Traction Roundup: Landing your 1st customer, getting 1,000 new users, building an email list of 50,000 people...
3 digestible growth strategies
In case you missed it…
Welcome to the roundup issue where we highlight a few growth strategies from founders over the last few weeks.
The 3 growth strategies:
How to get your first customer with Bobby of Equals
How to get 1,000 users with Michelle of Typedream
How to build an email list of 50,000 signups with Sam of HeyDay
Housekeeping:
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1. How to get your first customer with Bobby of Equals
I wrote a lot on our blog. I wrote a lot on LinkedIn. I wrote a lot.
Our first customer came in through that content. It was the CFO of a company called Umba.
He wrote in saying that he'd been reading the content, found it super useful, really appreciated it.
We started talking and swapped thoughts on things.
When Equals was finally ready to start having users on the product, I called them up and I said,
“Hey, look, I'd love to show you what we're building and give you a demo and see if it'd be something that'd be useful or interesting for you.”
That led them to jump in on the product. And they're still one of our most active and happy customers.
2. How to get 1,000 users with Michelle of Typedream
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.
3. How to build an email list of 50,000 signups with Sam of HeyDay
We built up that email list primarily through content. We had built a really large publication on Medium.com called “Noteworthy.”
At its height, it grew to nearly a million unique visitors per month.
That publication was basically aggregated guest posts from different people on the platform who were writing and bragging about tech and productivity.
And the way that Medium works is when someone adds a post to your publication you get edit access over it.
So our pitch to writers on the platform was: “Hey, if you submit your posts or publication, we will help you get more distribution via our email lists.”
The main incentive for these writers was getting their writing seen by others. And in exchange for that, we would add a call-to-action at the bottom of of the posts that pointed people to Journal.
One of the main interaction points with journal was a Web Clipper.
We would say “save this post in Journal” and when people clicked on that it would take them to the Journal landing page where they would learn about the product, and then they would sign up to the waitlist from there.
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❤️
Joshua