Getting your first 🔟 users

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Welcome to "note to self" #14 focused on marketing & growth 💻 

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Today we're discussing your first 10 users. Let's dig in  🍽

Your First 10 Users - an overview

Existing networks, Hackers News, Product Hunt, Friends and Family, and College Campuses, are just a number of ways the products we love and use almost every day recruited their initial users. The Snapchat and Doordash founders initially handed out flyers around shopping malls and college campuses, while Slack “begged and cajoled their friends at other companies to try it out”. These are truly unscalable approaches that some of the most well-known companies today used to gain their first users, and this manual approach to gaining initial users is what YC founder Paul Graham means in his famous essay “do things that don’t scale”. 

We know that when launching a new product or service, one of the biggest challenges is getting your first few users, and founders have to actively recruit these users, where existing networks are a great place to start. But how do you do it? 

The answer is that there’s no single solution. It’s a combination of factors. You need to be willing to explore different strategies and approaches to find out what works best for you, but ideally, your initial customers are those who intensively have the problem that you want to solve, and therefore, will love and be willing to pay for your product.

Getting your first 10 users

Why 10? Having 10 happy users is a solid goal and where you can start to see recurring needs among users. After all, if you have 10 happy users, why can't you have 100?

First and foremost, you need to make sure that your product or service is something people actually want. If it’s a solution to a problem that nobody has, then you won’t get anywhere. If it solves a real problem, then you have the potential to get your first ten users. You should qualify your customers and actually consider charging them, that way you know whether your problem is intensively solving the customer's problems. A willingness to pay is a sign of this.

Early-stage founders must also realise that they are still an early company, likely with many flaws, so they must identify customers who are willing to work with an early-stage startup. A discount whether that be in the form of the product itself or a monetary incentive could be utilised here in order to activate these first users to use your product ( if you focus on being really good at 2/3 things that ultimately solve your users' problem, they tend not to care so much about smaller flaws ).

For those customers that don’t qualify initially, filter them out for now ( I know turning down customers sounds very counterintuitive ), but if they don’t qualify for your beachhead market, then you won’t be able to build and refine the product as well as you should. 

​​Finally, you should focus on building relationships with your customers. Show them that you care about their experience and that you’re willing to go the extra mile to make sure they’re satisfied. Companies like Amazon and Zappos have grown to become household names because of the importance they placed on customer service. You should want your customer to call you so make sure it’s easy to contact you ( not hide your contact number like some eCommerce stores do ), as the more you talk to them, the more you can identify problems and create an even stronger relationship with these valuable existing customers. If you can build a strong customer base, then you’ll be well on your way to getting your first 10 users.

Getting your first 10 users isn’t easy, but it can be done. With the right product, visibility, incentives, and relationships, you can start to get your product or service out in the world and remember that a bias to action is a key characteristic of great founders/companies.

Case Study: Instagram's First Users

We gave it to a few folks who had a very large Twitter following. Not necessarily a large following overall, but very large followings within a specific community — specifically, the designer community, the online web design community. We felt that photography and the visual element of what we were doing really resonated with those people. 

And because they shared to Twitter, it created this tension, of like “When is this thing launching, when’d do I get to play with it?” and that’s the day when we actually launched, it had that springboard effect.

- Kevin Systrom - Instagram Founder

In other news: 📰

-> OpenAI releases its most powerful GPT model to date

-> Blog/Pod/Video of the week: Why onboarding is the most crucial part of your growth strategy

-> Website/Tool of the week: Glasp - personalised AI summariser

Have a great week!

Harry Arkwright