How Typedream got their first 1,000 users
Co-founder Michelle Marcelline tells us how they got early traction
Introducing Michelle Marcelline
I’m a co-founder at Typedream, a no-code website builder with a Notion-like interface. I was born and raised in Indonesia and moved to the US for college in 2015.
I met my 4 other co-founders in my first computer science class in college and ever since then, we’ve been building projects together.
We dropped our day jobs just 3 months after graduating from college because we all wanted to pursue the entrepreneurial journey. We applied to Y Combinator, got into the W20 batch, and have been building startups ever since!
Getting their first 1,000 users
First 10 users: Manual recruiting
Our initial target market was those who built their websites on Notion.
Therefore, we decided to rebuild their sites using Typedream and asked them if they would like to claim their websites.
Rebuilding people's sites was definitely NOT scalable but we automated it a while later by building templates.
50-100 users: On the spot setup
We started #buildinginpublic on Twitter and opened our waitlist via Product Hunt ship.
Other founders: "Will you try our beta?" "Great, we'll send you a link!"
Typedream: "Hop on a call with us and let's build your website together!"
Sure, onboarding our waitlists 1-by-1 was not scalable, but it was very beneficial:
Less drop-off compared to simply sending people a link to our beta and asking them to try it themselves
A LOT of feedback because we get to see them interacting with our product, live
100-500 users: Delighting our users
One of the mistakes we did with our previous startups was that we were trained as engineers so customer service was not part of our efforts.
We avoided this mistake. With Typedream, we provided a level of service no big company can.
500-1,000 users: Product Hunt launch
Once we'd gone through enough iteration and finally had a shippable product, we didn't hesitate to launch.
Misconceptions about growth
Some people think:
“If we build it, they will come - we don’t need to do any marketing because the product is good enough to sell itself.”
Even if your product is excellent, you need to make sure that people know about it.
It’s challenging to sell an unknown product, so building product awareness is one of the main marketing goals for an early-stage startup.
Early experiments
It is believed that content marketing is one of the most effective ways for startups to gain exposure. We experimented with creating a company blog.
After approximately 5 months of actively writing blog articles, the analytics weren't so great that we decided to stop and analyze what we needed to do.
Our analytics showed that our most well-performing pages were the Templates, so we decided to make content for the templates instead of writing blog articles.
We added some information about each template, including a short description about what the template is, and how to use the template.
Building an MVP
Our primary objective when building an MVP was to get the product out the door quickly so people can start using our product and let us know if our product solves the problem that we can continue to develop further.
If we aim for perfection without even shipping the product, there is a high chance of wasting lots of time in developing the product without knowing if the product brings value to people.
Advice to founders
Fail fast, fail cheap, fail forward. Nobody knows what the “right” thing is. You just have to give it a shot, fail, learn from your failure, try again. This way, you’ll avoid your past failures and become better.
Technology allows us to fail fast, fail cheap, and fail forward.
50 years ago, people had to invest millions of dollars and years to build a factory so the cost in terms of money and time is very high.
25 years ago, people had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years in school to become a doctor or a lawyer.
Today, all we need is a laptop and an internet connection.
Thanks so much for reading!
Check out Typedream and sign up for an account
You can find Michelle on Twitter @michwirantono and LinkedIn
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