How do I get my first users?How do I get more users?How do I get the word out about my product?What growth tactics can I use to get my first 1000 users?How do I leverage online communities to grow?Am I too early to monetize?How do I sell a B2B product?How do I set an initial price for my product?How do I create an effective freemium plan?How do I deal with rejection in sales?
How do I get my first users?
"One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist.
Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off."
- Paul Graham (Read: Do things that don't scale)
"You just need to get a hundred people – maybe you focus on ten or fifteen of your friends. Get them in a WhatsApp group with your product name as the title and start chatting a lot in that WhatsApp group."
Daniel Gross, office hours (video - restricted to Pioneers)
How do I get more users?
DuckDuckGo Founder & CEO Gabriel Weinberg wrote a book on user acquisition called Traction. This blog post does an excellent job summarizing it: The 19 Channels You Can Use to Get Traction.
How do I get the word out about my product?
"I spent a lot of time just reading stories and reading people's comments and reactions to them and talking to people, trying to figure out what they care about... I wasn't guessing."
Courtland Allen, AMA (video)
What growth tactics can I use to get my first 1000 users?
"Donothingfor2minutes.com was the precursor to Calm. Visitors were asked not to move their cursor for two full minutes or the counter started over. The website received over 2 million unique visits and facilitated 100,000+ email captures in 10 days."
- Ali Abouelatta (Read: 60 ideas to boost your growth)
How do I leverage online communities to grow?
"It depends a lot on your product and the rules of the community. But you should always work backwards from what they want and support, rather than trying to figure out how you can jam your thing in."
Courtland Allen, AMA (video)
Am I too early to monetize?
"In the early days, you do want to focus on getting a small number of users who really, really like your product. Even if you're not charging anything.
I do think there's a limit to that. There are founders who tend to get addicted to this and they never charge. The failure mode there is they end up building a lot of vitamins (nice-to-haves) in their product that don't properly convert."
Daniel Gross, office hours (video - restricted to Pioneers)
How do I sell a B2B product?
"The same product can be sold for $50, or $5,000,000–and the price comes down to how much value the buyer is getting from the software. As long as the buyer sees it as a positive return on investment, it’s worth it to pay the price."
- Calvin French-Owen (Read: How to sell a B2B product)
How do I set an initial price for my product?
"A lot of startups treat pricing as a math problem or, worse, an afterthought. Pricing is as much an art as it is a science, one that relies as much on marketing and psychology as it does on classical economics."
- Sequoia (Read: Pricing Your Product)
"This advice is distilled from my career in running and consulting in various SaaS companies. Your mileage may vary; I’d encourage you to experiment often and boldly with pricing, as it is the easiest needle to move in your company.
The tendency of most SaaS companies is to set prices without much consideration and leave them alone for years at a time. I’d encourage you to revisit them quarterly.)"
- Patrick Mckenzie, Stripe (Read: Pricing low-touch SaaS)
"When you're early stage, you should build a product and decide a price. You're thinking 'we just chose this randomly and –' yeah, you did. That's how everyone decides their first price. And you'll figure out you can probably double it."
Daniel Gross, office hours (video - restricted to Pioneers)
How do I create an effective freemium plan?
"Zoom's 40-minute limit is the best version of this in the world."
Daniel Gross, office hours (video - restricted to Pioneers)
How do I deal with rejection in sales?
"Rejection is great. It's a wonderful opportunity to learn."