How to get your first 1000 users organically

Gaining traction can be challenging. Let's uncover a few tricks that can help you get early users without spending a lot.

It is common to see tweets with 0 engagement. It isn’t that the content is terrible, but because it wasn’t distributed well. While everyone thinks content generation is essential, distributing content is equally important. A similar thing can be said for products. 99% of products made today fail to reach 1000 users. 

Attracting users can be the most challenging task when launching a new product. While paid marketing can help, most people don’t have the budget to invest in these channels. So how do you solve it? And break the 1000-user barrier. 

Imagine you have a validated idea with 5 - 10 paying customers. Now what? 

Here is how you can get started 

1. Research

Research is the most significant piece of the marketing jigsaw puzzle. Spending more time on research will help you avoid common mistakes while knowing your market better. Following are some questions I would want to answer using my research.

• Know your User

  • Who is your potential user? 

  • Define their persona. 

  • What are they using currently? Or who is your competition?

  • What are their main concerns, and how is your competition addressing them? 

  • Where do they hang out? 

  • Are they the ones who will pay for your solution? Or are there other decision-makers involved? Ex. In developer marketing, developers are the users, while CTO or CFO decides on buying. 

• How will you reach them? 

  • What channels are being used by your competition to reach potential users? Ex. SEO or social media. 

  • How efficient are they? 

  • What’s the tentative CAC of those channels?

  • What’s the traffic breakdown of other websites in the same space? 

  • What are the media companies in your space? Ex. Newsletter, Youtube channels, communities, etc. 

• What are your Moats?

  • How are you different from your competition 

  • How will you stand out? Brand/messaging/marketing/product 

  • Identify gaps in competitor’s product & marketing

The aim here won’t be to get all the answers, as most early saas companies will struggle to get all of them. Instead, the exercise is to build clarity on what you want to achieve & how to achieve it. More answers = More clarity.

Some ideas won’t even have direct competition. Marketing such a product is tricky as you will have to invest heavily in explaining to your audience that they have a problem & your solution can solve it. 

2. Steal the Audience

Going super niche initially will help you target more efficiently. If you are building for everyone, then you are building for no one. So have a super targetted approach & focus on getting the first 100 super fans. 

How would you find them?

Ride on top of your competitors

• Social media DMs

  Follow competitors’ Linkedin & Twitter to find who are the ones who are engaging with their content. Usually, you will find power users there. DM them requesting their time to ask about your competitor & if they would be open to trying your product. Even if they reject this, try understanding why or what makes them stick around with your competition. 

  The next phase can be cold DM’ing all of their followers. Target to reach at least 100 - 150 followers per day. If you are lucky, you will get about 1 - 2 users daily.
  

• Monitor reviews
  Check out your competition on review websites like Trustpilot, Capterra, G2, etc., to see who gives your competition a 1 - 4 star rating. These users are potentially the easiest to convince to try your product out. Reach out to them on either social media or email ID. Use this disgruntled customer to identify gaps in your competition, future roadmap & keywords to target.
  

• Monitor keyword mentions
  Use tools like Social sprout, Brands24, and Google alert to monitor keyword mentions around your competition on social media. This can also be used to monitor keywords around the business. For example, a SaaS tool building a website feedback widget can monitor keywords like “website feedback”, etc. 

Use Influencers who are active in your space

• Identify the influencers in your space & use social media to leverage their audience. Reply to them, quote them, fight with them on Twitter, do whatever it takes to ride on their fame & gain their audience’s attention towards your product.

3. Talk talk talk 

• Use content to your advantage

  Social media will drive most of your traffic. So try to produce as much content as possible and consistently provide value to your target market. Follow great content creators & writers to understand the art of great social media hooks, storytelling & brand messaging. 
  
  Content is the most efficient way to reach a large audience. All social media are slowly converging, thus making it super easy for content creators to use the same content everywhere. Currently, we have the best opportunity in hand to create & push the same content on multiple channels like Twitter, Linkedin, Indie Hacker, Facebook & others to drive audience. 

• Sponsor content that your users are consuming

  During your research & user interviews, you will know what content your audience consumes. List the source of this content ex. podcasts, youtube channels, newsletters & other media outlets that overlap with your users. Use this to your advantage and contact them for sponsorships or partnerships. Select media companies with under 100,000 followers. These companies either work on a barter or provide slots at reasonable CPMs & have a higher engagement rate.

4. Launch multiple times 

Plan multiple launches on websites like Product Hunt, Hacker News, Betalist, and Appsumo which has a community of early adopters. These platforms have strong communities of people who would love to try your product & provide constructive feedback.

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5. Hangout 

Find your user’s tribe. There are many places where people you wish to reach already hang out in a bunch. Try to find such hotspots. Usually, you will find multiple communities on Slack, Discord, Reddit, or good old Facebook. 

Try to be a part of such communities & get yourself acclimatised. Start understanding their language & how keen they are towards self-promotion. Spending some time in such communities will help you find a way to market your product. 

6. Run ads (Tiny budget ~$1000) 

Most founders I have met underutilise paid acquisitions. But running small-budget ads helps you in many ways. They can help you understand 

• Language market fit
  Understand which keywords & copies are getting the highest conversion. These words can help you understand how to strategise your content calendar & also help you fine-tune your offers on the landing page. 

• Identify Keywords performance
  Understand keyword performance and cluster them under various groups based on their competition, CPMs & conversion rates. This will help you devise your SEO strategy to target keyword ranking. Ex. Some products might convert well on keywords like “Alternative to Compettitior”, while others convert well to high-intent keywords like “Manage X.”

• Know customer issues that convert the best
  Doing the research will help you identify the problems faced by your target audience. But how would you rank them based on priority? Again, paid ads will provide concrete data on which issues are dearer to your customers. 

• Boost SEO
  Paid ads help you boost SEO & domain ranking. However, many marketers feel that paid ads don’t impact SEO much, but a healthy traffic mix is ranked well above a website focusing only on content/organic traffic. 

7. Creating a base for the next phase: scaling to 10,000 users

The list mentioned above will help you get your first 1000 customers quickly. The primary goal should be to get them as soon as possible & then build your product based on their feedback. This robust product can then scale to 10,000 users. Along with product feedback secondary objective should also be to start creating a base for your marketing to scale. The tricks that got you to 1000 won’t get you to 10,000; building your marketing fundamentals will support your system to scale. 

Here are some good to have goals I would also try to achieve while scoring my first 100 users. 

• Find THE channel
  One channel will drive 80% of your revenue. This channel will have the best CPM/conversion ratio to make your business super-profitable while growing fast. Experimenting early on will help you fixate on this channel to get your next 10,000 users. 

• Start with SEO
  SEO is a long-term game. It will take at least 4 - 5 months for google to understand your offerings, identify your domain as a credible source of information & showcase your content. However, having a base prepared for this in terms of having a list of keywords to rank on, the type of content that can work & fixing technical SEO can go a long way in setting up SEO to scale to 100,000+ organic visits. 

• Social presence & proof
  Use this phase to have enough followers on social media channels. No one likes to buy stuff from people/brands with 30 followers. Try to ramp up the content & consistency to reach a good number. This will act as social proof for new buyers, signalling you know what you are doing. In this phase, create leaders among your organisation to build their brands. These personal following will go a long way in building relationships with your users. 

• Build a Community
  Try building a community of users & evangelists of your products. Provide them with a platform to interact & help other users. Also, start with a referral program to effectively reward the users who spread the word.

• Measure & Report analytics
  Create funnels & set up analytics. Use data to understand early users and their interaction with your product.  

• Find the best people
  Identify the strengths & weaknesses of your current team. Plan & hire to fill up the deficiencies. 

Feel free to reach out on Linkedin or Twitter if you have any queries or feedback.