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How YesGraph Got Its First 1000 Users
- programminggeek 13y agoI think it would be interesting to see a followup to this about when they make their first $1,000, $10,000, $100,000 etc... Getting free users is not the hardest thing in the world. People like free things. Getting them to pay you is a different thing altogether.
- ivankirigin 13y agoI totally agree! Getting 1000 people to stay is hard, which is part of the point here. We want to focus on engagement. Getting 1000 people to pay if they stick around is much easier than if they don't.
- njudah 13y agoI had an insightful manager once who told me 'you'd be surprised how hard it is to sell something for free.' The point being, getting their attention and usage is in fact pretty difficult.
- zabramow 13y agoAgree. Especially since people are sick of signing up for services, especially when it requires username and password.
- weixiyen 13y agoI've always had the opposite problem. Users were willing to pay, but I didn't have a good enough user acquisition funnel to justify it so it shut off payments. It took me a while before figuring out how to get to 1000, then 10000, then 100000, but user acquisition and retention are imo the hardest things for a first-time product maker. I actually think monetization is easy once you have the user base unless your product inherently does not provide any real value. I bet anything that 99% of startups fail due to traction, not inability to monetize.
- dbecker 13y agoGetting free users is not the hardest thing in the world. Out of curiosity: have you done it, or are you just speculating that it isn't difficult?
- ecesena 13y agoThanks for sharing, we're facing similar problems and comparison is always useful! Betali.st and similar "tools" worked well for us, although users from these services are easily to get in, but harder to keep engaged (I guess as they're used to jump to the next novelty).
- ivankirigin 13y agoDid you compare the results across such alpha list tools?
- ecesena 13y agoThe best for us was erlibird.com, say ~500 users in a couple of months.
- ivankirigin 13y agoI'd be particularly interested in hearing about different ad channels people tried early on. If anyone has any experiences to share, I'd really appreciate it.
- gustaf 13y agofor mobile applications Facebook Mobile Ads are pretty good since you can target very specific audiences and built local critical mass. whenever you're bidding on non-branded adword ads you usually have to compete with some incumbent that have spent time on their optimization which means you probably wont be able to beat them with your new product
- ivankirigin 13y agoGreat points. For us, we want to compare channels, because at the start nothing is optimized. So it isn't all about comparing to incumbents. I'll only see them in effectively higher bids to get the same attention.
- ecesena 13y agoIn addition to Google Analytics, we tried Twitter, Facebook and Stumble Upon. My feeling is that, at early stages, all outperform analytics unless you really know what you're selling and/or you've good landing pages. All have their specific "way to use it", e.g. on Facebook you need a page with engagement, on Stumble you need "something" that people can stumple upon :) e.g. blog posts. Here I'm considering signups as conversions. Analytics (and Bing) were good to reach a lot of page views (that may still be useful).
- zizee 13y agoWhen you say "Google Analytics" do you mean "Google Adwords"?
- fitzpasd 13y agoGhostery blocks this entire article for me... (first time I've ever seen that happen)
- ivankirigin 13y agoI think it's the linkedin widget. I'll remove it
- jere 13y ago>Blog. If you make great content, people will read it and share it. This reminds me of a jwz quote, except I would rewrite it as such: Some people, when confronted with a marketing problem, think "I know, I'll blog about it." Now they have two marketing problems. The whole premise of an article like this is that a great product won't draw in users by itself, but it's assumed that a great blog will draw in readers magically. I'm not saying you can't build a large readership. We've seen it done many times. But I'm skeptical that you have to do any less work than you would just to promote the product in the first place. The internet is filled with blogs that nobody reads... I'm writing one myself.
- bliti 13y agoOTOH, I know of tech startups growing like crazy without a blog, or public facing website. Content is great and all, but its not a magic bullet. Off-topic: The design of that blog. and the landing page feels weird. Doesn't really flow very well, and is hard to read.
- ivankirigin 13y agoYour comment is timely because I spent more time promoting this post than writing it. Compared to the last blog post on the blog, it got 100X the traction after ~3X the promotion effort. I completely agree actually. The relationship between frequency, quality, promotion, and traction on a blog is fascinating.
- sybhn 13y agodoh!! Signed up for a trial just to realize yesgraph's a linkedin message cannon >:(
- ivankirigin 13y agoActually we don't send any messages over Facebook and LinkedIn. If we did, it would be with explicit permission per message. Here is how it works 1. Describe a role 2. Invite people to make recommendations (using the invite link or the direct email flow) 3. Connect to get contacts, and we make it easy to recommend good people That's basically it! Try it out and let me know what you think: ivan@yesgraph.com
- ivankirigin 13y agoThis new post by Brian Balfour is related and super awesome http://brianbalfour.com/post/63581380690/customer-acquisition http://brianbalfour.com/post/63581380690/customer-acquisitio...
- piALGO 13y agoJust started using Pinterest to post relevant infographics. I use buff.ly to manage all my social media postings, and I have them all linked together so that people interested in topics related to our technology can find us and learn about what we're doing.