Need more users for my internet startup (Growthhacking) (Not launched yet)

Often the best way to get users is to give people the opportunity to sign up to the real thing (not just a pre-launch page). Therefore aim to launch soon; it doesn't matter if your product is not perfect yet. According to Reid Hoffman (Founder of LinkedIn): "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late!".

Not only will this give you actual users, but something much more important: feedback. People can now tell you what's good about it and what is not, which is crucial information for you to develop your product into a real value-add. 

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"!

Collecting users takes time, and the eariler you start with it the better.

Setting up a pre-launch page to collect emails (= first users) is pretty easy these days as there are inexpensive services just made for this: Launchrock.com and Unbounce.com are classics, but there are several more, see this overview.  

If you haven't launched yet you have a big advantage: you can promise your prelaunch site visitors almost everything on earth so that they give you their email address (of course, it shouldn't be entirely divorced from reality). 

For example, promise them to fix a major problem in a cool way. If your pre-launch page looks professional enough and people don't see any reason why the service will not be cool, their imagination will "fill in the blanks" and they will almost certainly want to get alerted when you launch.

For that reason it also makes sense to stay somewhat vague. Provide enough information so that they see a (potentially) strong value, but not enough so that some of them may realize it's not for them (which is actually the case - no product serves everybody). Some pre-launch sites succeeded with being as vague as only the title "Something cool is coming to San Francisco" (read here), however most likely that wouldn't do it anymore. 

Also, try to trigger the FOMO (fear of missing out) feeling as strongly as possible, so that they really feel the urge to give their email to you.  

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. 

To get a feeling for how prelaunch-pages can be designed, have a look at the collections from Kickofflabs or Speckyboy.

If you haven't lauched yet, but already have a working beta version, then you can approach bloggers and offer them beta-invites (for their readers) if they write about you, or allow a guest post from you. 

This way you get some coverage, and the blogger gets interesting content with an exclusive benefit to their readers (they are always looking for good content, and exclusive access to their readers is a strong plus). 

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. 

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. 

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. 

Read this great article from Smashingmagazine on how to design your prelaunch page. 

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). 

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: 

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.