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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?

#21

Post by austincheney »

I grew my thing, a developer's productivity tool that runs in the browser and command line, by focusing on feature enhancements and code quality. I am obsessed about quality of performance and quality of output. This has its pros and cons:

Pros

My little tool can do things other more popular tools cannot do, tends to be more stable, and executes extremely quickly. From purely a technology perspective my tool is probably superior in many ways to other similar tools. This has earned me a super loyal following and allows me freedoms to solve problems, provide enhancements, and solve bugs very quickly.

Cons

I am so focused on the code and technology that I don't perform marketing or advertising of almost any kind. I am entirely reliant upon organic search results, word of mouth from my users, and occasional feature announcements. The challenge with this is that I have no control and often no awareness of my traffic.

Being obsessed with code quality and product quality the code is very terse and not friendly to many developers. This means there is less interest from users to submit pull requests to the project.

The extremeness of this approach makes the popularity of my tool hard to gauge. Last year it appeared I was on trajectory to become one of the most popular packages on NPM. I pulled out of NPM because they kept breaking my package, and so I have completely lost that traffic. I was about to exceed a million NPM downloads a month almost entirely from direct sources external to NPM. This is what it means to be obsessed with product quality.

The single greatest burst of traffic to the website came when I published a new diff algorithm here last month. I made the front page for a day and got about 50,000 visitors.

What I have learned is:

* If you are producing something worthy of demand in a way that is superior to everything else it will eventually get the attention it deserves. If you are willing to accomplish those things the competition is either incapable or unwilling to accomplish you can compete no matter their funding or popularity.

* If the code is harder for newbs to instantly jump into your contribution community will be small or non-existent.

* If you damage the availability of your product most of your users will happily transfer their investment into something inferior. For most people convenience is, to a point, more important than niche features or product quality.

* Without any marketing strategy the popularity of your product will grow exponentially (if it is worthy of growth). So expect to invest years of effort before seeing any return on investment until that special tipping point occurs.

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

#23

Post by AznHisoka »

sebringj wrote: post #22

If people really like your app AND you have a way for them to invite others easily AND share about it on their social links easily AND you started off by going to your core group personally and battle tested it, it just happens.

this is true only if you are in an ecosystem where people commonly share apps such as tech, food, marketing, and productivity and your app has a very useful freemium component.

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

#24

Post by sebringj »

AznHisoka wrote: post #23
sebringj wrote: post #22

If people really like your app AND you have a way for them to invite others easily AND share about it on their social links easily AND you started off by going to your core group personally and battle tested it, it just happens.

this is true only if you are in an ecosystem where people commonly share apps such as tech, food, marketing, and productivity and your app has a very useful freemium component.

totally

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

#26

Post by gerenuk »

AznHisoka wrote: post #9
no1youknowz wrote: post #8

I looked at the other Ask HN for 100 users. Only 1 person mentioned influencers. I'm going to recommend it again, but with more detail. An influencer has a particular niche/segment in the market that they are passionate about. They may have various channels in which to communicate to their audience, these may be facebook page/groups, youtube channels, instagram. These influencers have from 100 to 100k audience member…

what industries or niches does this strategy work for? which ones do they not work as well?

If your product is related to SEO, social media, ppc this can work really well.

We recently launched a side project in SEO vertical with couple other partners and did over $200k in sales revenue over a week through our affiliate channel.

If you are looking particularly where affiliates are promoting for products then check out voluum, link assistant etc.

If your product is more of a tech side and starts with less than $20-$30 then chances are less people are going to promote that.

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

#27

Post by mayermail1977 »

You get your first 100 users already so I think you went through the hardest part. Unless it is all friends, you can analyze those first few users and see common characteristics such as age, gender, location, interests, etc. These first users are your micro-micro universe and you want to get to know them. Once you found those common traits, you can go out and look for those very similar potential customers and reach out to them. How? It depends on your product and service. You can try paid ads via Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc, you can try influencers to feature your product, reach out to bloggers in your field, talk to people face to face, etc. etc. You have to find what works for you and your app. Make sure that you analyze everything you try. Some things might not work out totally as you expected, but might give you some good lessons how to try next time. I suggest you check out this list: http://blog.linkody.com/seo/growth-hacks-list

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

#28

Post by dasil003 »

austincheney wrote: post #21

I grew my thing, a developer's productivity tool that runs in the browser and command line, by focusing on feature enhancements and code quality. I am obsessed about quality of performance and quality of output. This has its pros and cons: Pros My little tool can do things other more popular tools cannot do, tends to be more stable, and executes extremely quickly. From purely a technology perspective my tool is proba…

Don't be shy, what's your tool?

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

#29

Post by austincheney »

dasil003 wrote: post #28
austincheney wrote: post #21

I grew my thing, a developer's productivity tool that runs in the browser and command line, by focusing on feature enhancements and code quality. I am obsessed about quality of performance and quality of output. This has its pros and cons: Pros My little tool can do things other more popular tools cannot do, tends to be more stable, and executes extremely quickly. From purely a technology perspective my tool is proba…

Don't be shy, what's your tool?

http://prettydiff.com

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

#30

Post by Huhty »

We run a community platform called Snapzu (http://snapzu.com) which is similar in nature to HN/Reddit/etc (which entirely depends on user submissions, voting, etc) so we right off the bat had to battle the notorious "chicken and egg" problem. It was really hard attracting users when the entire site depends on other users (of which obviously at first we had very little of) for content.

However, we did several (mostly automated) things to increase our user count to 26,000+ members, which is where we stand right now. The main goal was to make sure that each user is catered to and getting exactly (or close to) what they are looking for.

1. Split up the content into several categories (14 to be exact). This allowed us to focus on specific categories such as Science, Earth, Politics, etc. Each category has its own social media account (on Twitter, Tumblr, Medium, WP, etc.) where we share our highest voted RELEVANT user-submitted content automatically using IFTTT. Example: http://science.snapzu.com

2. We also used the same user-submitted content to build our newsletter and send out the top relevant posts of the week for the "tribes" (communities like sub-reddits) that they are subscribed to. This attempts to get as many people to come back and often, a tactic extremely important when the community is dependent on other users coming back and contributing/participating.

3. We create automatically generated "top list" posts for some of our top categories and share them on all our social channels, newsletters, certain relevant sub-reddits, etc. These again are dependent entirely on user-submitted content, and although I mentioned they are automated, they still require some work (for the intro quote, minor curating) but 95% of the work is automated. Each post takes approx 10-15 minutes to create, instead of several hours, and uses the past week's top submissions as the main content. Example: http://snapzu.com/teamsnapzu/weekly-roundup-earth-and-nature...

4. Obviously there were also several things completely out of our control. Reddit had their massive debacle a couple years ago when Victoria got fired (she hosted their AMAs) which created a massive Reddit "revolt". Over the course of a few weeks in July 2015 we had 40,000+ people come in from there, of which approximately 8000 signed up. But that obviously would not have happened if we were not "somewhat known" at this point. We were basically at the right place at the right time, as one of the few semi-known Reddit alternatives/competitors. Because the "Reddit revolt" was somewhat big news, we also got mentioned in several articles (Daily Dot, Inc, Moz, etc) which brought in a few more thousand users.

We're now using many of the things we learned from the entire 4 year process of growing our own community platform to help bloggers (and/or website/business owners) who are struggling with the same things we were (and still are). Many of the growth problems (and eventual tactics) involved are nearly identical mainly because of the chicken and egg problem I mentioned before. If you are curious it's at http://blogenhancement.com. It contains several tools we use ourselves and basically allows bloggers to start, run, and utilize their own communities to get more audience, engagement, content, and revenue. It also ties in beautifully to our platform that we've spent 4 years building and constantly improving on, so it's a natural win/win for both parties.

Hope this helps. Cheers!

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