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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?

#51

Post by sherm8n »

gerenuk wrote: post #26
AznHisoka wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Thanks for this! Would you mind diving a bit deeper on how you were able to drive $200K in sales? That is impressive and congrats!

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

#52

Post by sherm8n »

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…

wow that's pure hustle! you logged int about 900 boxes then? :)

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

#53

Post by gerenuk »

sherm8n wrote: post #51
gerenuk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Thanks for this! Would you mind diving a bit deeper on how you were able to drive $200K in sales? That is impressive and congrats!

Thank you, most of the sales were generated through affiliates, our profits after the launch were about 95k. If you check out jvnotifypro or jvzoo.com, you will get an idea.

To drive $200k was not simple, we partnered up with a person who had a record of 6 figure launches and had a good relationship with JVs.

To be honest, most of the tech savvy people would be hating jvzoo type audience but the reality is if you have good following you can generate good revenue from your side projects and feed that revenue into your main Saas startups for bootstrapping. This is something that we are doing without involving any VC for our core product.

One another example is a shopping cart product is Samcart.com, the co-founder Brian also captured the top Jvs for his launch including Jeff Walker, Todd Gross etc. These Jvs I have mentioned actually have the similar type of audience like Jvzoo.

Also, on the Saas side, one of my buddy Thomas from pagemodo (previous co-founder) did a similar thing while running the startup. And later he sold his venture for $114 million.

And the Voluum founder Robert gryn used the same approach to scale his product.

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

#54

Post by kyriakos »

ecesena wrote: post #7
p0nce wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean Twitter ads? I tried several times, was very underwhelmed. Curious what made it work for you.

No, no ads. Twitter meaning start a meaningful account, interact with users, new & old. It's a long term investment, like SEO, but it also pays back relatively soon in terms of signups.

Twitter recently has been shadowbanning new accounts which follow the particular pattern. Especially if most posts contain URLs. Might no longer be a good idea. If you post with popular hashtags and get no response probably Twitter shadowbanned you.

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

#55

Post by spacetexas »

nikanj wrote: post #44
cheez wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your average customer LTV?

High thousands to low tens of thousands per year, lifetime is hard to guestimate as there's very little churn in our business. We still retain practicly all the customers we've ever made.

Would you mind sharing a link to your product?

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

#56

Post by throwaway33t00 »

rkunnamp wrote: post #39
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…

How do you track and pay commissions? Any tool recommendations?

Please check http://eetti.com/influencers/

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

#57

Post by jjoe »

sherm8n wrote: post #52
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…

wow that's pure hustle! you logged int about 900 boxes then? :)

Quite a bit more. This is from my jump box:

$ wc -l ~/.ssh/known_hosts 1240 /root/.ssh/known_hosts

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

#58

Post by bjones53 »

sherm8n wrote: post #50
rkunnamp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you track and pay commissions? Any tool recommendations?

Have you checked out GrowSumo.com? They were YC S15. Luke and Bryn are awesome guys. They got us connected with a handful of influencers that promoted my first startup – www.goodaudience.com. Then their software tracked monthly commissions and payouts.

Thanks sherm8n. Happy to chat to anyone about best practices, but our platforms lets you set commission and make payouts.

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

#59

Post by cheez »

nikanj wrote: post #44
cheez wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your average customer LTV?

High thousands to low tens of thousands per year, lifetime is hard to guestimate as there's very little churn in our business. We still retain practicly all the customers we've ever made.

Thanks for sharing. I figured that kind of revenue justifies the cold calling. Congrats on finding the niche!

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

#60

Post by brianwawok »

kyriakos wrote: post #54
ecesena wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no ads. Twitter meaning start a meaningful account, interact with users, new & old. It's a long term investment, like SEO, but it also pays back relatively soon in terms of signups.

Twitter recently has been shadowbanning new accounts which follow the particular pattern. Especially if most posts contain URLs. Might no longer be a good idea. If you post with popular hashtags and get no response probably Twitter shadowbanned you.

Couldn't you verify from a test account?
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