

Ask HN: Getting users  - vaksel

In the what startups are really like topic, a few people wanted pg to expand on this, so I figured it'd be a good standalone topic.<p>What was your strategy in getting the first 1,000 users?
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patio11
Content creation and organic SEO. If you're the guy writing things that solve
problems for your users, it a) brings them into your site and b) pre-disposes
them to trust you when you say that using your software/service will help them
with the problem they are having. (Content ranks for long-tail terms, content
draws links, links help you rank for more competitive terms, repeat ad
nauseum.)

Organic SEO scales stupidly well, incidentally, and if you're a bootstrappy
type of person you can turn the revenue it brings into AdWords or other paid
acquisition strategies, then use the revenue that brings to improve your
organic SEO, then...

It really helps if you either write very well, have a unique positioning for
your blog/articles/whatever, or have some sort of unfair advantage that
everybody else on the Internet can't match. In my case, the unfair advantage
for the last two years has been my CMS, which lets me outpublish organizations
with budgets next to which mine would be rounding error. (An old buddy of
mine, ex-military, on the subject of unfair advantages: "A fair fight is the
result of poor planning".)

~~~
tptacek
You know, I just tried to track down your email address, gave up/came to my
senses, and I'll just spit it out here. Connect the dots for me. How do you go
from the content you publish on your blog (the one I know about, MicroISV) to
selling teachers bingo cards?

I would _love_ for the answer for customer development for Matasano's product
to be content development, but, like you, our blog is inside baseball. We're
popular, and there's some overlap between our readers (security people) and
our customers (firewall operators), but not as much as you'd think.

For services work, content has been a clean win (also: surveys, giving away
posters). I'm not seeing how to do it with the product. I read your stuff and
I always feel like there are a million things we're doing wrong.

~~~
patio11
Oh, the blog is more for me than for my customers. The content I write for my
customers is metric loads of bingo cards:
<http://www.bingocardcreator.com/bingo-cards> (Edit to add: Oh, I have a blog
on the main site too these days. No great shakes yet.)

It is _very_ easy to go from downloading bingo cards to selling software to
write them. Customers come in wanting to play e.g. American history bingo,
customers realize the free set doesn't have exactly the words from their
lesson, customers are told if they want to customize a few sample cards all
they have to do is sign up for the free trial, ... you get the general idea.

Edit to add:

Incidentally, I know nearly nothing about firewalls or what the concerns of
firewall operators are. I imagine they sound something like How Do I Set Up A
Firewall Which [Insert Distinguishing Feature Here]. I further imagine that
there are a wide range of distinguishing features which could be enumerated
automatically or semi-automatically, for example, set up a firewall which
allows $APP_NAME by opening up $APP_PORT. Have you considered writing an
article or two about that general subject? How about writing an article or two
thousand? (You can, of course, interdisperse it with more hand-crafted, higher
level content.)

------
sachinag
Honestly, the number of your users is directly correlated to your potential
market. Patrick's bingo cards are going after a much smaller market (teachers)
than Drew's online storage (everyone). Colin's online storage for technically
astute paranoids is probably somewhere in the middle.

So it really doesn't matter what you do if you're not targeting your market
correctly. You have to be honest with yourself and figure that out first.
Blogging on your blog isn't as good as being a good member of the relevant
messageboard for your particular community, for example. (At least not for
your first 1,000 users.)

For us, it was cold calling on the seller side and PR on the buyer side. Turns
out that the tech blogs have been much more willing to write about us than the
gaming blogs. I don't get that, but hey, whatever. YMMV depending on your
initial vertical.

~~~
jlees
Games blogs are usually fairly focused on games themselves, not the meta stuff
around selling and buying them. OK, at Joystiq et al we would often do stuff
like sales charts and in-person reports from the Xbox 360 line, but readers
mostly visit for entertainment value. Writing about a marketplace site would
come across too much like an ad, I think; we didn't highlight Amazon or Best
Buy's sale items, for example!

(Weirdly we did cover the digital distribution stuff a fair bit, but I think
that's twofold. Firstly, most of it is from major gaming players and impacts
the rest of their strategy, which fanboys will leap on. Secondly, digital
distribution is still New and Exciting.)

------
dotBen
Pre launch: Blogging about a subject related to your startup and twittering,
funneled into the classic "sign up to know when we launch" holding page, along
with personal networking should give you 1000 prime users ready for when you
launch.

Post launch: more personal networking (esp with influentials - either in
person or virtual) and getting good write ups

However, before you sign up even your first user you need to make sure you
have a strong viral loop going (assuming your product is suitable for it) so
that every user you obtain is likely to send you even more.

IMHO it's not actually hard to get 1000 users, it's actually harder to obtain
the first 50,000 users. After that you probably are reaching the inflection
point and it gets easier (assuming good viral loop).

~~~
benofsky

      funneled into the classic "sign up to know when we launch" holding page
    

How did you make this work for you? How long did you open it up before
launching?

Edit: formatting.

~~~
dotBen
You should put the "sign up to know more" box the moment you have your domain
hosted.

WP Themes like <http://themeshaper.com/wordpress-domain-parking-theme/> are
your friend... takes 20 minutes to set this up.

Add to the list of emails u get from this page the email address of everyone
you network with about the idea/startup. That's kinda cheaky but it's done a
lot.

When u launch go through the list to spot any pr, media or VIP people -- offer
them a beta. Then just launch and email blast everyone with the information.

~~~
benofsky
Thanks!

------
iamelgringo
I've used mechanical turk in getting initial users. You can set up a task, and
have turkers do very specific actions on your site, for $.05. And, studies
have been done, that suggest that Turkers are really very well educated, and
are probably early adopters. If you treat them with respect, and show
appreciation for what they are doing, they will go the extra mile for you.

I've also used Adsense to get initial users. For my keywords, they cost about
$.10 a user, and about half of them bounced. But, it provided me with a
demographic that I wouldn't have reached with Mechanical Turk.

~~~
megamark16
Wow, not sure how I didn't even know that this existed! Thanks!

------
omarchowdhury
Search marketing.

This avenue may not fit your startup because no one may be searching your
industry. I mean, if your startup is Twitter, you're not going to get very far
bidding on the keyword "microblogging".

It worked with our startup because people were already finding our competitors
using search (our competitors literally created the search market for us
because of their large scale media buys offline), and the volume allows us to
scale.

------
icey
Bribery.

Every product launch I've been a part of has basically used some form of
bribery to get users. Of course, my background is all enterprise software. We
have either shown people how they are losing money by not using our product or
how they will miss out on making money by not using our product. Maybe bribery
is the wrong word. What's the word for bribing people with their own money?

I haven't had any "viral" products yet, so I'd personally like to hear about
how that works for people :D

~~~
zaidf
Proving ROI?

Pretty much what Greg Mcadoo(sp?) from Seqouia said yesterday I think.

No idea why you' consider this bribery, lol. You're either saving money or
helping them make more. Bribery is a (usually criminal) way of giving
something for a favor.

~~~
icey
Evidently I've done a poor job of making a joke :D

My point was just that we've found that the best way to motivate people to use
our products has been to illustrate that they're missing out on an opportunity
by not using it. Since I do all enterprise work, the fastest way to do that is
by showing them how it affects their money, not that our solution is cheap or
expensive or anything like that.

~~~
zaidf
Haha totally understandable. A joke like that can easily get lost. I recently
joked with a potential cofounder about creating a service "100 f __*ing times
more addictive than cocaine". Threw him off for a bit;) Lesson learned.

------
swies
Launch in private beta and email bloggers access codes. We got 18,000 users in
4 weeks like this, not sure if it's generalizable. I wrote the details down
here: [http://runitback.tumblr.com/post/223371555/how-we-
got-18-000...](http://runitback.tumblr.com/post/223371555/how-we-
got-18-000-beta-users-in-4-weeks)

------
swombat
The way we got our first users for Woobius was that some of the initial team
were architects, and we had strong links with a number of architecture firms.
So when the product was barely useable, we deployed it and got them to start
trying it out. There followed a frantic search for a decent host when we
realised that those people were using Woobius for real live projects and
they'd get rather annoyed if it suddenly vanished in a hard drive crash or the
like.

Anyway, to cut a long story, since Woobius is a naturally viral tool (see
[http://danieltenner.com/posts/0009-how-to-make-your-
applicat...](http://danieltenner.com/posts/0009-how-to-make-your-application-
viral.html) ), it spread from that initial kernel, with effectively no
marketing.

If you don't have strong connections to potential users of your product, I
would advise building a different product.

~~~
DTrejo
From swombat's article:

 _One way to resolve this problem is to ask yourself what would happen if
someone who just joined my application thought it’s great and wanted to invite
20 of their friends/colleagues? If you can’t provide an easy way for that
person to market your application for you, you’ll lose out on your best
inviters._

As a user, it really annoys me when inviting others is a hassle. Ideally the
process should be almost effortless.

------
bemmu
Link from my other sites.

I might be up for sending some HN people their first users if you are getting
desparate (see my profile for contact info), but I doubt my audience of
MySpacers really matches with anything that anyone here is doing.

------
zaidf
If you are making money from get go, paid search is not bad if you can get to
a positive ROI after a little bit of messing around.

Your leverage with paid search will depend on your longterm earning per
customer and your cost of customer acquisition among other factors. I would
suggest you read Sean Ellis' blog. He talks a lot about customer acquisition:
<http://startup-marketing.com/>

------
staunch
Directories. There's almost always appropriate directories to get your thing
listed on. iPhone app store is the extreme example. Maybe you can create an
addon for Firefox and submit it to addons.mozilla.org. Maybe you have audio
software and you can get it listed on some big audio software directory or
blog.

It really depends what kind of thing you have, but there's almost always some
list out there that it belongs on.

~~~
pclark
will that really get you a thousand users?

~~~
DenisM
With iPhone apps - sure.

~~~
pclark
not without marketing also

------
DenisM
You are probably solving a problem, right? Ask yourself how would you go about
finding the solution to such problem and go there. "There" will be some blogs,
community websites etc where you can add comments whenever a relevant question
comes up for discussion. This worked for me.

What didn't work: approaching any kind of famous blogger (zero responce),
google ads (huge money drain).

------
pclark
our first 1000 users:

via our blog talking about what we're doing and why (= good for SEO,
engagement of community)

PR though you'd be surprised at how little an effect this makes typically
though, you gotta really target / be lucky. Tip: DaringFireball = iPhone app
sales.

Twitter - great to engage users of competitor products (sorry) or people
musing aloud wishing your product exists (it does! they just haven't found
it!)

Spin off sites - I really love these. Do a simple project (= 1 days work)
that'll get on the reddit home page or become a mini twitter hit. works really
well for getting users, then convert them from the spin off site to your site.
if you're a good product manager you can make this work wonders. this might be
a widget (duckduckgo style) or a tshirt or mugs, or an actual service.

------
aaronblohowiak
Buy ads, track their performance, use multivariate testing to improve their
performance.

------
kevinholesh
Direct mail. I'm not talking the crappy postcards or the fake credit cards
everyone gets.

I'm talking about handwriting a note to someone influential. If your market is
teachers, write to the department heads at a local High school. If they like
it, they'll spread it to their teacher friends.

Handwriting the notes is a PAIN (it will literally hurt your hands), but it is
much more effective and personal than a cookie cutter email or a mass mailing
letter.

Unfortunately, this method isn't scalable, but it will give you a good start.

~~~
eru
> Unfortunately, this method isn't scalable, but it will give you a good
> start.

Perhaps, if you cheat? Let somebody else hand-write your notes. (Although you
still need to create the content.)

------
lloydarmbrust
The easiest way is make your product appeal to the widest range of users
possible. If half the people on an airplane could benefit from your product
than your onto a good idea.

Unfortunately my product deals with a very specific market and by the time we
have 1,000 "users" we'll be billionaires.

I'm still trying to figure out how to create a SaaS product that provides
water or food . . . because everyone needs that.

------
fjabre
If you are really niche then adwords is probably the best way to go.

If you are mass market then get the blog mentions and organic SEO.

------
known
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_action>

------
andreshb
Influencers and Media Relations. Picked industry specific niches, and leaders,
invited them to participate in our early stages (at least their opinion) and
began strong networking. Day of release(s) had support from these opinion
leaders and they helped promote.

------
alttab
This is of course based on the assumption you've built something people
need/want.

------
wensing
Create a widget with a link back to your site. Good for referrals and
pagerank.

------
offyourfacelook
We're trying to get bloggers. www.offyourfacelook.com

------
pclark
techcrunch

~~~
phil
...though that's probably an unsuitable strategy for most products.

~~~
pclark
i was joking a little too :)

------
zackattack
This is really interesting for me, because I'm working on this problem right
now with my startup: CustomerFind.

Right now, CustomerFind.com is a Twitter application that automatically
follows users on Twitter. You specify a set of keywords, and then
automatically follow users who have a tweet mentioning one of those keywords.
Presently, on average of ~15% of users will follow back, with good keywords
typically generating a 30% follow back rate.

Unfortunately, there's really no way to know if those users are real customers
who will use your product/pay you. So I'm working on evolving the service. How
many of you would be interested in the next iteration? The idea is to create
personal conversations with customers. I am considering the following features
for candidacy.

1\. You get a list of users who have a tweet mentioning any one of some
prespecified keywords.

1a. You have an option to auto-follow these users.

1b. You can filter the list by geography, user popularity, and emotional
inflection of the message.

2\. You get a CRM tool to enable you to personally engage with users. Sachin:
you noticed someone is looking for "sell videogames"? You then have an
opportunity to start an @reply/DM conversation with them, within the product.
This coincides with Seth Godin's philosophy of permission marketing: you get
to reach out to people who _really want_ to hear what you have to say.

2a. You get automated notifications to encourage you to follow-up with more
messages. Following up is critical to any good sales methodology.

2b. Each sales/conversation thread contains the user's information, and other
facts mined from the tweeting history to help target the conversation.

3\. You can type in a competitor's screen name (or your own!), and figure out
the most popular words or phrases that its followers are tweeting about. Helps
you do better targeting for your own list. For example, you type in
@TheNorthFace, and learn that people are talking about "cheap snow jackets".

Anyone interested? Note: if you object by saying "that's too many
conversations to keep up with!", I'd like to note that's a problem that you
_desperately_ want to have.

-Zack

~~~
catch23
I was a user of your service. and when I signed up, I started following so
many spammers I had to kill the oauth hookup. I don't know what was wrong with
it, but it kept auto following all the horrible horrible spammers and my
follower list just filled up with really bad people. I had to manually go
through my follower list and delete people. Good thing I didn't have thousands
of followers or else it could have taken me days.

~~~
paraschopra
Maybe you could look at Followers to Following ratio of a potential spammer to
detect if it is indeed a spammer?

~~~
catch23
The main issue was that zack's software would automatically make me follow
someone. He could probably add some basic heuristics to prevent people from
following spammers. Even basic bayesian filtering would have worked. Some of
the spammer accounts have completely identical tweets. It would seem kind of
stupid if I had to write the software to filter my followers... I could just
not use customerfind, it seems easier that way.

