How do I get my first users when I launch?

Before we go full blast on ad campaigns on the usual suspects, Meta, TikTok, whatever it might be, what WhatsApp communities are there? Through your extended network of friends and family, do you have access to any of these groups? They might be smaller, but you've got some kind of personal connection there.

They'll just end up being warmer introductions, and I think they'll give you faster feedback. It's only really going to cost you time to start those conversations.

You might draw up a list of online communities. You then need to work out how you're going to approach them and what your pitch could be.

Usually it kind of boils down to finding your first customers, which won't involve that much marketing. It's way more figuring out what exactly they want.

The wider you go in the funnel, regardless of whether that's ads or organic, the less you know about the people. I honestly wouldn't do any large scale marketing before having the first 10 customers.

In your place I'd personally try to get the so-called design partners and really show them the app first. It doesn't have to be the complete product, it could be just screenshots of the design. Just do a demo call with them and see how they react.

With the ads and the cold, you're jumping to advanced strategies that are really hard before you've done the easy stuff.

I'm only having you talk to people you already know, or your loved one is introducing you to someone they already know. I would just start having these conversations, getting free trials and building the features for the people in your own sphere. They're the easiest people to get to refer.

Then we'll look at your block, and after your block your neighborhood, and after your neighborhood your state, and after your state the Internet. We don't need that many testers. We need like 3.

You have to figure out the messaging and positioning. Hard stop, because if you don't clearly communicate that value, nobody's gonna download your app anyways.

You've got the people you surveyed and your connections on LinkedIn. You're going to just have to brute force getting 100 people to download and install this thing and give you feedback.

For a product like this, I think you have to start thinking about how the product finds more people. Could be really simple: you're in the product and you're prompted to share it with a friend. Find two or three touch points in your product where the user has just experienced some value.

You can do discovery through Facebook groups or live conversations. Hey, can I get 10 minutes of your time just to ask you a couple questions?

It's very hard to get in front of people and try to start selling a thing if you haven't built those relationships. People love being asked their opinion about things. You then say, would you be interested in playing with a new tool that I have?

When you actually want to charge, you can create a founding cohort. The first 100 users get introductory pricing. The quid pro quo is you get it cheap, but you're part of the advisory board that provides feedback.

I can tell you what I did, not what you should do, because it's a completely different business model.

My thought process was the people that are writing stories about how they bootstrapped and how they grew, they want to share. So I reached out to those guys via email and on LinkedIn, told them what I was building and asked for feedback. That's how I found my first dozen or so solid mentors.

Then these dudes would post about it on LinkedIn and put it as their company on their work experience. That was a huge growth loop, because then other people on LinkedIn would see it.

The reason you want these people is because you're building it for them. You think they are the right sample for all the people who will end up using it. So you have to pick them really wisely.

A hacky way of doing it: I would go on a site where those people write reviews. I would grab a list of 5000 users, enrich that with their personal emails or their business emails and do a very personalized outreach. Personalized, but at scale.

You call out one of the reviews they've written and say, "I noticed your review." They're probably not getting a ton of those and that stands out.

I'd try the vertical or use case you can lead with a very good case study. If you find someone you can give the product to for a month, let them really show your prospects what they can do with it.

Every time I've gone into a new country, I've started with a very small niche within a vertical and tried to work from there.

If you wanted to go into the e-commerce market, maybe it's choosing one of the e-commerce platforms to work with, some specific product where you can very easily find all of the people that use that software and then market to them.

You can't pay for 20 or 30 creators to go live at any given time, because the capital is not there. What you can do is start incentivizing people for every paid member they generate, which you can track. They get a payout.

No one is going to do it for a free month of membership. People like money. Feel free to try and prove me wrong. It's just my experience.

In the early days, any momentum is really valuable, especially for any kind of community app or marketplace app. You need it to be growing quite quickly so users have other people to bounce off.

For one of the games back when we did browser games, I think our budget was €300. Of course, in general everything was cheaper back then in terms of advertisement. Traditionally we should have gotten probably somewhere around 3,000 players, but we got over 30,000 because it was just the right platform to advertise.

The way we made a tiny budget work with so many players is you need multipliers. If you do ads and pay for each person, you just have one person.

With a game that's educational, maybe take some extra time to get a school on board. One school means you get 100 or 200 players.

It's very nice to have the organic channels. Don't expect a lot of organics through those sources. I saw cases when TikTok videos were gaining like millions of views but still barely any installs.

You need user acquisition budgets and a person who can run user acquisition. Most probably you need to focus on advertisements on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. The tricky part is not specifically running user acquisition. It's to make the funnel work and make it really profitable.

Set up a testing campaign at around $50 per day for like 5 to 7 days, till it optimizes itself. You'll see whether the economy model fits or not.