gotten me 40-50 users.

2\. Write articles [1] on encryption/privacy/webdev. Some of them made it to
frontpage HN, some didn't. That might have gotten me to 500 users.

3\. Repeat. Tirelessly. Painstakingly. Depressingly. Just keep going doing
small things every day. Eventually they start to compound.

[0]: [https://standardnotes.org](https://standardnotes.org)

[1]: [https://journal.standardnotes.org](https://journal.standardnotes.org)

Similar thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191161](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191161)

~~~
gonzofish
Seems like the answer is always to grind it out. I commend anyone who has put
in the work to succeed.

------
nikanj
We operate in the public sector SaaS space. We tried all sorts of focused
marketing, but by far the best results were obtained by 1) Picking up a list
of municipalities 2) Calling the main switchboard of each one and asking who
makes decisions relevant to our business 3) Calling said person, setting up a
live demo.

There's still immense power in the human-human interaction, even if it's not
webscale.

~~~
cheez
What's your average customer LTV?

~~~
nikanj
High thousands to low tens of thousands per year, lifetime is hard to
guestimate as there's very little churn in our business. We still retain
practicly all the customers we've ever made.

~~~
cheez
Thanks for sharing. I figured that kind of revenue justifies the cold calling.
Congrats on finding the niche!

------
jonathanbull
These are the top 3 things that worked for us at
[https://emailoctopus.com](https://emailoctopus.com):

1) Posted on niche subreddits and HN. Commented and gave a gentle plug on
related posts. 2) Launched a free side project on Product Hunt:
[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/templates-by-
emailoctopus](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/templates-by-emailoctopus) 3)
Ran a crazy-cheap Black Friday promotion for all our leads.

------
sb8244
I've seen my current product go from 0 users to thousands. It is a business
workflow tool where most users log several hours per day, so I understand that
it's very unusual compared to other services.

The big thing for us was just a strong sales and marketing presence backed by
a product team (my team) that listens for the user and the marketplace and
responds quickly. It takes a little time but snowballed by just sticking to
that formula. Sales is in the DNA of my work, and so they are very effective
at all aspects of it.

Sounds like weak advice, but it worked for us.

~~~
udkl
Sure, but sales is expensive. Is there a trick or insight to keep sales costs
low ?

~~~
sb8244
It almost baits me to pitch the company I work for. I would think we keep
sales cheaper because of efficiency.

We were very very good at setting up a very efficient pipeline of demo setter
(sdr) to demo performer and closer (ae). I believe this is one of the more
cost effective ways to scale because the specialization allows for getting
really good at that one part of the pipeline.

------
mayermail1977
You get your first 100 users already so I think you went through the hardest
part. Unless it is all friends, you can analyze those first few users and see
common characteristics such as age, gender, location, interests, etc. These
first users are your micro-micro universe and you want to get to know them.
Once you found those common traits, you can go out and look for those very
similar potential customers and reach out to them. How? It depends on your
product and service. You can try paid ads via Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc,
you can try influencers to feature your product, reach out to bloggers in your
field, talk to people face to face, etc. etc. You have to find what works for
you and your app. Make sure that you analyze everything you try. Some things
might not work out totally as you expected, but might give you some good
lessons how to try next time. I suggest you check out this list:
[http://blog.linkody.com/seo/growth-hacks-
list](http://blog.linkody.com/seo/growth-hacks-list)

------
cdiamand
Posted this in the 0-100 thread, but posting here as well:

I did the following for [http://www.oppsdaily.com](http://www.oppsdaily.com)

1\. Posted landing page in a slack chat (first ~10 users)

2\. Posted on the indiehackers forum (+30 users)

3\. Got mentioned in the indiehackers weekly newsletter (+150)

4\. Posted to hacker news (+?)

5\. Posted to product hunt (did not go so great)(+?)

6\. Started posting weekly metrics to HN - made the frontpage (+1500-2000)

~~~
eelliott
Hey cool idea, I've subscribed.

One feedback - when you press Subscribe it opens a new tab to take you through
the Mailchimp flow. Considering there's not much value on the landing page, I
think it's better to stay in that tab.

------
kolinko
The first few dosen users were from an iosdevforum. Then someone recommended a
nice feature - at first I wanted to tell them it's impossible. But as I was
writing an explanation, I realised it's actually possible :)

Drank a lot of red bull for a week and pushed the feature to production. Then
I emailed a reporter who covered our competition in TC weeks before, and put a
post on HN.

It picked up steam on HN, and the TC article appeared a day later:

[https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/12/appcod-es-launches-app-
sto...](https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/12/appcod-es-launches-app-store-
prediction-tool-tells-developers-which-keywords-work/)

Notice the crappy logo and make sure to watch the video - recorded in my
living room after a few sleepless nights.

While working on the improvements, I invented another feature (guessing
competitors keywords), which is now a standard across the ASO apps.

A few months later, users began telling us AppStore search algorithm changed.
After a few weeks of crunching I published a slideshare explaining the recent
changes. Another reporter picked it up:

[https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/29/looks-like-apple-has-
chang...](https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/29/looks-like-apple-has-changed-its-
app-store-algorithm-again/)

They embeded our slides, which pushed them into top 3 slideshares of the week,
or something like that. (after a few years the viewcount is 500k or so)

Users began coming in en masse (up until 800 paid or so), and people began
sharing slides and so on.

I gave a few podcast interviews, which pushed the promotion even further. But
it was mostly TC and HN that pushed it so far.

------
ecesena
Free or paying? Anyway, I think that is the size where you have to explore
social media. Typically Twitter is easier, Facebook will work is your biz
intrinsically spreads across friends, or you can explore others such as
Instagram and Pinterest if you'd like.

It's also probably a good time to start experimenting with ads, though don't
be fooled by the results and stay focused on product-market fit (I assume
you're following the startup school classes).

For us, Theneeds, the 100-1000 was totally through Twitter. It was also the
time where we started exploring apps outside purely web, first Pokki and later
Chrome (but Chrome was 1k-10k).

~~~
p0nce
You mean Twitter ads? I tried several times, was very underwhelmed. Curious
what made it work for you.

~~~
ecesena
No, no ads. Twitter meaning start a meaningful account, interact with users,
new & old. It's a long term investment, like SEO, but it also pays back
relatively soon in terms of signups.

~~~
kyriakos
Twitter recently has been shadowbanning new accounts which follow the
particular pattern. Especially if most posts contain URLs. Might no longer be
a good idea. If you post with popular hashtags and get no response probably
Twitter shadowbanned you.

~~~
brianwawok
Couldn't you verify from a test account?

------
sebringj
If people really like your app AND you have a way for them to invite others
easily AND share about it on their social links easily AND you started off by
going to your core group personally and battle tested it, it just happens.

~~~
egfx
Total nonsense. Most apps fail to gain enough users to experience the long
tail effect of which you speak. [http://2fb.me](http://2fb.me) was an app that
connected Twitter and Facebook through sharing. I built it believing this
methodology to be true but it's not.

~~~
sebringj
Hmm your app looks cool. Maybe you need to connect with your users better,
maybe nobody knows about it? Maybe the message isn't getting across.

------
rsoto
Remember that there's not just one answer. While other answers may work in
different degrees, you should find your marketing mix.

While I agree with some strategies (particularly inbound marketing), I think
that viral marketing has very high potential. Think about that: you want to
grow from 100 to 1,000 users. How many hours did you spent on each one of
those initial users? Now multiply it by 100. Seems scary, doesn't it?

Better harness the userbase you have, and let them spread your product. If
each one of your users can bring one more user, you've effectively doubled
your userbase, and then again, and by the third time you are 200 users away
from your goal.

This seems so easy and magical on paper, but you have to design your product's
virality: thinking about how it's easier for your existing users to bring more
of them, and rewarding both, either with cash or with influence.

A lot of business have been made with this strategy in mind. Just look for the
story of Hotmail. If you want to read more, check out Ideavirus by Seth Godin,
and Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg.

------
filvdg
For our freemium service , Product hunt gave the biggest boost in free users.
Real paying users we get with Google Adwords

[https://www.formlets.com](https://www.formlets.com)

------
austincheney
I grew my thing, a developer's productivity tool that runs in the browser and
command line, by focusing on feature enhancements and code quality. I am
obsessed about quality of performance and quality of output. This has its pros
and cons:

Pros

My little tool can do things other more popular tools cannot do, tends to be
more stable, and executes extremely quickly. From purely a technology
perspective my tool is probably superior in many ways to other similar tools.
This has earned me a super loyal following and allows me freedoms to solve
problems, provide enhancements, and solve bugs very quickly.

Cons

I am so focused on the code and technology that I don't perform marketing or
advertising of almost any kind. I am entirely reliant upon organic search
results, word of mouth from my users, and occasional feature announcements.
The challenge with this is that I have no control and often no awareness of my
traffic.

Being obsessed with code quality and product quality the code is very terse
and not friendly to many developers. This means there is less interest from
users to submit pull requests to the project.

The extremeness of this approach makes the popularity of my tool hard to
gauge. Last year it appeared I was on trajectory to become one of the most
popular packages on NPM. I pulled out of NPM because they kept breaking my
package, and so I have completely lost that traffic. I was about to exceed a
million NPM downloads a month almost entirely from direct sources external to
NPM. This is what it means to be obsessed with product quality.

The single greatest burst of traffic to the website came when I published a
new diff algorithm here last month. I made the front page for a day and got
about 50,000 visitors.

What I have learned is:

* If you are producing something worthy of demand in a way that is superior to everything else it will eventually get the attention it deserves. If you are willing to accomplish those things the competition is either incapable or unwilling to accomplish you can compete no matter their funding or popularity.

* If the code is harder for newbs to instantly jump into your contribution community will be small or non-existent.

* If you damage the availability of your product most of your users will happily transfer their investment into something inferior. For most people convenience is, to a point, more important than niche features or product quality.

* Without any marketing strategy the popularity of your product will grow exponentially (if it is worthy of growth). So expect to invest years of effort before seeing any return on investment until that special tipping point occurs.

~~~
dasil003
Don't be shy, what's your tool?

~~~
austincheney
[http://prettydiff.com](http://prettydiff.com)

~~~
rabeiusura
Your tool is great has saved me countless times.

I think the web ui is a little weak, but it is miles better than anything else
out there.

------
rmatte09
How do you got your first 100 users?

~~~
rossinimartins
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191161](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191161)

------
Huhty
We run a community platform called Snapzu
([http://snapzu.com](http://snapzu.com)) which is similar in nature to
HN/Reddit/etc (which entirely depends on user submissions, voting, etc) so we
right off the bat had to battle the notorious "chicken and egg" problem. It
was really hard attracting users when the entire site depends on other users
(of which obviously at first we had very little of) for content.

However, we did several (mostly automated) things to increase our user count
to 26,000+ members, which is where we stand right now. The main goal was to
make sure that each user is catered to and getting exactly (or close to) what
they are looking for.

1\. Split up the content into several categories (14 to be exact). This
allowed us to focus on specific categories such as Science, Earth, Politics,
etc. Each category has its own social media account (on Twitter, Tumblr,
Medium, WP, etc.) where we share our highest voted RELEVANT user-submitted
content automatically using IFTTT. Example:
[http://science.snapzu.com](http://science.snapzu.com)

2\. We also used the same user-submitted content to build our newsletter and
send out the top relevant posts of the week for the "tribes" (communities like
sub-reddits) that they are subscribed to. This attempts to get as many people
to come back and often, a tactic extremely important when the community is
dependent on other users coming back and contributing/participating.

3\. We create automatically generated "top list" posts for some of our top
categories and share them on all our social channels, newsletters, certain
relevant sub-reddits, etc. These again are dependent entirely on user-
submitted content, and although I mentioned they are automated, they still
require some work (for the intro quote, minor curating) but 95% of the work is
automated. Each post takes approx 10-15 minutes to create, instead of several
hours, and uses the past week's top submissions as the main content. Example:
[http://snapzu.com/teamsnapzu/weekly-roundup-earth-and-
nature...](http://snapzu.com/teamsnapzu/weekly-roundup-earth-and-nature-
top-20-stories-of-the-week-of-april-20-27th-2017/)

4\. Obviously there were also several things completely out of our control.
Reddit had their massive debacle a couple years ago when Victoria got fired
(she hosted their AMAs) which created a massive Reddit "revolt". Over the
course of a few weeks in July 2015 we had 40,000+ people come in from there,
of which approximately 8000 signed up. But that obviously would not have
happened if we were not "somewhat known" at this point. We were basically at
the right place at the right time, as one of the few semi-known Reddit
alternatives/competitors. Because the "Reddit revolt" was somewhat big news,
we also got mentioned in several articles (Daily Dot, Inc, Moz, etc) which
brought in a few more thousand users.

We're now using many of the things we learned from the entire 4 year process
of growing our own community platform to help bloggers (and/or
website/business owners) who are struggling with the same things we were (and
still are). Many of the growth problems (and eventual tactics) involved are
nearly identical mainly because of the chicken and egg problem I mentioned
before. If you are curious it's at
[http://blogenhancement.com](http://blogenhancement.com). It contains several
tools we use ourselves and basically allows bloggers to start, run, and
utilize their own communities to get more audience, engagement, content, and
revenue. It also ties in beautifully to our platform that we've spent 4 years
building and constantly improving on, so it's a natural win/win for both
parties.

Hope this helps. Cheers!

~~~
nickpsecurity
I'm your typical NoScript user from the days of web pages that were faster
loading than the links we retrieved them on. I'd normally complain about one
of these sites but your science link [re-]loaded seemingly in an instant,
looks great, and scrolls well. So, thanks for a better experience than looking
at many other demos. :)

------
jaequery
hn and product hunt

------
theprop
If you have a $5k or so budget and your product appeals to a more general
audience, you will definitely get 1000 users by sponsoring the Epic Privacy
Browser...they have a high visibility sponsorship that reaches a few hundred
thousand users...so any general service will get at least a few thousand
people to try a service (actual numbers will depend on whether your service is
general or niche, etc.).

