Lots of people come up with a good idea for a product, launch, then wonder where to get users. "Start with the market, instead," evolves their consciousness. I offer a different approach: start with the customer acquisition strategy and then build your product.
1) Build a landing page describing the problem and your solution, in terms of emotional value benefits
2) Drive paid traffic to the landing page. Get at least 20 signups. Boom, you're now at 20 users. Paid traffic = Pay Per Click ads. Try Facebook, Reddit, Quora, Google AdWords.
3) Build the thing. Write an email to your list describing the process of how you built the thing and how you found their names.
4) Cross post that very same narrative to discussion forums: Facebook, HN, Reddits, Indie Hackers[forum], wherever.
5) Search on google for one of those "web app directories" or "new startup directories". Block off two hours and painstakingly submit your app to every one.
6) Look for podcasts in your niche. Email all of them and invite yourself on as a guest
7) Look for influencers in your niche. Email all of them and ask them if they'd like a complimentary copy of your product (access to your webapp, etc) in exchange for a testimonial. If the influencers are all pay-to-play, find people who are active but on the verge of influencer status.
8) Send to your friends and family.
9) Post an ad for a usability test on Craigslist. You'll learn a ton and maybe get some quality users.
10) Post a Delighted.com or similar Net Promoter Score survey to your user base. You'll find the "holes" in your bucket that are causing you to leak users rather than compound them.
> 4) Cross post that very same narrative to discussion forums: Facebook, HN, Reddits, Indie Hackers[forum], wherever.
This seems more effective if your primary market is the startup crowd. It could also be distracting if they're not the target demographic and you overvalue their feedback.
I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree. For launching a new technology service, generally adoption follows a pattern: technologists (people who like tech for its own sake), then visionaries in the market itself – who use the tech to boost their own career and get an 'unfair advantage' over their peers, then the chasm. Then come pragmatists, who require social proof from peers in their market, and then conservatives, who require a full service solution (all the complements must exist, such as a support infrastructure). Finally, the laggards, who will only move to a new solution when they are absolutely forced to, such as when the incumbent discontinues support for its offering.
This has all been formulated in great strong detail in the book Crossing The Chasm. Maybe if you are implementing a 'commodity' service that is innovative in absolutely no way whatsoever, you can skip the technologists, but there is such a strong community of online entrepreneurs with a great support ecosystem that I recommend everyone take advantage of it. The only problem is that you have to pay to play – not in terms of money, but in terms of contribution (sharing what you know and helping others). In this case definitely, you really reap what you sow in the karma bank.
I would have to strongly recommend against number eight. It's almost impossible to be done tactfully and it's even harder to avoid the appearance of using your friends.
If I built something cool that I genuinely believed one of my friends would find useful then I would wait for them to seek me out with their problem and just give them perpetual free use with no strings attached and write it off as marketing.
Nice summary, but be careful with FB ads. It can easily suck tons of money for literally nothing. Even if you pay per click, you get clicks from absolutely irrelevant people (bots?), with zero engagement.
My heuristic is that I budget 2x expected LTV per channel for the initial test. So if I think my customer could be worth $100 over their lifetime, I will allocate $200 to reddit ads, Facebook, etc. If I don't get any movement in the funnel (clicking signup; actually signing up; paying; etc...), then I abandon the channel until I have substantially updated the product or messaging. If there is some movement, then I devote effort to optimizing the funnel, starting from the ad creatives toward each segment of the signup flow
1) Build a landing page describing the problem and your solution, in terms of emotional value benefits
2) Drive paid traffic to the landing page. Get at least 20 signups. Boom, you're now at 20 users. Paid traffic = Pay Per Click ads. Try Facebook, Reddit, Quora, Google AdWords.
3) Build the thing. Write an email to your list describing the process of how you built the thing and how you found their names.
4) Cross post that very same narrative to discussion forums: Facebook, HN, Reddits, Indie Hackers[forum], wherever.
5) Search on google for one of those "web app directories" or "new startup directories". Block off two hours and painstakingly submit your app to every one.
6) Look for podcasts in your niche. Email all of them and invite yourself on as a guest
7) Look for influencers in your niche. Email all of them and ask them if they'd like a complimentary copy of your product (access to your webapp, etc) in exchange for a testimonial. If the influencers are all pay-to-play, find people who are active but on the verge of influencer status.
8) Send to your friends and family.
9) Post an ad for a usability test on Craigslist. You'll learn a ton and maybe get some quality users.
10) Post a Delighted.com or similar Net Promoter Score survey to your user base. You'll find the "holes" in your bucket that are causing you to leak users rather than compound them.