Zero to Users

Find what acquisition channels repeatedly work for founders

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I've analyzed over 700 founder interviews to find what acquisition channels work consistently & repeatedly for them. You can see my preliminary findings on ZeroToUsers.com.

October 6, 2020 100 Subscribers

Got to 100 subscribers. Mainly from here. Also got some success from ProductHunt, but I'm not really sure what I did. Got 8 subscribers from there in 1 day. Trying a few different things in order to determine what was the exact reason for that surge.

September 19, 2020 Started dabbling with ProductHunt

PH is much more than their front-page it seems. They have a community, and up-and-coming section. Things that would definitely dramatically increase my chances of getting to their front page.

From reading founder interviews, it looks like most people had an initial set of users (that they sent the ProductHunt link to) to upvote. So definitely won't rush this channel.

September 18, 2020 +10 subscribers +2 replies

Finally started getting replies to my report. I am thinking of somehow incentivizing people to reply...maybe offer them a customized report just for them? What do you guys think (for those that follow this).

"What do you think" kind of emails seem to be overused and people simply seem to ignore them.

September 16, 2020 Got +2 Twitter followers (yay!)

I don't want to focus at all acquisition channels at once. I've decided to make Twitter a part of my mix though, because there are so many influential founders there. Plus, I'm seeing similar growth-related newsletters/products getting serious traction there.

I decided to start small and just include my Twitter handle in the emails I send. That brought me +2 Twitter followers today which is a good start.

September 15, 2020 Plus 12 Users

Like one guy said, growth at the beginning is like a snail. And then it speeds up. And then you get to a point where every post you do has a self-sustaining chain reaction so a big % of what you're going to throw at the wall sticks.

But until then, be a snail :)

September 14, 2020 Consistency is key.

It seems I started getting a small trickly of subscribers (5-8/day). It made me think...how many founders had a good product and they failed because they just gave up too soon.

Let's say I continue to get around 5 subscribers a day. That's 150 a month, 1500 a year.

Not saying I won't test other acquisition channels (after all, the whole product is about that lol), but my point was, just being CONSISTENT with 1 acquisition channel can bring you pretty good results over time.

September 13, 2020 Got my first 5 subscribers

Some people here just found the product & subscribed to the newsletter. Pretty encouraging news. Also got very useful & interesting feedback on the content that I can iterate on.

Basically, I'll need to provide more context & segment the already-big list I have.

September 11, 2020 Finished the landing page & email system

I published my landing page as a static page with Jekyll & Netlify. Currently finishing the email system for sending via SES.

I was thinking long and hard about the site name, about the way to express the value proposition. Luckily, ZeroToUsers was free so I registered it :)

May 6, 2018 Came up with the idea

I was inspired by the book "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg. The book was written back in 2015, before IndieHackers and other websites became "mainstream". I thought: Wow, they (Gabriel & his co-authors) had it really hard!

Nowadays I could just take various interviews that are already published & analyze / extract acquisition channels data & find a more comprehensive list of acquisition channels that work. So that's what I started doing.

About

I've analyzed over 700 founder interviews to find what acquisition channels work consistently & repeatedly for them. You can see my preliminary findings on ZeroToUsers.com.