

ASK HN: What methods do you use to gain early customers for your startup? - nickfrost

There are many ways that new tech startups can try to acquire early adopters AKA early customers for their product.<p>Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, tells about their original strategies, and their path through the customer development jungle. (http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262672510)<p>You as a new startup, whether you're a founder, hustler, hacker, or even early adopter:<p>How have you been able to gain visibility to early adopters, get them to evangelize for you, and ultimately convert them to early customers?
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Jebdm
As a frequent early adopter, I'd say the most important thing you can do after
providing a useful product in order to _retain_ early users is to actively
provide excellent support. I'll tolerate buggy software longer if it is easy
to report bugs (and I know that reported bugs actually get looked at).

Interacting directly with early users also "humanizes" your company, which
makes people both more forgiving of early mistakes as well as more likely to
put a little bit of extra effort into helping you get better.

~~~
smalter
Good points. Social news (HN, reddit) is a great place to find early adopters,
and interact directly with them.

I launched <http://iDoneThis.com> here on HN in January and now we have 5,000
users. A benefit to that was not only finding early adopters and engaging with
them, but in that engagement, you have the opportunity to find what people
want and improve the product. One thing we discovered from the international
audience at HN is that our site didn't work with unicode, and folks abroad
wanted to be able to adjust their timezone from the default US/Pacific. We
added those features and now we have a huge following in Japan.

I wrote a bit more about how we got our first 5,000 users here:
[http://blog.idonethis.com/post/4779807862/how-we-got-our-
fir...](http://blog.idonethis.com/post/4779807862/how-we-got-our-
first-5-000-users)

------
patio11
Organic SEO. This isn't necessarily limited to early adopters: it is not
obvious to the average Internet user that an attractively presented website
which ranks #1 to their query is a new entrant in the field.

Most of my customers assume, all evidence to the contrary, that my products
are made by some megacorp somewhere. (Most common guess that I've heard: made
by Google, because they found it on the Googles.)

~~~
nostromo
Anyone interested should read the parent commenter's blog entry on this topic:
[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/07/17/seo-for-software-
compani...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/07/17/seo-for-software-companies/)
\-- I found it very useful.

------
petercooper
Go listen through the Mixergy archives - <http://mixergy.com/> \- it's one of
the most common questions that Andrew asks people. Something that I learned is
that the answers are _wildly different_ for everyone (and not solely by
industry or company type).

------
revorad
Blog posts which bring in organic traffic.

Listing on the Chrome Web store.

Asking friends and friends of friends.

Asking former colleagues.

Participating on relevant forums just answering people's questions, NOT
pitching your product.

Tweeting product updates.

Using Olark to stalk visitors.

Emailing 3-5 popular, connected and intelligent strangers everyday to get
feedback.

Writing a book.

Cross promoting and selling other popular products in the field to get to know
customers.

------
veb
This is why many experienced entrepreneurs tell you to ask someone who has
money, or a business owner if there's anything you could do to improve their
life... because they'll be your first customer, and they'll be spreading the
word about you even when you're building the prototype.

------
SkyMarshal
Steve Blank is teaching an entrepreneurship course at Stanford and blogging
about it. They're currently working on customer acquisition strategies:

[http://steveblank.com/2011/04/15/the-leanlaunch-pad-at-
stanf...](http://steveblank.com/2011/04/15/the-leanlaunch-pad-at-
stanford-%e2%80%93-class-5-customer-relationship-hypotheses/)

~~~
dtwwtd
He came to Michigan to speak a few weeks back and he recommended to me a
presentation from Dave McClure that covered some of the same stuff. It's
pretty jam packed full of info but really useful none the less.

There's a few of these floating around, this is the most recent one I could
find: [http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-
pir...](http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-sf-
jan-2010)

~~~
nl
This is a great deck. Look at slide 22 if you want some good ideas relating to
this topic.

~~~
gspyrou
You may see the video of the presentation :
<http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5336115>

------
mvkel
Depends if you're B2B, or B2C.

For both, though, giving some incentive to be an "early adopter" is a must.

My company is SaaS; to get some initial momentum, we offered early adopters
their first year at a discounted rate, additional functionality at a fraction
of the normal price, and an account credit if they connect us to another
customer that ends up working with us.

We actually still do the latter; nothing is better than having your customers
be your evangelists.

~~~
mvkel
and yes, the comment above is correct. It depends on the industry, business
type, etc. etc.

For SaaS, what I mentioned is just one of many methods...

------
mendicant
We gave free trials. One of the most important things for us was image. We
work with oil and gas companies and getting a couple of Canada's top producers
on board was paramount for us.

We needed the "well if big guy X" is using it then maybe it's worth checking
out.

We met with some big guys and asked what else they would need to make it work
for them. A few tweaks later and a 6 month free trial (plus discounted first
year) and we were off to the races.

There are some customers who love us because we love feedback and work hard to
implement the really good ideas.

Providing a free trial + personalized tweaks gave us the start we needed. It
worked doubly well because we targeted the companies who have respect in the
industry first.

~~~
keeptrying
Canadas top oil and gas companies needed free trials? Wow.

~~~
mendicant
The money wasn't the issue. The fact that there was literally not a single
company signed up was the issue. Why would a top company pay for a service
that -- as of that time -- no one was using.

The fact of the matter is, it was two guys coming up to a massive company
saying "Hey! We've got this site where you can advertise all these items you
want to get rid of... but we've got no traffic and you will be the first
person on it." There's literally no incentive for them.

Our service depends on having clients to be valuable. So there wasn't any
value in our service at the time. However, as soon as you get one of the big
guys signed up and putting their items on our site, we instantly add value and
get the "hey, if Company X is putting their stuff up there, I want to be there
too!" effect.

~~~
keeptrying
That makes more sense :).

------
redsymbol
Bartering was helpful in getting the first customers with my startup:
[http://ai.redsymbol.net/2010/09/boostrapping-your-
business-w...](http://ai.redsymbol.net/2010/09/boostrapping-your-business-
with-barter.html)

In general, it'll probably work better with B2B offerings.

------
inkaudio
You'll have to build an audience first. I read a lot of the mixergy
Entrepreneur majority of the successfull ones all had audience or contacts
before they had customers. An audience or contact is different from a customer
because they are just people who are interested in you, whereas customers go a
step further and buy. However an audience or contact allows you to make offers
and build a customer base.

You can build an audience by making friends on hacker news, if you're known
for making great contributions to the hacker community you can build audience.
So it's important to be genuinely interested in the community. Once you have
an audience you can make them an offer, and if it's any good you'll have
customers. And interesting recent example of this is edw519 ebook. Ed
genuinely enjoys the hacker news community and people enjoy his contributions
which are basically his comments/submissions. I doubt his intentions was ever
to sell an ebook of his comments, but he is doing that now, and the site
promoting it has been viewed 20923 times, and that's only because he is part
of the community and has an audience. see: [http://edweissman.com/i-turned-my-
hacker-news-comments-into-...](http://edweissman.com/i-turned-my-hacker-news-
comments-into-an-eboo)

It's a small experiment on Ed's part, but it won't be worthwhile without an
audience. If you're interested in more specific ways to build an audience stay
tuned.

Also read: [http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/04/the-easiest-way-to-
succ...](http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/04/the-easiest-way-to-succeed-as-
an-entrepreneur/)

~~~
nl
You don't have to "build an audience first" - that's just one of many possible
strategies. It's often promoted by bloggers - who often happen to have found
success because of their audience.

For example, Groupon never "had an audience" - they got on the _telephone_ and
_rang up small businesses_.

~~~
nickfrost
That's a great observation actually. When I originally created StartupLi.st in
my tent while servine the US Navy on deployment in Afghanistan, the only way I
could "gain an audience" was to make the effort to contact each startup before
I featured them. It worked brilliantly, and will still be a strategy I'll use
as <http://startupli.st> grows. Thanks again for your comment!

------
surendra_sedhai
I think it depends on the product you are lunching. However, in general
following things may help to gain early users

1) Using social media (Facebook and twitter) for marketing

2) Make Facebook app/ Facebook fanpage it may help in viral growth

3) Search engine optimization

4) Service\content you are providing should be magnetic so that early visitors
will be converted into early users

------
davidedicillo
I recorded a video of the Matthew Wensing talking about how he bootstrapped
Stormpulse. He spent a lot of time describing how he got the first clients and
locked some big distribution channels.
[http://www.davidedicillo.com/social/a-great-story-on-
bootstr...](http://www.davidedicillo.com/social/a-great-story-on-
bootstrapping-stormpulse-com/)

------
jahmed
It definitely depends on what your startup is doing. Since it is addressing a
need (hopefully) you should try to find people who have this need and target
them. A local B2B company will do vastly different marketing from a social B2C
company. Friends and family are great, maybe sponsor local events and go out
with an iPad and show off the startup. Or maybe try advertising on stumble or
facebook.

At my startup <http://louderr.com> we have been trying out as many ideas as
possible to see what generates good CTR and loyal visitors. Word of mouth is
working best, along with strategic advertising on social networks. Im looking
forward to writing a blog post with lots of information about what worked and
what didnt for us.

tl;dr: Guess and Check. Repeat. This is the hard part.

------
gettinstarted
For early adopters, it's all about product endorsements. As someone who isn't
from Silicon Valley, but reads all the major tech news sources and thought
leader blogs, I set out on a mission to meet as many thought leaders as
possible....Long story short, one tweet from a single thought leader converted
to 500+ clickthrus to my site at product launch. Another product got 90 signed
up alpha users from a single tweet. People who follow tech thought leaders are
voraciously looking to find the next best thing in their space.

It's not easy, but once you establish those relationships, they continually
pay dividends, if you don't abuse them.

------
kenjackson
A big question to answer is if you're social or standalone. That is do you
need critical mass to be truly useful or if one person uses it, does that one
person still get 99% of the benefit.

------
mapster
As a freelancer, I get to work directly with sales reps and franchise owners,
so I am making a SaSS for them and so they will be my early adopters. I've
already interviewed a dozen or so of my clients and am confident my service
will be well received. At least the Beta will not be overly complex so I can
tweak it in the right direction during Beta review. Here's hoping.

------
brianbreslin
What's your startup?

~~~
nickfrost
My startup is <http://StartupLi.st> It is a new way for EVERY tech startup to
create visibility, gain early adopters that will socially promote your
startup, and build an interactive community around a startup's aggregated
social activity streams. Social Customer Development. It's going live this
week.... so stay tuned :)

~~~
badkins
Wait a minute. The owner of a start up that helps other startups gain early
adopters is asking for advice on how to gain early adopters?

~~~
swGooF
If you really think about it, @nickfrost is probably gaining early adopters by
posting this. Nearly everyone that reads this post will be interested in
<http://startupli.st>

Plus, no one has all the answers and I am glad that @nickfrost is welcoming
other ideas.

------
keyvanraoufi
We submitted our site to betali.st and received 400+ signups as a result.
Would your site be similar to that?

~~~
nickfrost
Yes, absolutely! Every person in StartupList can VERY EASILY sign up for your
startup, then recommend it to their friends within StartupList and even to
their Twitter and Facebook social crowds. Your startups social stream will be
connected and automatically aggregated to your startup's profile, so the
activity stream is constantly real-time and interactive. Also, submit and
relate news about your startup to Startup News to gain targeted readers as
well as their opinions on the news you post. Please join <http://startupli.st>
and add your startup to gain the full experience of early adopter interaction
and development.

------
pitdesi
The best is to use networks... your friends, your friends friends, your
advisors friends etc. They'll be more willing to put up with a less than
perfect product, and if you make them happy, they will be customers for life
and tell their friends. We had luck with this early on at FeeFighters and it
has served us well, as our customers almost always refer us to other
customers. (B2B site lowering credit card processing fees via instant reverse
auction)

