Customer Acquisition (It's a bit Wordy!)

(you guys are getting tired of me....) --forgive me and my wordiness!!

I've been thinking a lot about customer acquisition strategies when one has $0. How can it be accomplished? Best strategies for the effort, etc..

The whole idea of a saas/service using "affiliates/referrals" is to have your app somehow spread. And it makes sense. We've all seen various companies use the strategy. The growth articles all use the same 50-75 (largely successful) operations as examples.

But none of these articles discuss how to go from 0 users, to then growing! (without already having a significant userbase you can turn to)

Give me anything, and if I have the audience Taylor Swift has, I can probably sell it!

And this brings me to Github -- packaging "associated" services to be made available to others. This makes a lot of sense at a gut level.

You give the Advertiser/Owner exposure, and more than that, you potentially get users who learn to use your "product" and then take it into the workplace with them.. powerful!

I was astounded, (and still am) that the powers the be, didn't jump all over this, and immediately start forming "business" competitions around this. Where users could enter, teams formed, teams then given different projects to perform, where the users have to have "defined" roles/proj mgmt plans/progress charts/etc.. and the users are judged with real prizes to be awarded.

Of course, the teams have to use the products/services from the vendors in some way/shape!

And this gets to my jonesing on saas/affiliate operations and trying to find/connect with them.

The project I'm working on needs to find these saas services/products to have the real conversation (ie talk, not a feedback dialog/email that gets tossed!) to discuss the ability to expand the userbase of a select group of these operations.

The proect I'm working on, is targeting the top 500-600 colleges in the US, with the goal of providing cheaper textbooks, as well as eventually doing a better "onboarding" for the users to jobs

Conversations with various "hiring" contacts within different types of businesses would be thrilled to have a better/more productive process. A lot of businesses across the US have no real clue about what/how tech can improve their bottom line.

thoughts/comments!

thanks