"Meetup.com is one of those services that will do the job of driving traffic to your meetup if you create one." This is a great point, but I think it's also important to focus on creating successful meetups. This is a huge time commitment. Creating a consistent arena for your user base requires coordinating activities that they would love, and then reaping the benefits of customer loyalty. It's an excellent idea, but you need to devote a good deal of time to it (sometimes even a person).
Places to Start Acquiring Users
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Re: Places to Start Acquiring Users
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every craigslist post defaults to "You are not allowed to email me about related services." It's not up to them to try and enrich my life with their new services I didn't ask to hear about. It's blatant spam. But blatant spam and lawbreaking resulting in money hats is apparently okay around here. (It's not shady or illegal -- it's hustling and hacking the system. )
I don't see the harm in them trying to help wanting people connect with a useful service that solves their needs.
So is it just matznerd.com and natmobi.com who's domains I need to add to my blacklist?
Because those sorts of words are exactly what _every_ spammer uses to justify their behaviour. (including, hilariously, such beautiful grammar constructs as "… trying to help wanting people connect with a …")
It's spam, no question about it. If I get it from you I'll probably just ignore it, but if I'm in a bad mood or looking for timewasting activities, I'll report it to gmail/rbl/mailchimp/campaignmonitor/your isp - mostly for the lulz, but partly because I feel I owe some of my time to occasionally trying to slow the inevitable slide down the tragedy of the commons that the internet has been on since the eternal September…
Re: Places to Start Acquiring Users
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see the harm in them trying to help wanting people connect with a useful service that solves their needs.
So is it just matznerd.com and natmobi.com who's domains I need to add to my blacklist? Because those sorts of words are exactly what _every_ spammer uses to justify their behaviour. (including, hilariously, such beautiful grammar constructs as "… trying to help wanting people connect with a …") It's spam, no question about it. If I get it from you I'll probably just ignore it, but if I'm in a bad mood or looking for…
I'm not going around advocating doing this, I was just pointing out that AirBnB used this technique to acquire it's first users...
Re: Places to Start Acquiring Users
#14I like the way you put it - "Put simply, go to where your potential users are".
I would add - Think about not just users, but power users! At-least in the begining you are not looking for a regular joe, but somebody who would benefit the most by your product, and be the cheerleader moving forward.
Re: Places to Start Acquiring Users
#15I've never tried it myself, but I've heard people have had decent success using a combination of Twitter searches + live chat.
You can monitor people on Twitter complaining about the problem you solve, @reply them to check at your site, and then chat on oLark/SnapEngage to help convert them into users (or just do customer development).
Re: Places to Start Acquiring Users
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every craigslist post defaults to "You are not allowed to email me about related services." It's not up to them to try and enrich my life with their new services I didn't ask to hear about. It's blatant spam. But blatant spam and lawbreaking resulting in money hats is apparently okay around here. (It's not shady or illegal -- it's hustling and hacking the system. )
It's a very fair point, and I think it's good to always err on the side of "not being shady". Just to play devil's advocate, many companies would never have broken through the clutter if they didn't break a few rules to be seen at first. This includes great companies many of use use every day (like AirBnB). Reddit was forced to create fake accounts and pose fake conversations to get started. Google certainly was brea…
A brief quibble - Reddit was not "forced" to do anything. They chose to create and utilize fake accounts/conversations, but they certainly could have chosen not to do so.
Re: Places to Start Acquiring Users
#17This is a great article. Thanks so much, it's nice to see new approaches as opposed to the same tactics recited over and over. Good stuff!!
Re: Places to Start Acquiring Users
#18I've never tried it myself, but I've heard people have had decent success using a combination of Twitter searches + live chat. You can monitor people on Twitter complaining about the problem you solve, @reply them to check at your site, and then chat on oLark/SnapEngage to help convert them into users (or just do customer development).
Love this strategy. Something like this would make for a great startup, and there actually is one doing something similar in NYC called LocalResponse. Their approach is a little different in they're focused on marketing rather than customer development or conversion.
Re: Places to Start Acquiring Users
#19I've never tried it myself, but I've heard people have had decent success using a combination of Twitter searches + live chat. You can monitor people on Twitter complaining about the problem you solve, @reply them to check at your site, and then chat on oLark/SnapEngage to help convert them into users (or just do customer development).
I did this when we launched our new on-boarding process for our CMS recently[1].
I put in hashtag monitors into hootsuite for #html, #css and #wysiwyg (I've found using hashtags makes people much less annoyed at receiving a reply out of the blue) and then replied to people with a personal message who were chatting about them.
Because I could do it on my phone (ie. on the train, waiting in line) it was basically "free" time.
I wrote maybe 500 messages, got about 120 people to the page and about 57 of them put their email address in, all within 3 days of launching.
Re: Places to Start Acquiring Users
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a very fair point, and I think it's good to always err on the side of "not being shady". Just to play devil's advocate, many companies would never have broken through the clutter if they didn't break a few rules to be seen at first. This includes great companies many of use use every day (like AirBnB). Reddit was forced to create fake accounts and pose fake conversations to get started. Google certainly was brea…
A brief quibble - Reddit was not "forced" to do anything. They chose to create and utilize fake accounts/conversations, but they certainly could have chosen not to do so.
Fair enough