Ask HN: How to get first 1000 users? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How to get first 1000 users?

#11

Post by wturner » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 3:54 AM UTC

I seriously doubt this will help you but...

I operate a wiki site and I literally spent years adding content, developing and refining to the point that it now gets a few thousand visitors a day. I am not selling anything and none of these people pay for anything or contribute to the site, they are just visitors. If you want a "brute force" way to attract an audience find an area you're interested in and make a content/tutorial/information site out of it. If you can couple that with something to sell you might have something. I haven't figured out the latter part yet.

Re: Ask HN: How to get first 1000 users?

#12

Post by jmathai » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 6:52 AM UTC

Buy it.

You can try to get bloggers and press but in my experience you get spikes of traffic and what you want is predictable and consistent traffic which you can run tests against. Getting 3k signups in one day from TechCrunch isn't terribly valuable, IMO.

You can buy it fairly cheap from Ads on Google, Twitter or Facebook. Try them all and see which work best for you. I prefer Google/Twitter. This is both consistent and reproducible.

Consider getting your first 10,000 users as more of a learning experience of what the hell you think you're building and what your customers think you've built.

Re: Ask HN: How to get first 1000 users?

#13

Post by mansigandhi » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 9:17 AM UTC

Try putting up your product on betali.st or startupli.st We've gotten about 400 beta users from there. Retention is a different matter though!

Re: Ask HN: How to get first 1000 users?

#14

Post by bennyjoseph » Mon, Apr 01, 2013, 9:05 PM UTC

This a good reference to get you started: http://www.slideshare.net/mattangriffel/growth-hacking