1. First things first, the time to get those initial 1,000 to 5,000 users is before you officially launch your startup. For Ausobot (http://www.ausobot.com), I created a simple landing page (with LaunchRock). I put it out yesterday morning and as of today I have about 234 people signed up.
2. Neeharc's tip on betali.st is great too. I submitted to it on Friday evening and paid $15 to get the review expedited. I got an email yesterday afternoon though that they do not accept LaunchRock created landing pages so that would be one thing to consider. I am now in the process of creating a custom landing page.
3. I also created a simple Facebook Fan page, nothing too creative on it yet but the idea there is to use that to create posts that trigger engagement (www.facebook.com/ausobot).
4. On the Twitter side, the goal is to use the @ausobot to add like minded followers, and actively participate in discussions where I can add value. I am not sure what social listening tool I am going to use for this yet (inputs would be great). My current pick is DataSift. I was playing around with it at BNOTIONS (where I used to be a Director of Product up until Tuesday when I resigned / got laid off).
It allows you to filter tweets around specific tags. Use these tags to identify the users that your startup can add value for. Reach out to them proactively by offering something they can use. Since this is in real-time, use context to your advantage. If someone is trying to solve a billing related issue and you have a billing software, offer tips.
That's pretty much all I have. I don't like the idea of AdWords, I don't like the idea of paying for acquisition until I have proven the model.
Oh and finally HN of course. I have never been actively participating in HN, I do peruse the tweets though and I was currently trying to figure out how people post Show HN and what the rules around that were :) That's of course another avenue if the story gets picked up(?).
Good luck and would love to hear from others on this.
- Tehsin Bhayani @tehsin681 www.ausobot.com Founder of the Ausobot, Your first personal robot.
1. I tweeted out 'The product I have dreamed of making is finally going to be a reality: http://www.ausobot.com Please do sign up for the Beta and RT :)'
I only got 2 retweets despite my plea, and 7 people that tweeted about it directly.
I wish I could figure out which of these 9 people got me the most of my sign ups from Twitter. At the very least, what I will do in my next attempt is put the link on Twitter out with a ?ref code or a separate subdomain altogether.
2. I posted the link on my FB, and once again despite my (quite an emotional) plea, I got all of 35 people who willingly posted it on their timelines. This I think helped me with at least 75% of my sign ups. Each time I saw a share on the timeline, I would log into Insights, take a look at the sign ups, and notice them trickle in.
Next steps: What I left out from the above strategy was the idea of talking to all the mavens (well connected folks).
These 'mavens' fall into two categories: 1. Those that I know (all 5 of them) 2. The 200 or so that I wish I knew.
I would make a list of these 200, and listen for when they are talking about something related that I can contribute about (you can again pay attention and filter this through DataSift or manually). Contribute, help the discussion, engage them and try to convert them into advocates of your product.
Does that make sense? This is my first time attempting marketing but I am trying to emulate (and improve upon) all the success stories as best as I can.
Try using http://betali.st/. It's a good way to get the first 100 users or more. It's not the first 1000 but its a start.
Kissmetrics had put up a good article on how to go about doing this.
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/landing-page-design-infographic/
I will probably use facebook/google ads after the startup has been validated by users as we are still in the alpha testing phase. Will keep you posted if I find out any killer tips for getting more users.