Need more users for my internet startup (Growthhacking)

If you try to serve everybody, you end up serving nobody. Therefore, review the client segments you're targeting. Are they sharply defined? If you approach your prospects, do they clearly feel you offer value to them?

Imagine the following two fitness trainers: 

A) Fitness trainer A advertises his services to everybody - "as everybody needs fitness" (and he's right!)

B) Fitness trainer B offers his services to women who recently gave birth, promising to help them to get their prematernal weight back. He develops a tailored fitness & nourishment plan for this segment, and advertises in magazines read by pregnant women or those who gave birth recently. 

Which fitness trainer will get traction more quickly? Whose clients are more likely to recommend him to their friends (who are in the same situation)? 

Note: Starting out with a niche doesn't mean that you have to stick to it for life. Even Facebook started out with a niche (college students). The power of focusing on a niche is that it gives you initial momentum. Once the ball is rolling you can successively widen your scope. 

They don't say for nothing  "The riches are in the niches"!

Think how you could grow on a platform which already managed to get a significant audience.

Airbnb's growth hack on Craigslist is legendary, however also a bit grey hat as it violated Craigslist's terms of services (which you shouldn't do, obviously). Make a longlist of platforms which are somewhat related to what you do, and think carefully for everyone of them how you could leverage off of their success. 

Note: although large and established platforms should be your focus, don't forget to look at emerging platforms as it might be easier to get your foot in the door with them (enabling you to grow with them). 

Become an expert on growth hacking (= the art of getting many users quickly). Read everything about it. Great resources are growthhackers.com and growthhackertv. 

A popular - and effective - way to generate some pre-launch buzz (and maybe even go viral) is the prelaunch waiting list. 

Characteristics: 

• Everybody can see at which point of the waiting list he/she is
• The higher up on the waiting list, the sooner that user will get access to the site (e.g. invite to a beta-version)
• The order of people on the waiting list depends on two factors: a) When they signed up (=> increasing the incentive to sign up soon) and b) How many friends they invite (=> Increasing incentive to share). 

This strategy works best if you offer a product which people want to get access to as soon as possible (obviously). An example for a company which played this strategy really well is Robinhood.com, see this case study.

Adding a sharing-feature to your prelaunch-site is obvious, however: how do you make people use it? 

Apart from giving people who share earlier access (see solution "Create a waiting list") you can also think of any other benefits that you only give to those who share your site while still in prelaunch-mode. 

For example, if your site uses a credit point system (once live), you can make the exclusive offer to your prelaunch-site-visitors that they get 10 starter credits if they invite at least 5 friends (or make at least 5 friends join). Think about all the (non-free) benefits your final site will offer, and then give some of that for free to people who share your prelauch site. 

You could also do a competition, e.g. the user(s) who invite most people win a price. This may lead crazy sharing, provided the prize is big enough (you may still be able to afford it as there will only be very few prices). You can also do it the Harry's way, giving different prices depending on number of people users made join, which lead to 100,000 prelaunch sign-ups in one week (!). 

To get most effect from this, use email marketing wisely. For example, if you give 10 starter credits to everyone who made 5 friends join to the prelaunch page, send that user already an email after the first friend joined, saying something along the lines of "Congratulations - your friend XY signed up on the prelaunch page! Only 4 to go" so that they may invite even more people to it. Most of the shares will come from a minorty of prelaunch-visitors (the old 80/20 rule applies here too), so really think hard how you can encourage users who shared your site to share it even more. 

If you want people to use (or share) your service then learn what makes people tick by reading good books on psychology. 

A great primer (also for advanced marketers) is Robert Cialdini's "Influence". Buy it here and never look back. 

In order to get a lot of users, you need to provide value to them. So first and foremost you need to ensure that you're working on something which does have a high perceived value to your future users. 

If you're still in the conceptualization phase, then instead of investing time and money for the next 6 months to build your product (on an untested hypothesis), put a simple dummy-page up which looks like it's already doing the real thing, and see how people interact with it. 

For example, if you're a service which helps people to get quick compensation for flight delays (i.e. you're doing all the paperwork and deal with the airlines) then put a website up which looks like it's already live, showing people what the deal is (e.g. you're taking 10% commission from the refunds your clients get), and a large "Sign Up"-button, and see how many people click on it (tracking it with tools like Google Analytics). You can get initial traffic to your site by paying a few dollars for advertising, e.g. on Google Adwords. 

No matter what the feedback is, it's very useful for you: Either it confirms your hypothesis and you're even more eager to implement it, or you learn that what you have in mind is not what people want, so you save your time and money and move on to the next idea which might be the successful one.

Also: this test is not only useful to decide if your idea is good or bad, but you can also do split testing to test other points (e.g. you can change your fee structure and observe what impact it has on (attempted) sign-ups to test the pricing sensitivity of your prospects). 

The idea & philosophy behind this approach is closely related to the Lean Startup Model. Have a look at this introduction video: