7 ms·

Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

209 points by sherm8n 9y ago

rmatte09 9y ago
How do you got your first 100 users?
- rossinimartins 9y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191161
ecesena 9y ago
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 9y ago
  You mean Twitter ads? I tried several times, was very underwhelmed. Curious what made it work for you.
  - ecesena 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        Couldn't you verify from a test account?
sb8244 9y ago
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.
- zachsnow 9y ago
  Agreed (coming from a similar spot it sounds like, in my case daily operations tools for SMBs): build a good product, and a sales team to sell it. Then sell it, all day, every day. Just make sure the product can back up sales!
  - sb8244 9y ago
    Keeping churn in check is very important. High churn means something is wrong with the product.... Or maybe not? Implementation and support are important parts of the equation too. Product can't be garbage though.
- udkl 9y ago
  Sure, but sales is expensive. Is there a trick or insight to keep sales costs low ?
  - sb8244 9y ago
    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.
no1youknowz 9y ago
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.
- AznHisoka 9y ago
  what industries or niches does this strategy work for? which ones do they not work as well?
  - gerenuk 9y ago
    If your product is related to SEO, social media, ppc this can work really well. We recently launched a side project in SEO vertical with couple other partners and did over $200k in sales revenue over a week through our affiliate channel. If you are looking particularly where affiliates are promoting for products then check out voluum, link assistant etc. If your product is more of a tech side and starts with less than $20-$30 then chances are less people are going to promote that.
mobitar 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Seems like the answer is always to grind it out. I commend anyone who has put in the work to succeed.
jjoe 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
- sherm8n 9y ago
  wow that's pure hustle! you logged int about 900 boxes then? :)
  - 9y ago
jaequery 9y ago
hn and product hunt
maneesh 9y ago
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-bolt-case-study-4c879753d85d https://medium.com/@maneeshsethi/kickstarter-is-sorta-debt-a... -- this is an article that talks about how we built a hardware physical product without a real VC round.
- primitivesuave 9y ago
  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?
cdiamand 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
rsoto 9y ago
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.
kolinko 9y ago
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-store-prediction-tool-tells-developers-which-keywords-work/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/12/appcod-es-launches-app-sto... 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-changed-its-app-store-algorithm-again/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/29/looks-like-apple-has-chang... 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.
austincheney 9y ago
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 9y ago
sebringj 9y ago
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.
- AznHisoka 9y ago
  this is true only if you are in an ecosystem where people commonly share apps such as tech, food, marketing, and productivity and your app has a very useful freemium component.
  - sebringj 9y ago
    totally
- egfx 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
filvdg 9y ago
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
mayermail1977 9y ago
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
Huhty 9y ago
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-top-20-stories-of-the-week-of-april-20-27th-2017/ http://snapzu.com/teamsnapzu/weekly-roundup-earth-and-nature... 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!
nikanj 9y ago
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 9y ago
  What's your average customer LTV?
  - nikanj 9y ago
    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.
    - spacetexas 9y ago
      Would you mind sharing a link to your product?
    - cheez 9y ago
      Thanks for sharing. I figured that kind of revenue justifies the cold calling. Congrats on finding the niche!
jonathanbull 9y ago
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.
theprop 9y ago
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.).

209 points by sherm8n 9y ago

rmatte09 9y ago

How do you got your first 100 users?

rossinimartins 9y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191161

ecesena 9y ago

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 9y ago
You mean Twitter ads? I tried several times, was very underwhelmed. Curious what made it work for you.
- ecesena 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Couldn't you verify from a test account?

sb8244 9y ago

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.

zachsnow 9y ago
Agreed (coming from a similar spot it sounds like, in my case daily operations tools for SMBs): build a good product, and a sales team to sell it. Then sell it, all day, every day. Just make sure the product can back up sales!
- sb8244 9y ago
  Keeping churn in check is very important. High churn means something is wrong with the product.... Or maybe not? Implementation and support are important parts of the equation too. Product can't be garbage though.
udkl 9y ago
Sure, but sales is expensive. Is there a trick or insight to keep sales costs low ?
- sb8244 9y ago
  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.

no1youknowz 9y ago

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.

AznHisoka 9y ago
what industries or niches does this strategy work for? which ones do they not work as well?
- gerenuk 9y ago
  If your product is related to SEO, social media, ppc this can work really well. We recently launched a side project in SEO vertical with couple other partners and did over $200k in sales revenue over a week through our affiliate channel. If you are looking particularly where affiliates are promoting for products then check out voluum, link assistant etc. If your product is more of a tech side and starts with less than $20-$30 then chances are less people are going to promote that.

mobitar 9y ago

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 9y ago
Seems like the answer is always to grind it out. I commend anyone who has put in the work to succeed.

jjoe 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
sherm8n 9y ago
wow that's pure hustle! you logged int about 900 boxes then? :)
- 9y ago

jaequery 9y ago

hn and product hunt

maneesh 9y ago

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-bolt-case-study-4c879753d85d https://medium.com/@maneeshsethi/kickstarter-is-sorta-debt-a... -- this is an article that talks about how we built a hardware physical product without a real VC round.

primitivesuave 9y ago
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?

cdiamand 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

rsoto 9y ago

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.

kolinko 9y ago

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-store-prediction-tool-tells-developers-which-keywords-work/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/12/appcod-es-launches-app-sto... 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-changed-its-app-store-algorithm-again/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/29/looks-like-apple-has-chang... 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.

austincheney 9y ago

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 9y ago

sebringj 9y ago

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.

AznHisoka 9y ago
this is true only if you are in an ecosystem where people commonly share apps such as tech, food, marketing, and productivity and your app has a very useful freemium component.
- sebringj 9y ago
  totally
egfx 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

filvdg 9y ago

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

mayermail1977 9y ago

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

Huhty 9y ago

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-top-20-stories-of-the-week-of-april-20-27th-2017/ http://snapzu.com/teamsnapzu/weekly-roundup-earth-and-nature... 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!

nikanj 9y ago

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 9y ago
What's your average customer LTV?
- nikanj 9y ago
  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.
  - spacetexas 9y ago
    Would you mind sharing a link to your product?
  - cheez 9y ago
    Thanks for sharing. I figured that kind of revenue justifies the cold calling. Congrats on finding the niche!

jonathanbull 9y ago

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.

theprop 9y ago

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.).