How I got our first 100 beta customers with $0
While working on my most recent project, I've noticed a difference in how quickly sign-ups for the beta were generated without spending money.
I'm sharing these observations in case they are helpful. I'm a product designer who's generated millions of app installs, sold a company, and mentored startups at Techstars in Boston.
Usually it's a real struggle to get these first customers and especially to get ones that will really engage and give feedback. This time around, we seem to be generating better relationships with customers that are giving us valuable feedback. Here's what I think is working:
1. Micro communities are powerful
90% of my beta customers came from a single community with less than 2,000 members. This has worked 10X better than bigger social platforms like Twitter. In these small communities it's much easier to stand out simply by putting in effort.
Lots of people are trying to be awesome at Twitter. Very few people are trying to be awesome at a forum with 2,000 people in it. These small communities can also be hyper targeted at our potential customers.
2. Do It Yourself
So far I have to admit that the vast majority of our beta customers have come directly from my engagement in trying to attract them. As the founder, nobody knows the product, vision, and customer better than I do. Customers also like that they are getting to talk to the "person that's making it."
The more I've directly invested my own time in acquiring customers, the better the result has been. In these early stages, I've found the scrappy, unscalable work of reaching out myself is the thing that's working best.
3. Share & Show
This has been successful everywhere. It was a real struggle for me to be so open until someone at my last company taught me how powerful it is to share and communicate.
I'm working harder to make sure I talk more publicly. I try to write as much in micro communities and on Twitter as I do in our internal Slack. I am working every day to get better at this, and I'm not a pro yet by any means.
What's worked for you in attracting your first 100 beta customers? How are you keeping them happy? Let me know in a comment below.
Hey Andrew, can you give some insight into the forum you targeted, or at least how you discovered your micro-forum? Perhaps it's just reddit haha, but I am curious.
@GoGoJoe sure! It’s run by a creator/influencer and primarily filled with people interested in creating a newsletter.
It’s a paid community that costs <$100 per year. I discovered it because I was following the work of the person who runs it.
This is where the old adage of being a customer of my own product pays off. I was just looking around at the things that interest me, and those communities are filled with people like me.
If I were to try to recreate it for my product, I’d look for creators making content and teaching courses in an interest area related to my product. In my case that interest area is writing. Writers happen to have quite a few communities and most of the people there are interested in what I’m making—a note taking tool.
The second tip I can give is to be a useful person inside the community. I went in and introduced myself as the creator of Thunk, but then just participated a lot and tried to be helpful for a while before asking for any feedback. Most of my beta customers have come through posts asking for feedback on a feature.
The community runs on circle.so, which is a community tool for creators. There are some features of circle that highlight really active posts, so responding to comments and asking tons of follow up questions will highlight any posts you make.
I hope this helps! I’d name the community, but I don’t want to overwhelm them with promotional content. :)
Speaking of being active and helpful, this was a great response! Thanks for the insights without being too specific or outing your community.
Hi Andrew, a question, as far as I see you did not mention which type of project you were developing in this example. I'm in fact in a comparable situation. Could you take a look at timz.flowers and if you have a tip where to go for a micro-community tell me?
On first glance, I'd probably look for places where people are talking about remote work and problems relating to remote work.
Hi @nalband yes, that's what we are doing. We are setting backlinks in these kinds of threads and are doing the normal stuff. But I was esp. interested in the notion of a "micro-community". This sounds to me like a highly interconnected network area. In network theory, those would be node-accumulations with a higher "rich-club coefficient", if that is correct? Interestingly that's exactly the difficult thing to find out, how the interconnectedness of people is given, because even if this rich-club network exists the network actors only appear randomly outside of their network. The only strategy for me to find such network centers is exactly the thing we are all doing here on IH, PH, Reddit, and twitter - connecting the same flock of people from different angles. But that is a pretty obvious thing as these platforms are notorious for hosting these networks, so this is a very special case. How can we identify such kinds of flocks on different platforms? I'm new in the growth hacking business, so even obvious tips sometimes are extremely helpful, how can we use the idea of a micro-community appropriately? Thank you
What's been successful for me is a community organized around a domain expert.
Circle seems to be the platform of choice for these kinds of communities. https://circle.so/