How did I get my first 100 active users within days after launching my product?

Hi, I’m Morgan, the founder of Gemoo.

As a startup founder, I completely understand how eager every founder is to get more users and their feedback as soon as possible, and how difficult it is to drive new users when you have a limited budget. That’s how we embarked on our journey, with these expectations but no prior experience.

It’s been a difficult journey because we all lacked experience, so we began to search, collect, and read a plethora of posts, threads, and even books about growth hacks before attempting them. We finally reached our goal after a few days. The number of users far exceeded our expectations, with over 1k visits, and around 100+ active users.

To assist new businesses like ours in gaining users as quickly as possible, I’ve decided to share my experience here:

🤝 Create strong bonds with other founders
The majority of the founders are experienced people in this field, having founded more than one product, and are dedicated to product growth. Most importantly, the majority of them are friendly and warm-hearted, so after talking to them, you may find the best way to get more users.

😼Hang out around all related communities
Personally, I adore the internet’s enchantment. If you want to dive into a specific topic and drive traffic from there, just join a community and get involved.

I and my partner have joined more than 10 Facebook groups, participated in 5+ Slack communities, met 100+ Twitter founders, and posted more than 20 times on various subreddits. Fortunately, we’ve seen the result:

• 60 + News Visits from Facebook
  
• 130+ New Visits from Reddit
  
• 200+ New Visits from Twitter
  
  I’m so proud of my team and myself for accomplishing all of this!

🌟Influencer outreach is necessary
We were initially unsure about who our target users were (a mistake we should not have made, and I can dedicate another post to it if you're interested in the learnings we got from this mistake), so we devise a strategy: imagine some users in various fields, identify a few people who are regarded as experts in those fields and have a consistent following, and then connect with them.

It was effective. We initially targeted marketers, and I discovered a lead marketer in a Facebook group who also runs a community. We talked about something he was interested in, and then I began to recommend Gemoo and promised to provide some benefits to users in his community. It demonstrated that it is an excellent method for both recruiting beta users and soliciting their feedback.

Here are some comments and suggestions we’ve received

🚀Launch on Product Hunt
I wasn’t going to write about Product Hunt at first because it’s such a well-known platform and so competitive that it may be difficult to stand out. However, it is still the most effective way to generate more visits and feedback. We've gained more than 500 visits from Product Hunt.

I've also shared my experience in this post before.

The above suggestions are the most effective for me and my team, and you can also check this post to see all the ways we've tried.

All of the above are based on my personal experience; if you have any additional suggestions, please leave your comment below.

Thanks for your time and hope my experience could help you catch early users for your projects.