How to Acquire Users

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You’ve built a product, now how do you get people to use it and find a sustainable source of customers?You have to experiment to see what works best for your product. The way you find your first user will differ from how you find your hundred thousandth but this doesn’t matter. 

I faced this dilemma when trying to generate traction for my design marketplace. Over time we got our reach (emails) up to 100k. 

"Do things that don’t scale." - Joe Gebbia

Product is key. At an early stage you want to keep it lean to get feedback. If you’re building a huge analytics solution find the simplest entry point for a customer to try it. They’d rather use a useful tool that fixes a core problem of theirs than half-baked analytics app trying to do everything.
 

• Find your Users

You need to be wherever your target users are. If you’re building a SaaS app for musicians then be on every musician forum, IRC chatroom and Facebook group. Add value and engage, don’t just self promote. These can drive a lot of high quality word-of-mouth referrals.

I’ve used Meetup in the past to find related events in London.  You’re almost guaranteed to find a meetup related to your startup where you’ll have the chance to speak to fifty or a hundred possible users. 

• Viral

A great way to build a user base is to create something related and interesting and that leads the visitor to checkout your product. Sometimes it’s an especially interesting blogpost or a related weekend hack that has share-ability. 

One example I’ve seen was a product built on Gmail built a tool to generate an infographic based on your email habits. Once you’ve shared this they could up-sell you on their other tools.

Many have seen the Dollar Shave Club or Undrip videos. For some companies YouTube is a valuable promotional platform. Warby Parker responds to support questions via YouTube videos. With each video receiving from hundreds to thousands of views. These are the kind of experiments that can add value. 

The old-fashioned approach is to get customers to invite their friends or add sharing to the signup flow. This can work well but often backfires when a customer doesn’t understand it. More recently there has been the inclusion of ‘frictionless sharing’ on the Facebook timeline, which for a social startup can be highly valuable. Use it wisely,  startups that have found extreme growth from it have found numbers plummet. 

• Word of Mouth

Word of mouth is the most popular way users find new products yet its something you can’t control. At launch it’s impossible to keep track of word of mouth but in the past I’ve recommended startups based on other aspects than just product. 

Do things your way, not the way your competitors do and people will notice. If you’re building a SaaS service why couldn’t you send a personal email to your first 100 users welcoming them? 

Offering amazing customer service stands out, look at Zappos, 37 Signals and IntercomIO. They got attention from how they interact with their community. 

People always ask “Are you solving a problem?” but an equally important question is “Who is your customer?” because once you know this you can ask them and know what you’re building toward. 

• Free

Everyone loves free. For SaaS businesses freemium is a common tactic to entice users and increase morale. Uber often gives away free credits for new users at events and over the Olympics they gave away free trips for each hour after a British olympian won a medal in London. This stood out and I saw a lot more tweets thanking them in my timeline than ever before. For e-commerce services giveaways drive a lot of traffic but visitors won’t necessarily have an intent to buy. 

• Referrals

For many startups simple referral schemes drive a lot of signups but they require an initial mass. Dropbox implemented this well by giving each user 100MB per referral, I see many more of these invites than any paid schemes within my non-startup circle of friends.

If you’d like to build a paid referral scheme then try Commission Junction or a similar service but the prior may drive the best results. 

• Content 

This strategy is loved by a subset of founders. Starting a blog requires a lot of work but if you become a thought leader in your space it is very valuable. A tactic is to try guest blogging and write for another publication with an audience, mentioning your startup in the byline (or tying it in). This is most commonly used for products in social media, marketing tools and SaaS companies. Find blogs relevant to what you’re building. Leo Widrich succeeded with many of these strategies at Buffer.

Content is all about creating value for your readers. A lot of people like creating SlideShare presentations because they rank so high in Google. For example the musician startup could create “Ten ways that musicians can find new venues” and put together some actionable content that drives them to their product. 

• Startup Communities

There are a number of communities for startups and founders to share what they’re building today. Such as Hacker News, /r/Startups andQUIBB. Share your product and you’ll receive a lot of direct feedback and a some traffic too, which helps. Although it’s unlikely that this will be your most engaged user-base.

If you’re looking for pure signups then you can submit your startup to a number of blogs & lists. Such as Beta List, The Museum of Modern Betas, StartupLi.st, Startups FM,  BetaKit and KillerStartups. These users will be even less engaged but will help build an initial community. 

• SEO

My last startup focused on email but for many businesses Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the most valuable path. SEOmoz have a great presentation called SEOMoz for Startups that they gave at YC. Too many have been burned by algorithm tweaks and other anomalies so don’t rely on it alone. Having a blog will help this because more of your pages will be non-promotional and linked to by trustworthy sites externally. 

• Social Media

Social Media presence is very much about context. With the right tools it can work to your advantage. If you know who your customer is you may be able to find them talking about a problem that your product fixes.Little Bird is a new tool to find influencers within a topic. If you have a valuable product then interact, get feedback and you may find they’ll share what you’re doing with their community. 

Your product isn’t designed for everyone and if need be send them to your competitors because you’re building relationships and showing that your goal is to help them. On Facebook I found that Facebook comments on product pages drove a lot of sales. Most people have a wider reach on Facebook than their Twitter following.

Quite a few founders have found value in Instagram and Pinterest as promotional platforms. If you can find a visual connect with what you do then they can be great. Scan has a beautiful QR related page on Instagram that is a stellar example. 

• Press

Press can be brilliant but the tech press is overrated. It drives a lot of short term traffic (12 hours worth). I was once interviewed on French TV and didn’t see any noticeable change in traffic because it wasn’t the right audience. You may find that the smaller blogs around your niche are the most valuable because two hundred active users is better than a thousand that instantly drop off. 

Most founders get on TechCrunch for the recognition and investor interest rather than the traffic. The best way to get written about is to have a story rather than a launch. Traction, funding or an interesting angle. 

Help a Reporter Out is an almost sobering but interesting concept where journalists request stories to fit into their piece or segment. For example: “ABC news is looking for a SF based founder in the financial space to talk about X”.  Make use of it if you’re trying to gain press attention. 

• Hype

I dislike hype but it has worked for some invite only services. It doesn’t work well for unlaunched or vague products (“Rethinking the photo”). You may receive a few hundred signups by the time you launch at which point most of them won’t won’t remember you. Svbtle, Medium andBranch provide an incentive to get in as influencers share their content to Twitter. On the other hand Hipster, Visual.ly and Dabble.in were overhyped by the time they launched it didn’t work. Path had thisproblem too but they were able to convince users by V2. 

One overlooked problem with creating exclusivity is that the ignored users can become resentful and when you finally launch they’ll ignore or bash your product. Which is why I like that Quora launched blogs without a drumroll. There’s no arrogance to it, yet a focus on quality thought.

• Guerilla Marketing

Guerrilla Marketing is using what you have at your disposal to market your product in the real world.  Anon User left lunches at HackerDojo and wrote gumroad links on them so that people could pay for them. If you do something interesting that shows off what you’re building there’s a good chance that people will share it and bring more attention than the original proposition. 

Mastercard have given out £10 prepaid credit cards (with vendors using mobile payments) at London tech events before. This is smarter for them than just sponsoring the food. 

Events startup Yplan launched at Hacker News London a few months ago which I attended, a few days later I noticed they were running Twitter ads targeted to ‘me’ and finally when walking down the street in London’s startup centre they had physical ads for a promotional event of theirs. This absolutely grabbed my attention and I installed the app. It worked because they know who their early user is.

• Hacks

Many founders resort to ‘hacks’ to get their initial traction. Most tactics are perfectly fine but others are considered to be in a grey area or wrong. Airbnb reportedly scraped and ‘spammed’ Craigslist to poach initial customers, you may disagree with them on these practices but I understand why they were in that position after spending years trying to get traction. If you find something ethical that works for you go for it, no matter how crazy it is. 

Stumble Upon is incredible for driving traffic to user generated content and their paid discovery feature allows you to ramp up the amount of traffic. I know a lot of user generated content startups that built their initial user base on this feature. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg but it’s a good start to help get its first thousand users. Startups are about momentum and your job is to start building it.

Mobile First and Foundation 4

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The other day, our friend and advisor Luke Wroblewski stopped by for a chat with Jonathan, Chris and myself. We’re in the midst of working on the finishing touches to Foundation 4, polishing the chrome and making her seaworthy. And Luke’s visit was a pleasant distraction.

Luke turned us on to Mobile First and his work has greatly influenced how we’re approaching Foundation 4, which we talked about during our conversation with him. While we talked, Chris was furiously pounding away on the code — he can pat his head and rub his tummy at the same time.

Some good stuff was said and we didn’t want you to feel left out. Here are a few snippets from our conversation:

Mobile First and Responsive

Luke: Step out to any street corner and people have their face in a smartphone. That trend doesn’t show any signs of letting up. In fact, it’s constantly growing. I think the whole idea of Mobile First is reaching all these audiences anywhere and everywhere. ‘Cause you can pull out your mobile device anywhere and everywhere. All the kinds of things people are doing are all the kinds of things we used to make websites about — buying things, looking up information, taking to their friends, killing some downtime, anything and everything is now mobile.

Mobile First, in a responsive paradigm, for me, forces you to focus on the stuff that matters, front and center. So what you see is people designing things desktop site down. What you end up is that they cram everything and the kitchen sink into the site. They make it huge and bloated in terms of performance, in terms of content, in terms of features. What they end up doing to get down to a mobile view, they stack everything into one long list. It’s huge and it takes forever. It basically creates a crappy mobile experience.

Shifting Paradigms

Jonathan: We’re doing something different with 4 than we did with 3. When we did 3, we said “2 is dead.” With 4, 3 is still there. Because even with our clients, it’s going to be another year of us beating the drum as much as we can to get our clients to sign up doing things Mobile First.

The nice thing about Foundation is we’ve always built Foundation so that it’s probably six months to a year ahead of where we are.

Luke: That’s an interesting philosophy. Sorta building ahead of where your clients are and bring them there over time and learn the lessons.

Jonathan: We have to drag them kicking and screaming. On the way, we get there ourselves.

Luke: I talk with a lot of companies around this sort of stuff. All of them know the terms. They know responsive web design. They know Mobile First. They know that they should be acting on it. But what’s really holding them back is their existing properties and processes. To be clear, what makes people uncomfortable is that it’s a different way of working. It’s different than what we’ve been doing for 20-plus years.

My counter argument to that is that it’s a pretty different web, pretty different world than it was 20 years ago. If you’re expecting things that worked for you 20 years ago work today, I don’t think that’s a viable way to run a business.

The other argument that I hear is that it costs more, takes more time. My response is: OK, so you can keep making a desktop and laptop site and just not have all these new audiences on tablets, on smartphones and all that stuff. If you want more usage on these more devices, more online time, you have to invest a little more. It’s not going to come for free. Nobody just comes hands you a pile of money or customers if you do nothing.

Jonathan: At some point, it’s just going to be the cost of doing business.

Forward the (Mobile First) Foundation

Jonathan: Luke got us turned on to the whole thing. We had lunch … how long ago?

Chris: Back in November … maybe September …

Jonathan: About six months ago, we had lunch with Luke. And Luke was like beating us over the head with “Foundation ought to go Mobile First”. And we talked about it before but that was the first conversation where we got to the end of it and was “like OK that makes some sense.”

Chris: He made us look at Zepto too.

Jonathan: He turned us on to Zepto. So that was a good conversation. I think it was a confluence of — he made a pretty good case for it. Honestly, I think, at last to me, the best case so far. Since we’re doing things mobile first, technically, we have the capability with Foundation to build experiences that don’t suck for like really old phones and feature phones. We’re not going to inherit all the styles we try to cram in there. It will actually be a mobile site.

So we can broaden our appeal by simplifying what we present for devices like that or older browsers like IE6 or 7. You could reasonably say you can build a site for IE6 using Foundation 4, which wasn’t the case with Foundation 3. That was a win.

Luke: To build on that. The promise of tomorrow, for me, is more and more multi-device web. There’s no shortage of devices.

Toward Tomorrow and Beyond

Luke: I think that it’s encouraging to see that more and more people are understanding this opportunity and jumping on it. You guys, potential working with clients, using Foundation — it’s a great vehicle understanding kind of what they’re inevitably going to have to do on the Web. I appreciate that you guys are moving it forward and pushing it past where the clients are right now. In the end, I think it’s going to be good for you and for them. It’s not a negative thing for me. I do agree that change is hard. It’s inevitable to deny that the mobile thing is here. And you’re going to have to deal with it. And eventually deal with it in a good way.

Jonathan: Pretty stoked to where Foundation is going. We wouldn’t have taken the direction we did if you hadn’t badger us for the last year and a half.

HTML5 vs Native Mobile App Development

HTML5 vs Native Mobile App Development: Which option is best? from Appcelerator Inc.

How to Become a Mobile-First Enterprise

How to Become a Mobile-First Enterprise from Appcelerator Inc.

Entrepreneurship: Who will be the next generation of business leaders after Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and others?

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Who will most likely be the next generation of business leaders to take over the previous generation? If we refer to the previous batch of business leaders who moved industries are Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and more. Who are the new guys and why?

Here we go:

1. Elon Musk:  I recently saw Mr. Musk speak at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.  He said that a younger age, he saw that 3 things would revolutionize humanity in his lifetime: 1) the internet, 2) sustianable transpiration, and 3) space exploration.  So, he set out to complete the audacious task of conquering all three.  He co-founded PayPal and sold to eBay, earning him a fortune.  He then went on to co-found the electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors, and in 2012, their flagship sedan received numerous accolades, including Motor Trend’s Car of The Year.  Finally, he co-founded SpaceX and was one of the first companies leading the charge in the privatization of the US space program.  Oh yeah, and he’s Chairman of SolarCity, which just went public in the fall of 2012.  He may also be the first human to survive indefinitely without sleep.

2. Jack Dorsey: Not only did he co-found Twitter,but he also co-foundedSquare.  And he didn’t leave one to work on the other.  He’s currently Chairman of Twitter and CEO of Square.  Twitter revolutionized the communications and press/media industries.  Humanity has never been so connected and been able to receive loads of information worldwide almost immediately.  Square is turning the credit/debit card processing industry on it’s head, and is one of the most powerful players in the digitization of currency.

3. Jeff Bezos: Amazon was founded by Bezos and is one of the more mature companies of the late 90’s tech scene.  I assumed that there wasn’t many new tricks in Jeff’s hat, and that Amazon would mature, grow 2-5% / year, and live on for decades without much innovation.  After all, Amazon is public, quite large with a market cap of $120 billion, and seemingly mature.  But, I was dead wrong.  Amazon Web Services hav revolutionzed the hosting/cloud space.  Bezos was able to forecast the future accurately and took a gamble with the Kindle, which has had great success since it’s launch and played a part in disrupting the archaic book industry.  Bezos is invested in many promising companies including Uber,Behance, ZocDoc., and ChaCha.  Reccomnded Reading: One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com

4. Larry Page:  He took back the reigns of Google in 2011, and as CEO the company’s stock price has risen by over 30%.  Mr. Page has the dedicated passion for Google that only a founder can have.  Complacency will never set him with him.  With him back at the helm, I think Google is scratching the surface of it’s potential.  See Project Glass from Google and Google driverless car.  Recommended Reading: In The ‘Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.

5. Tony Hsieh (pronounced ‘shay’): Founder & CEO of Zappos.com.  Tony understands customer service on a level I have never seen before.  And as Gary Vaynerchuck illustrates in his book The Thank You Economy, companies with exceptional customer service will be the ones to rise to the top.  He’s also spearheading the effort to revitalize the Las Vegas downtown and create an innovative and entrepreneur mecca in Sin City.  He has personally committed $600 million to the project.  Check out more: Downtown Project.  Recommended Reading: Tony’s book entitled Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

  

Ian McCullough, Early phase start-up junkie.

To start, it’s worth noting that through most of the 1990’s, it was General Electric'sJack Welch that was popularly seen as the greatest business leader ever. Welch’s retirement in 2001 was perfect timing for Steve Jobs to be the “it” CEO of the 2000’s.

Although Henry Hagnäs makes a mention of him, I think that Jeff Bezos is alreadythat business leader for the moment. Bezos founded Amazon.com and started successfully building it into the first major consumer ecommerce business in the world. He started with books and then progressively expanded offerings so that they now sell pretty much EVERYTHING.

They offer third party fulfillment services, are now the dominant player in cloud hosting and web services, have a large and increasingly dominant digital media business (including a curated Android platform) and are now developing and shipping their own electronics hardware under the Kindle line of products.

If Facebook is positioning itself as the social layer of the Internet, Amazon has effectively positioned itself as the small business layer of the Internet.

Speaking of Facebook, I think another notable mention for business leaders would be Sheryl Sandberg. Mark Zuckerberg may be responsible for general direction and product vision, but by all reports it’s Sandberg that is building the business and the company.

Marc Benioff from Salesforce is also very active and has built an incredibly successful enterprise that has greatly impacted the business and technology landscape in ways that I will not enumerate here.

All of this is offered with the qualification that Larry Ellison still actually runs the tech world and has for a long time now, but since Oracle isn’t a consumer-facing company (or even a small business facing company like Salesforce) he isn’t nearly as much in the public consciousness. That’s probably fine with Larry since I’m sure he’d rather be yachting.

Read more 

10 Web design trends you can expect to see in 2013

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1. More responsive design, please.

Yes, this responsive design also works on the Newton.

Duh. It should be no surprise that responsive web design is here to stay, so why do I predict it as a trend in 2013? Simple: the methodology behind responsive design is still changing and being established. For instance, the start of 2012 brought the idea of responsive design catering to breakpoints per device. When new devices hit the market such as the iPad mini, this idea was challenged, leaving us with the idea that the breakpoints should be made when the design falls apart instead.

My prediction is more attention will be made earlier in a website design project to ensure that the responsiveness of the site is based on the design and not the vast variety of devices out there. The idea of forgetting about the size of devices will help drive better responsive design, so we will start seeing websites designed with breakpoints of all types.

2. Typography will take center stage.

 

Web designers and developers are always focusing on the weight of things such as images and Javascript when they start building their websites. As the last couple of years have seen the first breakthroughs in web type in a very long time, this combination will inevitably drive the increased usage of typography as the central element in website design. While there are things such as @font-face to serve fonts from the server, some of which are heavily weighted — the weight of fonts used for website design are often lighter than their image and script counterparts.

Also, typography and layouts that are based on content are inherently easier to make responsive than really complicated layouts with different types of images and JavaScripts. As an added bonus, don’t be surprised to see more inventive ways of typography being displayed on websites either.

3. Buh-bye Flash. Hello just about anything else.

No surprise here as far as a trend that will carry over from 2012. It’s highly evident that Flash is on its last leg. It’s bad for the SEO of a site, many mobile devices don’t support it (I’m looking at you, Apple), and it is a pain to update (it crashes my browser all the time, what about you?). Plus, there are so many other technologies out there that can do what Flash does now (i.e. HTML5/CSS3, JavaScript, etc.).

I predict that we could see the end of Flash in 2013. It’s already on life-support as companies who did support Flash before start to dump it. With so much negative attention surrounding Flash, fewer designers and developers are going to use it which will make those who want the technology less and less able to hire someone to do it.

4. Skeuomorphism will show its age.

There has been some recent discussion about how Apple’s skeuomorphism is out the door, even as much as Apple questioning its own design decisions. Bringing in items from the past to provide cues in new technologies doesn’t help us advance in the way we think. For instance, we don’t need a visual of a bookshelf with books on it to know that we are about to read an ebook. We know they are ebooks, we put them on our devices. We are okay with looking at the cover and knowing what it is.

Since Apple is looking toward other design aesthetics, wait for others to follow suit as well. We already see major companies creating their own design methodologies, such as Microsoft’s Metro, so I predict that companies will look toward the way they think for design inspiration and less toward what the big dogs are doing (i.e. Apple and skeuomorphism).

5. Large images used for large impact visuals.

This goes against my prediction above about typography being used more than images due to the site weight. However, more websites are using large images on their home page to make an impact. These same websites are also keeping bandwidth and data usage in mind by only serving large images to those with large screens.

We are seeing more and more websites using large images as visuals on their home pages, and I don’t see this slowing down any time soon. It’s true that these large images make an impact, and companies know this. So, I predict this trend will continue through at least the first half of 2013.

6. Give me (more) white space!

Toward the end of 2012 websites were being designed with more white space. I predict this will continue as we move into 2013. Responsive web design and a clean design aesthetic (with the new Myspace leading the way) are both factors. These white space heavy designs lend an air of gravitas, and who doesn’t want their website to make them seem professional and knowledgeable?

7. More sharing on social networks.

Look for more social media integration into your favorite websites and even new websites. While sharing buttons at the end of articles is very old news, I predict the use of deeper integration with social media networks on websites to explode in 2013.

This includes further expansion of social single sign-on, “pay by tweet” or “pay by status” sharing, exploring other types of social media based on website content (such as Instagram for news sites or Pinterest for artists and designers), and even more advertising on social networks.

8. Calmer color schemes to reappear.

Color trends come and go faster than anything, but look for the use of more subdued or calmer color schemes as new websites make their way to the Web. This is already evident in some websites launched in the last few months, such as PayPal’s home page redesign. You can also see this in Pantone’s color choice for 2013.

It’s really hard to predict what colors are going to be the most common at any given time. However, desaturated and light colors will more than likely dominate the color palettes of new websites and mobile apps. Also, it is safe to add that the use of whites, grays, and blacks will be used more as the primary colors in a design than actual hues.

9. Mobile apps will start to replace mobile browsing.

Even though there is a push to make websites work on all devices, including mobile ones, certain websites seem to work better when they are used through their own app. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc are all examples of such websites where their apps are much better than their mobile browsing experience.

The movement from mobile browsing on certain sites to apps that will serve the same content will become accelerated in 2013 as more and more people are using their phone for everything. Give Facebook’s mobile site a run and then compare it to the native iOS app — there’s just no comparison.

10. King content will keep its crown.

Content will keep its rightful throne as we move into designing for the web in 2013. Without content, there is no website. What will keep content on top is the increasing need to be able to access any content anywhere you are. We can give responsive web design a big pat on the back for keeping content where it belongs: priority #1.

Along with content staying on top, more focus will be made on creating high-quality content. Writing, designing, publishing and sharing will help content keep its crown, while responsive design will be responsible for the delivery. It’s all in the family when you think about responsive web design, content, and social media, a family which will dominate in 2013.

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Projection Mapping on Trees

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