Acquisition channel that works in 2024: Discord

To grow as a newbie founder, you want to focus on acquisition channels that are:

1. Not that saturated/expensive
2. Give you a fast feedback loop

Let me explain.

Channels that are not that saturated: Here, the age of the channel is directly correlated with saturation.

Take Facebook Ads, for example. Facebook was launched in 2004. If you want to use Facebook Ads, expect to pay up to $2 per click.

Ouch. Especially if you're a bootstrapped founder.

As a new founder, you want newer channels that are cheaper to market to.

Provide you with fast feedback: Ideally, you want to get feedback from users on that channel.

Going with the Facebook Ads example, you probably won't get much feedback from people there if you run an ad. You define your budget, run your ad, get some clicks, users, and that's about it.

More and more founders are using Discord to acquire new users

Discord is a relatively new marketing channel.

It was launched in 2015 and has really taken off since then.

There are now over 614 million Discord users.

I've noticed more and more founders mentioning Discord as an acquisition channels that works for them while reading recently published IH interviews.

Take Masud and his product, Queue, that's currently doing close to $1 million in revenue a year.

Masud tried a bunch of different marketing channels. Discord was one of those channels that worked really well:

...we launched the product on Discord servers that we were part of, and that is what gave us our early traction.

This IHer was also successful by launching on Discord.

Discord can also help you get to product-market fit faster

Remember our earlier point about fast feedback?

Discord can help you get feedback fast because, at its core, it's a chat app.

You send something. You receive something in return.

People respond on Discord. Positively or negatively. The important thing is that you won't get radio silence like with some other channels (think: SEO, Facebook Ads, etc.)

There are over 19 million servers on Discord

That's according to Statista.

Chances are, several hundred of those servers are related to your product.

How to find a Discord server relevant to your product: Discord has its own search engine (there are over 38,000 servers listed there currently) where you can find relevant communities.

Just type a keyword related to your product (e.g., founders) to start your search.

Think of each Discord server like its own subreddit. They're all different, with their own rules, etc.

Which leads me to my last point...

How to post on a Discord community (without getting banned)

The last thing you want to when joining a Discord community is posting a blatant link to your product.

Instead, you want to be...more subtle.

Or DM the admin directly for a "blatant" promotion.

Convince the admin to do a shootout: Every Discord server has an "announcement" channel where admins can post things relevant to their members.

One of those things can be your product.

One good idea is to scan the "announcement" channel for any previous links. If you find any, there are higher chances you'll get a 'yes' for your shoutout request as well.

The art of being subtle: If you want to promote your own product on a channel, you could start by posting a question.

Say you have a project management SaaS. One question you could ask is for people to list their favorite project management tools.

After that, you could mention that you're building a similar tool and were looking for what people were currently using.

Some people will check you out and provide you with feedback (remember our point about getting to product-market fit faster)?

When trying to be subtle, one popular quote among VCs comes to mind: Ask for investment, get advice. Ask for advice, get an investment.

Same here. Ask a question, get customers. Ask for customers, get a (are you a bot?) question.