Need more users for my internet startup (Growthhacking) (In private beta)

Betalist gives you some audience in case you're not available to the general public yet. Submit your startup here. 

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. 

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. 

Quick growth mainly comes from sharing. And how do you make people share your product? There are many techniques however they are all second to this one: pick a product which is inherently viral.

Some services only make sense for users if they share it. For example, a new chat application or community website (which the world may need, or not) is inherently viral: for it to make sense for users (i.e. add value) they need to share it with their friends. Facebook, Twitter and many others only grew so quickly because of this principle.

The reason for this is that you don't need to do a lot of convincing to make people invite their friends - once they bought into the concept (at least partially) it's just logical to them to invite their friends as next step.

Therefore consider carefully which product you want to put your energy into. Your original idea may provide good value - but if it's not inherently viral your path to growth will be much more difficult. 

Asking people to share your product (a main driver of growth) is asking for a big leap of faith. 

Even if they like your product, sharing it with friends and therefore recommending it could potentially backfire (e.g. as some products do dodgy stuff which is not obvious at first). It doesn't matter if your product falls into that category or not - all products are affected because this is a perceived risk for users - and they don't share.

Therefore don't give them the idea that they're sharing you. Make them think they share themselves. The Facebook user who invites her friends to join facebook to check out her pictures she uploaded doesn't primarily think about sharing facebook, but her pictures. This makes sharing much smoother (and more likely). 

Building up a presence on social media can be beneficial in several ways: 

1. People become aware about you and visit your site & sign up
2. Once you have a good number of followers: you are showing that people follow you, which makes it more like that others take you seriously also 
3. It can be a good tool to reach out to influencers

If you don't know how to go about, have a look at how to build up followership on social media.