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Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

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Re: Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

#11

Post by jjoe »

I did that with the cPanel Varnish plugin [1]. It's Varnish Cache integration for cPanel WHM (duh!). I signed up on several web hosting forums and would volunteer to help when someone posted looking for help with traffic or website performance.

But I'd have to login to each box, spend a good amount of time on the server, understand the business requirements, and then deploy Varnish. It was hugely time consuming but I loved doing this. It was less about bean-counting but rather more about helping. Also progress seemed slow at first because I would gain one user every 2 or 3 days. But word-of-mouth buzz from people I've helped was the thing that moved the chains for me.

The cPanel WHM platform has been moving quite fast over last few years. And so did several things under the hood. I also wanted to build new features that just couldn't be done on cPanel. I felt the project had potential to expand and reach a much larger subset. And that's when I built Cachoid [2].

[1] https://www.unixy.net/varnish

[2] https://www.cachoid.com/

Re: Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

#12

Post by gonzofish »

mobitar wrote: post #10

I posted this on a similar thread a few days ago. For Standard Notes [0], here's what I did: 1. Comment on privacy related HN posts about a privacy-focused notes app. That would have gotten me 40-50 users. 2. Write articles [1] on encryption/privacy/webdev. Some of them made it to frontpage HN, some didn't. That might have gotten me to 500 users. 3. Repeat. Tirelessly. Painstakingly. Depressingly. Just keep going doi…

Seems like the answer is always to grind it out. I commend anyone who has put in the work to succeed.

Re: Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

#13

Post by jaequery »

jjoe wrote: post #11

I did that with the cPanel Varnish plugin [1]. It's Varnish Cache integration for cPanel WHM (duh!). I signed up on several web hosting forums and would volunteer to help when someone posted looking for help with traffic or website performance. But I'd have to login to each box, spend a good amount of time on the server, understand the business requirements, and then deploy Varnish. It was hugely time consuming but I…

yes, i recall your plugin several years back. think over 7 years ago! although i had a hard time with dynamic content especially with sessions and logged in vs logged out views. but the performance boost from varnish is pretty mind blowing when configured correctly.

Re: Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

#15

Post by maneesh »

I did it with Pavlok, which is a wearable device for waking up early and changing habits. The first 100 was done through writing blog posts, getting email subscribers.

When we were ready with a basic prototype, we did a webinar presentation to our email list to pre-sell it (6 months before our indiegogo). We ended up selling about 200-300 prototypes before the webinar, and 300-400 pre-orders.

When we launched our Indiegogo, we built up a ton of press, media, bloggers, email and social influencers, etc to announce our campaign all at the same time to make our indiegogo sell ~3000 units pretty quickly.

Obviously it's a little different than software, but I find the launch methodology we used works in software launches too.

[1] http://pavlok.com [2] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pavlok-breaks-bad-habits [3] https://medium.com/@maneeshsethi/kickstarter-is-sorta-debt-a... -- this is an article that talks about how we built a hardware physical product without a real VC round.

Re: Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

#16

Post by zachsnow »

sb8244 wrote: post #5

I've seen my current product go from 0 users to thousands. It is a business workflow tool where most users log several hours per day, so I understand that it's very unusual compared to other services. The big thing for us was just a strong sales and marketing presence backed by a product team (my team) that listens for the user and the marketplace and responds quickly. It takes a little time but snowballed by just st…

Agreed (coming from a similar spot it sounds like, in my case daily operations tools for SMBs): build a good product, and a sales team to sell it. Then sell it, all day, every day. Just make sure the product can back up sales!

Re: Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

#17

Post by cdiamand »

Posted this in the 0-100 thread, but posting here as well:

I did the following for http://www.oppsdaily.com

1. Posted landing page in a slack chat (first ~10 users)

2. Posted on the indiehackers forum (+30 users)

3. Got mentioned in the indiehackers weekly newsletter (+150)

4. Posted to hacker news (+?)

5. Posted to product hunt (did not go so great)(+?)

6. Started posting weekly metrics to HN - made the frontpage (+1500-2000)

Re: Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

#18

Post by rsoto »

Remember that there's not just one answer. While other answers may work in different degrees, you should find your marketing mix.

While I agree with some strategies (particularly inbound marketing), I think that viral marketing has very high potential. Think about that: you want to grow from 100 to 1,000 users. How many hours did you spent on each one of those initial users? Now multiply it by 100. Seems scary, doesn't it?

Better harness the userbase you have, and let them spread your product. If each one of your users can bring one more user, you've effectively doubled your userbase, and then again, and by the third time you are 200 users away from your goal.

This seems so easy and magical on paper, but you have to design your product's virality: thinking about how it's easier for your existing users to bring more of them, and rewarding both, either with cash or with influence.

A lot of business have been made with this strategy in mind. Just look for the story of Hotmail. If you want to read more, check out Ideavirus by Seth Godin, and Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg.

Re: Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

#19

Post by jjoe »

jaequery wrote: post #13
jjoe wrote: post #11

I did that with the cPanel Varnish plugin [1]. It's Varnish Cache integration for cPanel WHM (duh!). I signed up on several web hosting forums and would volunteer to help when someone posted looking for help with traffic or website performance. But I'd have to login to each box, spend a good amount of time on the server, understand the business requirements, and then deploy Varnish. It was hugely time consuming but I…

yes, i recall your plugin several years back. think over 7 years ago! although i had a hard time with dynamic content especially with sessions and logged in vs logged out views. but the performance boost from varnish is pretty mind blowing when configured correctly.

It's crazy how time flies! Caching dynamic content is definitely tricky. Subsequent releases of the plugin have had WordPress specific VCLs among others. Cachoid has WordPress specific VCL too with a WP plugin so post edits/changes are reflected with immediate purges and cache warm ups via the Cachoid API. But the benefits of caching pages far outweigh the drawbacks. At least for more sites.

Re: Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

#20

Post by kolinko »

The first few dosen users were from an iosdevforum. Then someone recommended a nice feature - at first I wanted to tell them it's impossible. But as I was writing an explanation, I realised it's actually possible :)

Drank a lot of red bull for a week and pushed the feature to production. Then I emailed a reporter who covered our competition in TC weeks before, and put a post on HN.

It picked up steam on HN, and the TC article appeared a day later:

https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/12/appcod-es-launches-app-sto...

Notice the crappy logo and make sure to watch the video - recorded in my living room after a few sleepless nights.

While working on the improvements, I invented another feature (guessing competitors keywords), which is now a standard across the ASO apps.

A few months later, users began telling us AppStore search algorithm changed. After a few weeks of crunching I published a slideshare explaining the recent changes. Another reporter picked it up:

https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/29/looks-like-apple-has-chang...

They embeded our slides, which pushed them into top 3 slideshares of the week, or something like that. (after a few years the viewcount is 500k or so)

Users began coming in en masse (up until 800 paid or so), and people began sharing slides and so on.

I gave a few podcast interviews, which pushed the promotion even further. But it was mostly TC and HN that pushed it so far.

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