

Ask HN: How did you get your early signups? - mukgupta

What things worked for you? What didn&#x27;t? What would you recommend doing and not doing?
======
michaelbuckbee
Betalist (which others mentioned) seems to deliver at least 300ish signups for
a generally useful service. Unfortunately my latest project is targeting only
Heroku users who need to install SSL [1] so I needed to do something else.

The best thing I found was actually Twitter. I setup a search column in
Tweetdeck that would pop an alert on my desktop if anyone tweeted "Heroku" and
"SSL" in the same tweet. I'd then just @message them and ask if they'd want to
try the alpha (Heroku has strict phases with increasing numbers of users you
need to onboard before they'll release the add-on to General Availability).

If someone agreed to be an early tester, I'd try to "upsell" them into taking
the time to do a Skype onboarding call with me where I'd just watch them in
real time try and add a SSL cert to their app. This was likely the fastest and
most productive thing I've ever done to rapidly improve the product, hugely
benefical.

1 -
[https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl](https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl)

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garysvpa
We allocated a small marketing budget for the following:

1.) Offer promo codes to increase conversions

2.) Hire a writer and get quality content

3.) Provided incentive for users with a referral

4.) Email marketing

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quantisan
We tried a bunch of methods, getting press, cold calling, newsletters, blogs,
social media, etc. We learned that the most important thing is knowing who
your target first customers persona should be and why (e.g. nicolasd, in
another comment here, identified their Venn diagram). The more that you can
narrow and define that persona, the easier it will be for you to learn about
their habits and then get exposed at those places and speak to their needs.

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nicolasd
Last year we started a project (didn't work out) but we had a quit cool method
to get emails and sign ups. In our case, we used the data of 500px - you can
read about it here: [http://saloon.io/geek-approach-to-
marketing/](http://saloon.io/geek-approach-to-marketing/)

Even if you can't use the same strategy, maybe it gives you an idea for your
customer field :)

~~~
franl
Really neat! Why did you have to shutdown the website?

Edit: I'm referring to the customer research website you guys made, mentioned
in the post.

~~~
nicolasd
Oh maybe we this isn't clear enough in the post, but we shut down our photo-
sharing-tool (didn't work out - no retention). The "customer research" tool
was only build for our photo-sharing-tool to find photographers.

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marketingadvice
Betalist, handful of beta and nonbeta startup directories, reddit and HN.

If its a good product that will get you +250 users (we got about 330 while we
were still in private beta).

Beyond that we sank a couple hundred in ads at a $0.2 CPA to gain our beta
base. Then a month later we got placement on techcrunch, venture beat and a
few other major outlets while still in private beta

~~~
147
How did you get $.20 CPA?

