200 users!
by Tim MaddenIt has taken 8 weeks to go from 0 to 200 users, and as of writing this post we are at 237.
My last post on IH said 'it took 6 weeks to get the first 50 users and 6 days to get the next 50'. Well it took just 3 more days to double that again to get to 200. We were recently seeing conversions of up to 40 users a day, that seemed impossible a couple months ago, we were feeling pretty good to say the least.
Then some reality. For the last 4 days we've had 0 conversions. You think the conversions will just keep coming, but they don't. The momentum you build needs to be continually fed and nurtured with more content, more links, more promotion.
It's one of many lessons we've learned along the way, here are some more.
Your immediate network of friends/colleagues/acquaintances are your first 10 users. These are people who care about you, not your product per se, but they will support you and sign-up regardless. Their feedback is valuable at this stage but they may not be your exact market, so take it with a grain of salt, albeit appreciatively.
Sharing insights wherever you can is a good way to engage people with your product. Sign-ups from posts where we have been open and genuine about where we are at and what we are doing have done well in conversions and have provided the most valuable and useful feedback.
People telling others about you gives the best conversion, be it newsletters or blogs. Everyone is an influencer to someone. You don't need to find someone with millions of instagram followers to get a lot of people to check out your product. A recommendation from a person's newsletter with 5K subscribers gave us the highest conversion rates (~25%). They are like mini influencers (minfluencers if you will), they may as well be a Kardashian at this embryonic stage of a startup.
We've used this initial period to optimise our conversion process, we hope that this leads to greater conversion rates as our traffic increases.
Reddit traffic, or just generalised traffic who don't know your product until they land on your page, is very difficult to convert. There is no intermediary to explain your product or to recommend it to them. The traffic is nice but the lack of conversions are disheartening.
#winning
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Hey Tim. Great to see the progress and the insight is really useful.
I posted it to our Testing Slack(s), also Tweeted about it. I Flipped it too.
Let me know if that helps!
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One friction point I notice, is the scrolling box of tags of various kinds of software - Ruby, Jira, Firefox, etc. You have to scroll the box and scan through dozens of items, wondering if the items you use are there. That is not so easy to use. It might help to:
- Update the layout so it's easy to see all items at once, e.g. in a responsive-design grid layout
- Put in a search box at the top that filters the list with each keypress
That would be easy to implement, easy to use, and would look cool!
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Hey thanks for the feedback.
We've talked about doing that where it stretches full width, we might give it a try to see if it helps.
The search box is tricky because the software in the boxes is just the top 100 software, we have a search that searches the 15,000 other software not listed there. We are working on trying to improve this. I can see it where both of those search ideas are combined where you start typing and if its in the list it filters and if it's not in the list it searches.
cheers
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I have no users or subscribers yet, but I was thinking that the reality might be really different from these formulas we see to get super fast 100s of subs. Really appreciate what you shared. It helps a lot to set the right expectations and also to learn from those who are doing :)
All the best!
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Hey thanks, the reality is different for everyone so it's hard to replicate something that worked for one product to another. Just have to try things and see how they go, if they work, keep doing it.
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Exactly the same things here for my team's new web and mobile analytics platform. Got the first 35ish subscribers for pulsemetrics.io from a trade show and family and friends, but that was before we even launched for beta testing. Since launching for beta testing last week, we've had... 2 new signups.
I've started going around on Slack channels for developers looking for people to test it out, and that's proved to be at least a little helpful. I'm still a little stuck on where to go past that. How did you find these influencers to post about your product? Are there forums better than Slack where people may give some feedback? Reddit's been useless so far.
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Hi, I think getting 2 new signups in your first week is positive considering you haven't pushed it much out there.
We didn't find the influencers who put us in their newsletter, they actually found us, we didn't even know they posted it until we saw the numbers in our stats. But we are looking for similar newsletters and bloggers in that niche and we are going to approach them (cold email) and see if they would write about us, nothing to lose right?
You just need to try to post anywhere you can at this stage, forums, slack, wherever. You will start getting one or two responses and the more you put it out there the more you'll get coming in. It will all build up eventually.
Hope that helps.
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Nice! Keep us updated regularly with you progress :) Interested to see the growth.
P.S Love the line "They are like mini influencers (minfluencers if you will), they may as well be a Kardashian at this embryonic stage of a startup."-
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Thanks Ryan, will definitely keep updating our progress! 👍 cheers!
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Fantastic insught, i'm kinda going through the same thing , i jist launched my project this weekend, it has 41 users but mostly just curiosity and family/friends/acquintances.
Struggling to find real users. I need to find my niche!
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago.
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Thanks Chris, 200 does feel big when you start at 0. It’s been a good learning process.
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