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How to get your first 100k active users

blog.winnie.com

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Re: How to get your first 100k active users

#21

Post by annekate »

jqbx_jason wrote: post #12
annekate wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enough to get statistically significant data. There are programs to get $100 AdWords or FB Ads credit and that's more then enough to get a few thousand to 10k impressions on your ads and give you decent data about how well they perform. I would usually set a testing campaign to spend about $10/day for 5-7 days, and would shut it down early if it was looking particularly bad. Our app is free, so we aren't eager to pay…

Can I ask for a ballpark of what # of users it took to get to that inflection point when SEO and word of mouth takes over? At least in my experience getting to there has proven to be the main challenge. Also- thanks for taking questions and congrats on your success :)

It entirely depends on the domain so there's no good answer for this.

Our growth has been remarkably steady, with minor seasonal factors. If the majority of your acquisition channels scale with the number of users (SEO, social, viral) then you should see a steady accumulation of momentum over time, even from a very small number — perhaps the low thousands.

We've had a strong word of mouth factor from the very beginning, but I attribute that mostly to the brand and the fact that this is an underserved market. Parents have traditionally been invisible to tech companies and they are delighted someone is finally building for them.

Re: How to get your first 100k active users

#22

Post by annekate »

ythn wrote: post #17
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #5

Not that you need my vote, but I agree with all of this. In particular: - Go true native, not hybrid - Use ads for testing ideas - Don't forget about email! I'm also intrigued by your approach of not going market-by-market like a lot of local-focused marketplaces do. Your approach seems to make sense, and obviously worked for you. I particularly like that you had a different onboarding flow for users in new markets,…

> - Go true native, not hybrid What about for games? Unity is extremely tempting, especially when the alternative is to write the game twice in two different languages...

Games are the exception to this rule. Apple and Google have no problem featuring games built in Unity as long as they are performant and polished.

Re: How to get your first 100k active users

#23

Post by danielskogly »

This evening we got our 171st user for our wishlist-service. When we launched it 1 year ago we tried to get it out on different channels like Reddit and HN without much success, while we _did_ see success in just talking about it to friends and family, and had just over 100 users in January this year.

Since then, we've done close to zero marketing, and it's been amazing to see new signups, wishlists and items being created - seemingly out of the blue. I made a simple Slack-bot to post those events to a channel with their ID, and these are the stats from it was added late March until now: 53 new users, 74 new wishlists, and 482 new items.

As we do no sort of analytics, we have no clue who these people are, but boy does it make me happy to see those "A new user was just created!"-messages nonetheless!

Re: How to get your first 100k active users

#24

Post by annekate »

dna_polymerase wrote: post #20
annekate wrote: post #2

BTW, I'm the OP and am happy to answer questions here. My expertise is obviously in consumer internet products but I spend a lot of time thinking about growth. It's my superpower!

Regarding the part about native apps, would you go as far as even restraining from publishing any app, if native app developers are not available (or not in the budget) in the beginning?

Depends on the product. Winnie's target demo is millennial parents who are mobile power users, so we knew the apps had to be best-in-class and we were prepared to invest in them.

Not all products need to invest in amazing apps or apps at all, but if you don't have a decent app than ASO and featuring are not going to be available to you. This may or may not be important to your business.

Re: How to get your first 100k active users

#25

Post by mkalygin »

This is very interesting strategy. Thanks for the good article.

Could you elaborate on the content-growth strategy? I'm really curious since in some business ideas I'm usually stuck with "chicken and egg" kind of problem. I believe there is no universal strategy here, but what worked for you except this special onboarding flow for users in new markets?

Re: How to get your first 100k active users

#26

Post by onion2k »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #5

Not that you need my vote, but I agree with all of this. In particular: - Go true native, not hybrid - Use ads for testing ideas - Don't forget about email! I'm also intrigued by your approach of not going market-by-market like a lot of local-focused marketplaces do. Your approach seems to make sense, and obviously worked for you. I particularly like that you had a different onboarding flow for users in new markets,…

Go true native, not hybrid

Users don't care. Most of them can't tell.

Re: How to get your first 100k active users

#27

Post by annekate »

danielskogly wrote: post #23

This evening we got our 171st user for our wishlist-service. When we launched it 1 year ago we tried to get it out on different channels like Reddit and HN without much success, while we _did_ see success in just talking about it to friends and family, and had just over 100 users in January this year. Since then, we've done close to zero marketing, and it's been amazing to see new signups, wishlists and items being c…

You can't get from 0 to 100k without passing through 171 first. :) Congrats and good luck!

Re: How to get your first 100k active users

#28

Post by liquidise »

dna_polymerase wrote: post #20
annekate wrote: post #2

BTW, I'm the OP and am happy to answer questions here. My expertise is obviously in consumer internet products but I spend a lot of time thinking about growth. It's my superpower!

Regarding the part about native apps, would you go as far as even restraining from publishing any app, if native app developers are not available (or not in the budget) in the beginning?

I'll share an anecdotal opinion contrary to the article. I've been running the engineering team at a startup for 3 years now and our app is still 100% cordova. We passed 100k actives over a year ago.

There are many benefits to native apps from the experience polish to the community and resources surrounding them. There are 2 major negatives to native: dev time and cost.

The Native vs Cordova/SomethingElse discussion is going to have different answers depending on your use case. Let me restate that for importance. Your use case will dictate which is "correct" early on.

For us, the rapid product tests we were looking to run, in both web and mobile platforms with a very small engineering team all but required a cordova app. As our product has grown more mature, and major client features change less frequent, the appeal of native has grown. But despite that appeal, we remain firmly in cordova and will for at least another 6 months.

Re: How to get your first 100k active users

#29

Post by StavrosK »

ythn wrote: post #17
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #5

Not that you need my vote, but I agree with all of this. In particular: - Go true native, not hybrid - Use ads for testing ideas - Don't forget about email! I'm also intrigued by your approach of not going market-by-market like a lot of local-focused marketplaces do. Your approach seems to make sense, and obviously worked for you. I particularly like that you had a different onboarding flow for users in new markets,…

> - Go true native, not hybrid What about for games? Unity is extremely tempting, especially when the alternative is to write the game twice in two different languages...

I don't think there's native for games. You're going to use a game engine and almost none of the OS UX conventions, so go with Unity. I don't think there are any developers that don't.

Re: How to get your first 100k active users

#30

Post by firloop »

onion2k wrote: post #26
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #5

Not that you need my vote, but I agree with all of this. In particular: - Go true native, not hybrid - Use ads for testing ideas - Don't forget about email! I'm also intrigued by your approach of not going market-by-market like a lot of local-focused marketplaces do. Your approach seems to make sense, and obviously worked for you. I particularly like that you had a different onboarding flow for users in new markets,…

Go true native, not hybrid Users don't care. Most of them can't tell.

The OP wasn't talking about users, but rather best practices on how to get the App Store makers to feature you. I've heard the App Store editorial team specifically give the "go native" advice.

It's definitely not required, it just helps. Our app got featured in one of the App Store's daily stories despite it being written in React Native.

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