7 ms·

Ask HN: Getting users

• swombat 17y ago
  The way we got our first users for Woobius was that some of the initial team were architects, and we had strong links with a number of architecture firms. So when the product was barely useable, we deployed it and got them to start trying it out. There followed a frantic search for a decent host when we realised that those people were using Woobius for real live projects and they'd get rather annoyed if it suddenly vanished in a hard drive crash or the like. Anyway, to cut a long story, since Woobius is a naturally viral tool (see http://danieltenner.com/posts/0009-how-to-make-your-application-viral.html http://danieltenner.com/posts/0009-how-to-make-your-applicat... ), it spread from that initial kernel, with effectively no marketing. If you don't have strong connections to potential users of your product, I would advise building a different product.
  • DTrejo 17y ago
    From swombat's article: One way to resolve this problem is to ask yourself what would happen if someone who just joined my application thought it’s great and wanted to invite 20 of their friends/colleagues? If you can’t provide an easy way for that person to market your application for you, you’ll lose out on your best inviters. As a user, it really annoys me when inviting others is a hassle. Ideally the process should be almost effortless.
• dotBen 17y ago
  Pre launch: Blogging about a subject related to your startup and twittering, funneled into the classic "sign up to know when we launch" holding page, along with personal networking should give you 1000 prime users ready for when you launch. Post launch: more personal networking (esp with influentials - either in person or virtual) and getting good write ups However, before you sign up even your first user you need to make sure you have a strong viral loop going (assuming your product is suitable for it) so that every user you obtain is likely to send you even more. IMHO it's not actually hard to get 1000 users, it's actually harder to obtain the first 50,000 users. After that you probably are reaching the inflection point and it gets easier (assuming good viral loop).
  • benofsky 17y ago
    funneled into the classic "sign up to know when we launch" holding page How did you make this work for you? How long did you open it up before launching? Edit: formatting.
    • dotBen 17y ago
      You should put the "sign up to know more" box the moment you have your domain hosted. WP Themes like http://themeshaper.com/wordpress-domain-parking-theme/ http://themeshaper.com/wordpress-domain-parking-theme/ are your friend... takes 20 minutes to set this up. Add to the list of emails u get from this page the email address of everyone you network with about the idea/startup. That's kinda cheaky but it's done a lot. When u launch go through the list to spot any pr, media or VIP people -- offer them a beta. Then just launch and email blast everyone with the information.
      • benofsky 17y ago
        Thanks!
• alttab 17y ago
  This is of course based on the assumption you've built something people need/want.
• patio11 17y ago
  Content creation and organic SEO. If you're the guy writing things that solve problems for your users, it a) brings them into your site and b) pre-disposes them to trust you when you say that using your software/service will help them with the problem they are having. (Content ranks for long-tail terms, content draws links, links help you rank for more competitive terms, repeat ad nauseum.) Organic SEO scales stupidly well, incidentally, and if you're a bootstrappy type of person you can turn the revenue it brings into AdWords or other paid acquisition strategies, then use the revenue that brings to improve your organic SEO, then... It really helps if you either write very well, have a unique positioning for your blog/articles/whatever, or have some sort of unfair advantage that everybody else on the Internet can't match. In my case, the unfair advantage for the last two years has been my CMS, which lets me outpublish organizations with budgets next to which mine would be rounding error. (An old buddy of mine, ex-military, on the subject of unfair advantages: "A fair fight is the result of poor planning".)
  • ryanwaggoner 17y ago
    In my case, the unfair advantage for the last two years has been my CMS Can you elaborate? I don't understand this in the age of Wordpress and Drupal...
    • patio11 17y ago
      Oh, sure. My CMS takes a word list as input and spits out a page like this ( http://www.bingocardcreator.com/bingo-cards/holidays/thanksgiving http://www.bingocardcreator.com/bingo-cards/holidays/thanksg... ) as output. I think it is rather unlikely that a Wordpress plugin exists to do that.
      • ryanwaggoner 17y ago
        True, but probably due more to the lack of demand for one rather than the technical difficulty of creating one?
      • hellotoby 17y ago
        To me the use of keywords on this page look borderline splog-ish. Sure a great way to get page views but how is the bounce rate when people legitimately looking up Thanksgiving land on your page?
• andreshb 17y ago
  Influencers and Media Relations. Picked industry specific niches, and leaders, invited them to participate in our early stages (at least their opinion) and began strong networking. Day of release(s) had support from these opinion leaders and they helped promote.
• sachinag 17y ago
  Honestly, the number of your users is directly correlated to your potential market. Patrick's bingo cards are going after a much smaller market (teachers) than Drew's online storage (everyone). Colin's online storage for technically astute paranoids is probably somewhere in the middle. So it really doesn't matter what you do if you're not targeting your market correctly. You have to be honest with yourself and figure that out first. Blogging on your blog isn't as good as being a good member of the relevant messageboard for your particular community, for example. (At least not for your first 1,000 users.) For us, it was cold calling on the seller side and PR on the buyer side. Turns out that the tech blogs have been much more willing to write about us than the gaming blogs. I don't get that, but hey, whatever. YMMV depending on your initial vertical.
  • deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  • jlees 17y ago
    Games blogs are usually fairly focused on games themselves, not the meta stuff around selling and buying them. OK, at Joystiq et al we would often do stuff like sales charts and in-person reports from the Xbox 360 line, but readers mostly visit for entertainment value. Writing about a marketplace site would come across too much like an ad, I think; we didn't highlight Amazon or Best Buy's sale items, for example! (Weirdly we did cover the digital distribution stuff a fair bit, but I think that's twofold. Firstly, most of it is from major gaming players and impacts the rest of their strategy, which fanboys will leap on. Secondly, digital distribution is still New and Exciting.)
  • patio11 17y ago
    Honestly, the number of your users is directly correlated to your potential market. I strongly suspect this is not the case, because I have always been limited primarily by "number of prospects I can reach with my marketing" and not "number of elementary schoolteachers in the United States". (Over two million, incidentally. The Bureau of Labor Statistics will tell you all manner of fascinating things!) Nor does the percentage of teachers in the population matter very much at all, because I never address marketing to "the population", I address marketing to e.g. "the people who are searching for [bingo card activity for kids]".
• zaidf 17y ago
  If you are making money from get go, paid search is not bad if you can get to a positive ROI after a little bit of messing around. Your leverage with paid search will depend on your longterm earning per customer and your cost of customer acquisition among other factors. I would suggest you read Sean Ellis' blog. He talks a lot about customer acquisition: http://startup-marketing.com/ http://startup-marketing.com/
• fjabre 17y ago
  If you are really niche then adwords is probably the best way to go. If you are mass market then get the blog mentions and organic SEO.
• swies 17y ago
  Launch in private beta and email bloggers access codes. We got 18,000 users in 4 weeks like this, not sure if it's generalizable. I wrote the details down here: http://runitback.tumblr.com/post/223371555/how-we-got-18-000-beta-users-in-4-weeks http://runitback.tumblr.com/post/223371555/how-we-got-18-000...
• zackattack 17y ago
  This is really interesting for me, because I'm working on this problem right now with my startup: CustomerFind. Right now, CustomerFind.com is a Twitter application that automatically follows users on Twitter. You specify a set of keywords, and then automatically follow users who have a tweet mentioning one of those keywords. Presently, on average of ~15% of users will follow back, with good keywords typically generating a 30% follow back rate. Unfortunately, there's really no way to know if those users are real customers who will use your product/pay you. So I'm working on evolving the service. How many of you would be interested in the next iteration? The idea is to create personal conversations with customers. I am considering the following features for candidacy. 1. You get a list of users who have a tweet mentioning any one of some prespecified keywords. 1a. You have an option to auto-follow these users. 1b. You can filter the list by geography, user popularity, and emotional inflection of the message. 2. You get a CRM tool to enable you to personally engage with users. Sachin: you noticed someone is looking for "sell videogames"? You then have an opportunity to start an @reply/DM conversation with them, within the product. This coincides with Seth Godin's philosophy of permission marketing: you get to reach out to people who really want to hear what you have to say. 2a. You get automated notifications to encourage you to follow-up with more messages. Following up is critical to any good sales methodology. 2b. Each sales/conversation thread contains the user's information, and other facts mined from the tweeting history to help target the conversation. 3. You can type in a competitor's screen name (or your own!), and figure out the most popular words or phrases that its followers are tweeting about. Helps you do better targeting for your own list. For example, you type in @TheNorthFace, and learn that people are talking about "cheap snow jackets". Anyone interested? Note: if you object by saying "that's too many conversations to keep up with!", I'd like to note that's a problem that you desperately want to have. -Zack
  • jackowayed 17y ago
    No wonder you're having trouble getting users. Your product is pure evil. Stop helping spammers!!
    • zackattack 17y ago
      Did you read my post? That's why I'm evolving the product: to enable personalized communication.
• aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  Buy ads, track their performance, use multivariate testing to improve their performance.
• lloydarmbrust 17y ago
  The easiest way is make your product appeal to the widest range of users possible. If half the people on an airplane could benefit from your product than your onto a good idea. Unfortunately my product deals with a very specific market and by the time we have 1,000 "users" we'll be billionaires. I'm still trying to figure out how to create a SaaS product that provides water or food . . . because everyone needs that.
• icey 17y ago
  Bribery. Every product launch I've been a part of has basically used some form of bribery to get users. Of course, my background is all enterprise software. We have either shown people how they are losing money by not using our product or how they will miss out on making money by not using our product. Maybe bribery is the wrong word. What's the word for bribing people with their own money? I haven't had any "viral" products yet, so I'd personally like to hear about how that works for people :D
  • swombat 17y ago
    What's the word for bribing people with their own money? I think people in the enterprise world generally refer to that as "getting your salespeople to make a convincing business case".
  • aaronblohowiak 17y ago
    "What's the word for bribing people with their own money?" Incentivizing.
  • zaidf 17y ago
    Proving ROI? Pretty much what Greg Mcadoo(sp?) from Seqouia said yesterday I think. No idea why you' consider this bribery, lol. You're either saving money or helping them make more. Bribery is a (usually criminal) way of giving something for a favor.
    • icey 17y ago
      Evidently I've done a poor job of making a joke :D My point was just that we've found that the best way to motivate people to use our products has been to illustrate that they're missing out on an opportunity by not using it. Since I do all enterprise work, the fastest way to do that is by showing them how it affects their money, not that our solution is cheap or expensive or anything like that.
      • zaidf 17y ago
        Haha totally understandable. A joke like that can easily get lost. I recently joked with a potential cofounder about creating a service "100 f*ing times more addictive than cocaine". Threw him off for a bit;) Lesson learned.
• pclark 17y ago
  techcrunch
  • phil 17y ago
    ...though that's probably an unsuitable strategy for most products.
    • pclark 17y ago
      i was joking a little too :)
• bemmu 17y ago
  Link from my other sites. I might be up for sending some HN people their first users if you are getting desparate (see my profile for contact info), but I doubt my audience of MySpacers really matches with anything that anyone here is doing.
• omarchowdhury 17y ago
  Search marketing. This avenue may not fit your startup because no one may be searching your industry. I mean, if your startup is Twitter, you're not going to get very far bidding on the keyword "microblogging". It worked with our startup because people were already finding our competitors using search (our competitors literally created the search market for us because of their large scale media buys offline), and the volume allows us to scale.
• staunch 17y ago
  Directories. There's almost always appropriate directories to get your thing listed on. iPhone app store is the extreme example. Maybe you can create an addon for Firefox and submit it to addons.mozilla.org. Maybe you have audio software and you can get it listed on some big audio software directory or blog. It really depends what kind of thing you have, but there's almost always some list out there that it belongs on.
  • pclark 17y ago
    will that really get you a thousand users?
    • staunch 17y ago
      I suppose saying "directories" doesn't really do my suggestion justice. Although in some cases simply listing yourself can be really effective. What I really suggest is marketing your thing by integrating it into something popular. If you create a plugin or addon that connects something huge (like Firefox, phpBB, MySpace, Facebook, iPhone) with your thing, you get to get to drink the water from the elephant's eyes. Convincing 1,000 to give your thing a shot is not particularly hard. Once you have access to those people it's not hard to sell some of them on something else (if necessary).
    • DenisM 17y ago
      With iPhone apps - sure.
      • pclark 17y ago
        not without marketing also
• pclark 17y ago
  our first 1000 users: via our blog talking about what we're doing and why (= good for SEO, engagement of community) PR though you'd be surprised at how little an effect this makes typically though, you gotta really target / be lucky. Tip: DaringFireball = iPhone app sales. Twitter - great to engage users of competitor products (sorry) or people musing aloud wishing your product exists (it does! they just haven't found it!) Spin off sites - I really love these. Do a simple project (= 1 days work) that'll get on the reddit home page or become a mini twitter hit. works really well for getting users, then convert them from the spin off site to your site. if you're a good product manager you can make this work wonders. this might be a widget (duckduckgo style) or a tshirt or mugs, or an actual service.
• kevinholesh 17y ago
  Direct mail. I'm not talking the crappy postcards or the fake credit cards everyone gets. I'm talking about handwriting a note to someone influential. If your market is teachers, write to the department heads at a local High school. If they like it, they'll spread it to their teacher friends. Handwriting the notes is a PAIN (it will literally hurt your hands), but it is much more effective and personal than a cookie cutter email or a mass mailing letter. Unfortunately, this method isn't scalable, but it will give you a good start.
  • eru 17y ago
    > Unfortunately, this method isn't scalable, but it will give you a good start. Perhaps, if you cheat? Let somebody else hand-write your notes. (Although you still need to create the content.)
• wensing 17y ago
  Create a widget with a link back to your site. Good for referrals and pagerank.
• DenisM 17y ago
  You are probably solving a problem, right? Ask yourself how would you go about finding the solution to such problem and go there. "There" will be some blogs, community websites etc where you can add comments whenever a relevant question comes up for discussion. This worked for me. What didn't work: approaching any kind of famous blogger (zero responce), google ads (huge money drain).
• iamelgringo 17y ago
  I've used mechanical turk in getting initial users. You can set up a task, and have turkers do very specific actions on your site, for $.05. And, studies have been done, that suggest that Turkers are really very well educated, and are probably early adopters. If you treat them with respect, and show appreciation for what they are doing, they will go the extra mile for you. I've also used Adsense to get initial users. For my keywords, they cost about $.10 a user, and about half of them bounced. But, it provided me with a demographic that I wouldn't have reached with Mechanical Turk.
  • megamark16 17y ago
    Wow, not sure how I didn't even know that this existed! Thanks!
• known 17y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_action http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_action
• offyourfacelook 17y ago
  We're trying to get bloggers. www.offyourfacelook.com