

The hacker's guide to acquiring the first 1,000 users: Twitter - austenallred
http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the-first-1000-users-twitter/

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fjabre
I despise how twitter and facebook have become the de facto gatekeepers for
marketing an app. The web is littered with millions upon millions of "Share
this on/Log in with Twitter / Facebook" and for a lot of apps that are
successful at this marketing approach they are little more than a house of
cards and uninspired vaporware.

How about this, send a link to your site to all of your friends. Ask them if
they'll share it with their friends - via email or text -> novel idea right?
If people really like what you've made then you won't have to go around doing
shameless self promotion and being a slave to Twitter and Facebook status
updates on every little detail about your app, your company, or your team.

When did marketing an app become so ego-centric? I don't give a shit what you
look like. I don't care how many people are on your team. I don't care whether
you have 50,000 twitter bot followers. Does your app make me want to use it
more? Does it fulfill a real need I have or invent a need I never knew I had?
If it's reliable and I like it or need it then guess what: I'll use it.

Source: Google, Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc... Astronomical
successes that didn't have the 'benefit' of a glitzy social platform to share
their special sauce with the masses.

~~~
austenallred
While there's no marketing tactic that can make up for having a crappy
product, the notion that you can just email a couple of friends and a product
will take off works in _maybe_ 1% of cases, even for good products.

~~~
pstuart
It helps if you have something good....

~~~
austenallred
Even if you have something good, the chances you'll be successful without
marketing are _way worse_ than the chances you'll be successful as a startup
in general (which already suck).

~~~
rholdy
...and if you don't have something good, you'll figure it out a lot faster
with marketing than without. With a short runway, like when you're living out
of your car or something crazy, figuring that out is pretty important.

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ronaldx
The title purports to be about how Twitter acquired 1000 users.

The article is more about how to spam-favourite your way to 1000 followers on
Twitter.

~~~
austenallred
As stated in the article, your Twitter profile serves as a sort of pre-landing
page to get people to click through. You should be able to watch the
interaction from Twitter flow through to your landing page in real-time.

(The title is supposed to be about how to acquire the first 1,000 users for
your startup via Twitter. Sorry about the confusion.)

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mikeevans
Seems down. Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.a...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.austenallred.com%2Fthe-
hackers-guide-to-the-first-1000-users-
twitter%2F&oq=cache%3Awww.austenallred.com%2Fthe-hackers-guide-to-the-
first-1000-users-
twitter%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.538j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

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drtse4
The #SEO tweet trick didn't work, now i'm depressed.

~~~
mikeevans
Worked for me, I got two favorites almost immediately:

[https://twitter.com/m_evans10/status/385418950861156352](https://twitter.com/m_evans10/status/385418950861156352)

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danso
Twitter is still a somewhat divisive tool among those in the profession you'd
_think_ would automatically love it: journalists. It's almost a badge of
honor, like still reading the Sunday paper, in print, to eschew Twitter.

However, I think it's more of an existential judgment than one of actual
merit...I think many/most reporters, when the Internet was new, were used to
thinking that everyone in town read or watched or listened to them. Pre-
Internet media was very one way, so the only knowledge you had about your
audience was through personal letters (which could be surprisingly frequent)
and through circulation/Nielsen ratings (having a circulation of 300,000 does
not mean 300K people actually read your story). Even as a non-senior reporter,
random people would recognize my byline when I worked in Sacramento (a medium
sized paper) and if you were on TV news, _everyone_ in town knew you.

But it's much different on Twitter. Unless you're already a celebrity, you're
going to find in the first day, first week, first months of tweeting, very,
very few people will seem to acknowledge you. And even if you get to a
respectable sum of followers...between 1,000 to 10,000, you'll always be
_magnitudes_ less popular, via Twitter's follower metric, than the latest teen
pop star or reality TV freak.

That's pretty crushing to the ego, and that's the vibe I get from many friends
(journalists or not) who've poo-poohed Twitter. And it's not because they
despise the triviality of online interaction...they are on Facebook and update
it frequently, but on FB, your network more closely mimics your real life
friendships/following, and there's less "follower envy"...in that it's
respectable to weed out your Facebook network. But there's not much benefit to
having a small Twitter network.

~~~
hvs
Talking and listening to some journalists, I get the sense that they don't so
much as "like" Twitter, as simply recognize that since it is part of the
modern 24-hour news cycle, they have no choice but to be a part of it. If
anything, it seems like a love-hate relationship because now they have no
choice but to be constantly "on".

Anyway, I'm not a journalist and I find Twitter to be an interesting
distraction where I follow interesting people to see what they are interested
in. Oh, and comedians.

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alecsmart1
Any cached links? The site's down due to HN effect.

