Ask YC: Source of users for early stage startups
When in early stages esp in an online B2C model one usually faces the following issues "together"
- You need real users to evaluate your business, to dictate your product/features/presentation etc.. in effect evolve the idea.
- Your product might not be mature or tuned to generate good ROI.
You have little money to spend it on paid marketing, with low ROI it obviously seems too pricey or risky. But it becomes critical to prove that your startup brings value, it works (for a VC it would be mostly - you can make money)
So you need traffic (significant - lets say 3-4K hits a day).
What are some smart ways (preferably deterministic sources) you have found to achieve the reach you need ?
Google/Yahoo/MSN search. Digg, Stumble Upon.. more.. ?
20 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 60.1 ms ] threadDid you miss out some zeroes?
But that's not what 'hits' usually refers to, I think.
And with an ecommerce startup, sure, that'd be great.
That should do for us for now. For any kind of AB tests and even to get some money trickling that can be promising enough.
We also found that it is both more difficult and more valuable to organically grow a user base that finds good utility in your service. These users typically need more word-of-mouth (including via respected blogs) or viral messaging. A good way to get people in the door is to offer a free basic service coupled with a clear path to upgrade later to a premium service when you've ironed out your business model and service offerings.
Last, we've found that a good way to keep people interested in the service itself is to keep the technology open source. This builds a very involved community, ensures that if the service is valuable that it can continue, and provides excellent references later on when you will be asked if can support large numbers of users.
Best way to get early free traffic is with good SEO. Organic traffic is free, optimize for it! (read semoz!)
Submit your site and it contents to every online directory / listing service possible. Submitting our product data to Google Product search (froogle) has worked out great for us (tons of free traffic)
Find out where they spend their time online and hang out there. If it's a forum, post a lot and have a signature link back to your site. If it's a blog, comment a lot (intelligently) and eventually drop a note to the blogger for some coverage or feedback.
SEO, SEO, SEO. As part of your persona thinking, figure out what your audiences searches for and be high in those results. Don't guess. KNOW. Do keyword research.
Social media aggregators (digg, etc) require that you be funny, controversial, or useful. If you can tweak your initial offering so that you (or better yet, your ever-changing content) can meet these criteria, you can perform well.
Word of mouth/virality. If having 10 active users doesn't result in growth, you should improve your product until it does.
However unlike RescueTime which attracts a very high daily active users, we have a product discover & research site http://www.reviewgist.com. We would definitely work on to improve the engagement levels and plan it before we do PR but as you see the predominant traffic would be consumers and we would still have to deduce alternative sources.
If you craft the Mechanical Turk job well, you could probably get 5000 visits for a nickel each.
We have used stumbleupon to get 80-100 hits a day. This traffic usually has a low bounce rate of 20-30%. However when we took the same page and bid on StumbleUpon network for paid insertions it sure sends traffic but visitors hardly stay. Bounce rates hit 90%.
I'm not saying it's a sure-fire way to get permanent users. I'm just saying that it's a cheap way to get a couple thousand users to hit your site. Whether they stay or not... Doesn't that depend on if they like what they see, not on how they got there in the first place?