Can You Share Some Hacks for Getting Potential Users to Try a Product?
This is an area I'm simply trying to get better at. I've been working on Scramble. I recently decided to focus on making it a marketplace where people with fitness goals/interests can meet personal trainers. The task is getting fitness trainers to adopt it as a tool for notifying clients of workout sessions and processing payments from them.
Hi Elijah, nice to meet you.
Two-sided marketplaces are notoriously hard because you have a chicken an egg problem. You probably won't attract trainers without demand from people who need training, but people don't want to use a site with no trainers.
Usually with most two-sided marketplaces there's some sort of growth hack behind the scenes that fueled early growth.
For airbnb, they piggy backed off an existing marketplace by making it a one-click process to cross-post your airbnb listing to Craigslist. People who were looking for vacation rentals on Craiglist found airbnb, went to their site, and stayed there because it had better photos, ratings and was beautifully designed. This video from Josh Elman is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0j1NaFpEkg
For my first startup, Rentabilities, a rental marketplace for stuff like bouncy castles and chainsaws, we leveraged SEO to drive demand, then used that demand to pull merchants into the site. We wrote an aggregator that would pull down all the products and pricing from local rental merchants websites, then wrote another script to create thousands of hyper-localized landing pages that got indexed by Google. When a consumer who could on the site, it looked like it was populated full of items. They'd make a request, then we'd hustle behind the scenes to find a rental store with availability, get them on our site in the long term to do their own replies, then get the quote back to the customer. With that strategy, we scaled to about 2,000 local merchants with a team of 3 people.
This Mixergy interview from Chuck Gordon of SpareFoot is good too for ideas: https://mixergy.com/interviews/gordon-sparefoot-interview/
Hope this helps! Happy to answer other questions about Rentabilities. Good luck!
Thanks so much for this Andy! This is great insight!!
Do you mean for them to notify their existing clients, or for them to find new clients? Also, for whichever option it is, what's the best solution that people are using today and how does Scramble compare?
(I think all of this is relevant in determining how to get users to try your product, because step #1 is knowing what's valuable to them.)
The "hacks" worth trying are extremely specific to the product you're building. So… what are you building?
Thanks Courtland. I added a little more detail to the post.