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Launch Your Startup: A Step-by-Step Guide On How To Get 1000 Users
One of the main challenges a startup faces is gaining traction and getting its first users. It is often overlooked by a lot of startups who are confident that
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One learning from my mistakes is not getting familiar with no-code tools, and being able to build fast on this while writing about it in social media.
It's super important to build fast, but also to let people know about what you're building!
do you think telling people about what you're building will not cause your idea to be stolen?
Ideas are a dime a dozen.
Even if you have a great idea, you still have to manifest that idea by taking action.
If you take action, you still have to complete what you're working on or it'll be worth nothing.
And even if you finish building the thing, it has to be good or nobody will care.
Plus, you can give 100 people the same 'idea' for something, and you will still get 100 different results.
Ideas worth nothing. All that matters is the execution.
Just asking , thank your for the enlightenment guys
You mention that "don't leave your job is a bit controversial". I kinda disagree. Leaving your job to start something you have no idea if it'll work is insane IMO (unless you have a huge cash flow to sustain you for months or years).
I also wonder if sometimes we in the growth field underestimate the power of product-market fit. For example, you mentioned to build a simple landing page. What about building a few simple landing pages presenting your product from multiple angles? Or even modifying the offer a little bit? There seems to be people here (and in general) who think that the reason why their marketing isn't working is because of the channel, when in fact the real reason is their offer.
Great article though.
Leaving your job can be a calculated risk if you have a few years of savings, or if you want to raise some funding. It pretty much depends of who you are and what you want to achieve IMHO.
You're 100% right about the offer, I should have emphasis more about iterate about every aspect of the company, not only the product but the pricing, the offer, the story telling, the branding....
Thanks for your support and the valuable feedback!
Hey Xavier Coiffard,
From my perspective, for the first 1,000 users you often need to do a lot of uncool unscalable shit like emailing, communication with the community one by one etc. But there is never the only way to success .
Thanks for sharing this amazing content! I started implementing my app release today in the release directories you shared in your post for my app: https://makecopy.digital/en
Hope I can get a lot of traffic in the next few days following your guidance.
This is really interesting. Most of the time we want to build everything from scratch, being smart is to use the right tool for each task. This allows us to launch early and don't waste time in something that can be made in minutes using some existing tool.
Makes sense. For instance, having landing page templates, as supposed to building from scratch, would definitely save you time.
By the way, I'm looking for feedback on DarkColors, a tool that makes it easy for you to test website color ideas: https://www.darkcolors.digital/workspace
Interesting read. Food for thought:
I skipped all SEO / content marketing, and went straight to cold email. Took a saas product from $0 to 6 figures in 1 year just doing that (data scraping & outreach using https://www.getsalesfox.com/)
I have no idea how or why, but now we rank #3 or 4 for probably one of the hardest keywords to rank for real estate ($50+ per click on adwords) . No inbound links or anything. Im guessing it's the email content and people googling when we mention in email
ads to LIVE (dont do automated / recorded.. people get turned off and leave) webinars are super duper effective
we STILL don't do SEO / content marketing for that real estate saas product
You guys should definitely add a content strategy. Good job with the outreach. Curious to know what your outreach process was like.
1 example sequence:
Sequence 1: "Hi. I noticed your comment on <some platform>. We do XYZ for real estate investors. <Some well know company in real estate vertical> is using it. Are you interested in learning more?"
seq 2: "Touching base. Have you had a chance to read?"
Seq 3: <social proof 1>
seq 4: <social proof 2>
seq 5: "Haven't heard. Is this not your thing? Should I be following up again?"
[ End Sequence]
Breakdown (roughly... im too lazy to check the stats)
General lessons learned:
This was all email. We're testing multi-outreach too now. SMS / email.. but im bit hesitant with SMS b/c TCPA laws
Excellent read. A great list of modern resources and practices to gain initial users.
Thank you, Xavier! This post comes at just the ideal time :)
This post comes at the right time. I think I will use it to improve the launch of my solution beta. Thanks :)
I have a question, Xavier.
You're talking about posting on some major directories, like G2, CapTerra, and AngelList.
Do you think this is appropriate even with an unfinished product? For example, in the case of a beta version (which is my case :) )?
Isn't it better to wait for the product to be tested to limit the risk of bad feedbacks?
It's better you test the product yourself and even allow friends and family to test and hear their feedback before open it up to the market. The first impression matters, whatever experience clients have with your product is what they tell others wether good or bad.
Yes, that's OK for me, thank you :)
For the big directories like G2 and Capterra you should wait until your product is ready yes!
OK, that's what I thought, thanks :)
It is a very useful article. Big thanks! Do you have one about working with communities?
I have one about Reddit specifically: https://userbooster.co/blog/get-first-users-reddit/
Let me know if you have questions, I might create a blog post about working with communities
Thanks! This is a post I read on your blog. I have meant a post where there will be step by step instruction, a little bit more information about how to choose community, how to become your own, what to post about, how often and so on.
I think it will be a great topic.
PS. I work with Quora and reach 30k viewers for 3 weeks and plan to write about my experience.
Awesome, how do you find the questions to answer on Quora?
It is not difficult to find questions on Quora. In reality, it is difficult to find the right questions that will attract viewers.
The most effective way to do it, in my opinion, is to become a part of a specific community (space). As for me, I am a member of some business and entrepreneurship groups. You can find a lot of questions there.
You can also launch on Hacker News, and get 12k visitors and 1054 users in less than 24 hours.
But that's super unusual, so listen to Xavier instead 😅
That's a nice shortcut indeed :D
I found your article very useful.
Especially a lot of questions about working with communities and Hacker News in particular. I still don't understand how to attract traffic from there.....
You can check this blog post for HackerNews → https://userbooster.co/blog/my-first-post-hit-hackernews-homepage/
What specific questions do you have for communities? I might write a dedicated post for it
You have to start inviting people. And you have to convey to people you invite the idea that the place is a really interesting one, a really cool one, and surely that: 1) this place will become cool once others people join it 2) they will be cool if start inviting new people on it It's all about sentiment
I am in a similar boat starting my first site but kind of not sure how to drive users. This is a very insightful. Thanks
Glad it helps!
Feel free to shoot any question :)
Thank you
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