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How to get your first 100k active users
- annekate 9y agoBTW, I'm the OP and am happy to answer questions here. My expertise is obviously in consumer internet products but I spend a lot of time thinking about growth. It's my superpower!
- username223 9y agoI think this page completely embodies your core values and primary onboarding flows. It should be your homepage.
- forkLding 9y agoCanadian here, great to hear about your success, I'm on google play store and couldn't download, guess its US-only at this point?
- forkLding 9y agoAs well, got other questions, but understand if you don't want to answer, what did you think was the most important problem you solved for your users and how did you get people to really download your app after the beta stage? This also sounds like a good link that can go on indiehackers.com
- annekate 9y agoThanks, I'll check it out. We solve an huge number of extremely important problems for our users. Some things just off the top of my head: - Find local daycares that have spaces available, which is pretty important when you need to work - Find a nearby restroom or changing table when you need one RIGHT NOW (and when you need one, it's usually RIGHT NOW) - Get parenting advice in real time on just about any topic - If you're someone who doesn't fit in with traditional parenting groups (mostly moms, mostly married, etc), connect with a community of parents like you (single parents, stay home dads, etc) - Find places where you can nurse or pump safely - Get suggestions for things to do with your kids, because they are bored and you need to get out of the house - Locate family-friendly restaurants and businesses when traveling Etc. In some ways this is actually a challenge as there's no single, dead-simple value prop that we can use. But I love Winnie. We're genuinely helping people be less stressed and more successful as parents.
- jqbx_jason 9y agoWhat's a "very modest spend" when it comes to advertising? How much is enough to validate whether and ad is or isn't working in your experience? Also did a majority of your new users come from being featured on app stores or was it primarily through turning the modest spend into a serious spend once the ad was converting?
- annekate 9y agoEnough to get statistically significant data. There are programs to get $100 AdWords or FB Ads credit and that's more then enough to get a few thousand to 10k impressions on your ads and give you decent data about how well they perform. I would usually set a testing campaign to spend about $10/day for 5-7 days, and would shut it down early if it was looking particularly bad. Our app is free, so we aren't eager to pay for installs at any price, and paid aq is not a major channel for us. The lion's share of our new users come from organic search, social sharing, and word of mouth.
- jqbx_jason 9y agoCan I ask for a ballpark of what # of users it took to get to that inflection point when SEO and word of mouth takes over? At least in my experience getting to there has proven to be the main challenge. Also- thanks for taking questions and congrats on your success :)
- annekate 9y agoIt entirely depends on the domain so there's no good answer for this. Our growth has been remarkably steady, with minor seasonal factors. If the majority of your acquisition channels scale with the number of users (SEO, social, viral) then you should see a steady accumulation of momentum over time, even from a very small number — perhaps the low thousands. We've had a strong word of mouth factor from the very beginning, but I attribute that mostly to the brand and the fact that this is an underserved market. Parents have traditionally been invisible to tech companies and they are delighted someone is finally building for them.
- dna_polymerase 9y agoRegarding the part about native apps, would you go as far as even restraining from publishing any app, if native app developers are not available (or not in the budget) in the beginning?
- annekate 9y agoDepends on the product. Winnie's target demo is millennial parents who are mobile power users, so we knew the apps had to be best-in-class and we were prepared to invest in them. Not all products need to invest in amazing apps or apps at all, but if you don't have a decent app than ASO and featuring are not going to be available to you. This may or may not be important to your business.
- liquidise 9y agoI'll share an anecdotal opinion contrary to the article. I've been running the engineering team at a startup for 3 years now and our app is still 100% cordova. We passed 100k actives over a year ago. There are many benefits to native apps from the experience polish to the community and resources surrounding them. There are 2 major negatives to native: dev time and cost. The Native vs Cordova/SomethingElse discussion is going to have different answers depending on your use case. Let me restate that for importance. Your use case will dictate which is "correct" early on. For us, the rapid product tests we were looking to run, in both web and mobile platforms with a very small engineering team all but required a cordova app. As our product has grown more mature, and major client features change less frequent, the appeal of native has grown. But despite that appeal, we remain firmly in cordova and will for at least another 6 months.
- fpisfun 9y agoThat sounds absurd to me, go hybrid first then go native once it takes off, you can write your app in JavaScript and have an app that runs in all major mobile devices and a website, I'm not sure how can be beat unless money isn't a problem, such as massive initial funding.
- annekate 9y agoOr you can write a native app and get 10-20k installs for free from a feature on the app store. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- tootie 9y agoNow that you have users and presumably mounting operations costs, what's the plan for revenue?
- hrykora 9y agoWhy is your company sjw? Why are you hiring women only in engineering?
- p0larboy 9y agoHey Anne, my qns is with regards to getting a forum started. I see that Winnie have great topics discussion with questions asked and answered by users. For a new forum, there are bound to be empty-room syndromes. How did you guys manage to kickstart discussions in the beginning? Is it all organic or is there some growth hack involved? This qns have been bothering me a while and I can't seem to get any good readings anywhere else.
- jesse_ 9y agoHi there, I can try to answer this question from a user perspective. I was an early Winnie user in their public beta and it's one of my top two favorite startups that has launched in the last couple of years. Initially it did feel like an empty room, but this was before the ability to start discussions with other users and ask questions. Initially you could only add reviews of places. I remember adding a couple of reviews and since I didn't get any immediate engagement from other users it felt like I was adding valuable content but it wouldn't really be useful until they got a large number of users. When discussions became available the biggest thing was that Anne and her co-founder Sara were really active users and shared their knowledge of being parents. Every single post that I added was liked and/or commented on by them. If you asked a parenting question or posted something in the early days it would be answered/commented/liked by Anne and Sara and often within minutes. They also would add valuable and engaging content on a daily basis whether it was an interesting article, something funny, or just asking a question that could be answered by users and start a discussion. When you see how active both of them were it makes you feel like posting something or commenting is okay and at least going to be acknowledged and appreciated by them even if there weren't a whole lot of other users that were active. I always knew that in the early days the biggest thing was just continuing to add valuable content and eventually the engagement would follow. After a few weeks I started to see other users become more active and start liking my posts and adding their own which just continued to grow until they got to some of their big growth events like being featured in the app store or launching their daycare directory.
- boyce 9y agoWhat's your other favourite recent startup? Sounds like you have something specific in mind. Just curious
- ryanwaggoner 9y agoNot that you need my vote, but I agree with all of this. In particular: - Go true native, not hybrid - Use ads for testing ideas - Don't forget about email! I'm also intrigued by your approach of not going market-by-market like a lot of local-focused marketplaces do. Your approach seems to make sense, and obviously worked for you. I particularly like that you had a different onboarding flow for users in new markets, that's smart. But still, I'm not sure that this approach would make sense for a lot of local-focused apps? I think the fear would be that it would be relatively easy to get 100k users but they'd be spread out so thin that they'd find little utility in the app and stop using it. So you'd have 100k users in your database, but a tiny fraction of that in terms of actual active users. But maybe that doesn't even matter, since you wouldn't have had all those inactive users anyway? Could you speak to that? I'd love to hear how many of those 100k users are DAU or MAU, but understand if you can't share that :) Congrats!
- annekate 9y agoSure, of course! So this is one thing that might be unique to Winnie — local data is one of our value props (and the best one) but it's not the only one. We discovered pretty early on that even in the local communities people were asking not-local questions like "what's the best diaper?". This told us that there was some demand to be part of a parenting community, even if it wasn't giving you particularly local insights. This is one feature of Winnie that works anywhere in the world, and we do have an active cohort of users who just use us to talk and get advice from other parents. We also did something that I forgot to mention in the article that helped us grow nationally before we had a lot of proprietary data. One of the nice things about starting a company in 2017 is that there are tons of great resources available to you. Free or cheap services that solve what used to be really hard problems are readily available. One such service is Foursquare. When we launched Winnie, if you opened the app in an area where we didn't have data, instead of showing you nothing we instead showed you results from Foursquare. This was admittedly not the best experience, but it gave people affordance to still find places and write reviews. Refusing to go market-by-market also forced us to build a bunch of proprietary and very cool infrastructure that collects data at scale. One early system we built could actually figure out which restaurants had changing tables and highchairs, nationally and instantaneously, at a VERY low cost. I can't say how we did that but you'd be surprised at what's possible if you have the will and ambition :)
- dboreham 9y ago"Relying on push notifications alone" Yeah no. Apps using push notification for marketing/dark purposes is super irritating and for that reason I block notifications by default from all apps.
- annekate 9y agoFunnily enough, we also sort of failed to capitalize on push. We didn't even ask for push permissions in the first version of our app! Eventually we found the right push product for our users, but it's still the case that a lot of people have them off by default or prefer to be contacted by email.
- samschooler 9y agoYou say that, but you are in a minority. Most users just mindlessly click Allow. Its an amazing power - being able to appear on someones home screen instantly at anytime with any message - but a privilege. So having each notification be useful and actionable is key. In addition to not flooding them with too much frequency.
- miradu 9y agoThe advice to not only rely on push and native mobile hits home hard - despite it being cool - email, text, and the web still work really well to bring the customers in!
- fabianuribe 9y agoI love this kind of posts, by sharing the anecdotes of what worked and what didn't, they provide a glimpse into the inner workings and strategies for one of the biggest challenges for any startup, plus most likely will generate a considerable influx of new users from the post itself. Everybody wins.
- greggarious 9y agoYou could just use fake users like Reddit did. https://venturebeat.com/2012/06/22/reddit-fake-users/ https://venturebeat.com/2012/06/22/reddit-fake-users/
- danielskogly 9y agoThis evening we got our 171st user for our wishlist-service. When we launched it 1 year ago we tried to get it out on different channels like Reddit and HN without much success, while we _did_ see success in just talking about it to friends and family, and had just over 100 users in January this year. Since then, we've done close to zero marketing, and it's been amazing to see new signups, wishlists and items being created - seemingly out of the blue. I made a simple Slack-bot to post those events to a channel with their ID, and these are the stats from it was added late March until now: 53 new users, 74 new wishlists, and 482 new items. As we do no sort of analytics, we have no clue who these people are, but boy does it make me happy to see those "A new user was just created!"-messages nonetheless!
- annekate 9y agoYou can't get from 0 to 100k without passing through 171 first. :) Congrats and good luck!
- danielskogly 9y agoVery true! :) Thank you, and likewise - pretty sure there's more than 100k information-hungry parents out there, so wouldn't be surprised to see the "100k to 500k"-post in the not too distant future!
- quickthrower2 9y agoMaybe you can if you get multiple users sign up at once :-)
- adventured 9y agoI have a suggestion for wishy (if you're not doing this already of course). Extract out the most popular items that people are sharing (no identifying information connected, only extract out super items that you can identify well, like "Wonder Woman on blu ray"), or similarly build your own curated lists based on what's popular right now (eg a new PS4 game). Build some categories that they belong to ("video games" or "clothing"). Then enable people to quickly browse for things within those segments to add to their wish lists. It should boost wishlist item adding substantially over time and give people new ideas. You could also build a gently curated top 10 or 20 item list in a given week or month (manually reviewed for potentially inappropriate items). You can track various metrics for what's moving socially right now for a link/item to get an improved idea on what matters to provide some further ranking (eg facebook sharing acceleration or deceleration).
- mkalygin 9y agoThis is very interesting strategy. Thanks for the good article. Could you elaborate on the content-growth strategy? I'm really curious since in some business ideas I'm usually stuck with "chicken and egg" kind of problem. I believe there is no universal strategy here, but what worked for you except this special onboarding flow for users in new markets?
- annekate 9y agoIt's in the article. Provide the supply yourself (content) while you build demand (users). Do things that don't scale. One specific example is that we saw a lot of demand for information on child care, so we researched over 5000 local daycares & preschools and created very comprehensive pages for all of them. This sounds like a lot of work but it actually wasn't that bad. Once we had done that we were instantly the best place in the SF Bay Area to research daycares and find open spaces. Word spread like wildfire and we climbed the Google rankings quickly as well. Now, we no longer have to collect data manually, because the daycare providers come to us to reach their audience of customers. So it delivered growth on both sides of the network in a sustainable, ongoing fashion, and only required a one-time upfront investment in content creation.
- mkalygin 9y agoGot it. So it was mostly manual investigation and content generation at first, and then users started to add their own content. Great, thanks for the answer.
- mherdeg 9y agoCool, when do you expect to gather daycare data outside the Bay Area? I see one total daycare listed in my ZIP code (in the Boston area) and the search results page doesn't say anything like "we know this is a tiny number of listings, sign up here to be notified when we reach your area" (at https://winnie.com/search?category=childcare&near=[zip] https://winnie.com/search?category=childcare&near=[zip] ).
- annekate 9y ago
- notaboutdave 9y agoBest takeaways from the article (no particular order): - Retool ads as a way to test for and identify demand. - Bait people with truly useful content where they're already looking, and then direct them to your app. - Simple changes in wording or flow of UX can increase shares dramatically. - Get featured in app stores. How? - Integrate with latest device features being pushed - Adhere to vendor design standards - Email is still very effective, so use it. - Have 10 enthusiastic users that will spread their enthusiasm before you start. That last point is good to know, and perhaps the most important, but it's way easier said than done. Especially if you aren't a social butterfly. Also, the "don't use cross platform" preached in the article isn't very convincing. You can get excellent performance with well-coded cross-platform build tools, and in far less time.
- adventured 9y ago> Especially if you aren't a social butterfly. The best way to get those 10 enthusiastic users, without being a social butterfly (in a traditional sense), is to manufacture them through inclusion. For example, find a subreddit that is relevant to what you're doing, and sell a batch of users on being early adopters (a certain type of people love that). Then give those people credit, attention, and make them feel like their input matters and that their contribution to the thing matters. Basically, make it personal for them, cultivate that experience. For a lot of people those last few concepts can be very rewarding, they'll become your first cheerleaders (and just one of those on eg Reddit can spark something). I've observed that people who are not traditional social butterflies, can still often function at a decent social level on sites like Reddit (at least enough to do what I've described).
- annekate 9y ago^ This is good advice.
- wahnfrieden 9y agoThe point about native is that it’s more likely to win over Apple/Google editorial teams for getting featured. And getting featured is an absolutely massive growth opportunity which you can optimize for.
- amitmathew 9y ago"Grow even before you launch" and "Go big or go home" really resonate with me. We were able to sign up a few thousand people to our new product waitlist through two main channels: exhibiting at conferences and answering questions on Quora. In the past, I would have just done a small beta with friends, but I guess I'm getting a little wiser over the years :) Going big from the beginning is really a tough one. I already got burned at a previous startup by not narrowing the focus enough, but it really depends on the market and the type of product you are building. We're building a product for college students, which is a big group, so it's a toss-up whether to go after a certain category of students or go after them all. We're casting a wide net for now with the idea that our product will resonate with certain subgroups which we can focus later.
- annekate 9y agoI was an early employee of Quora and can vouch for it being a good place to do content marketing! I really love that site. The idea that you should have a small scope and narrow focus is the one very common piece of startup advice I struggle with. In my experience at Winnie, whenever we "thought small" growth would stall out. I think if your product is just better with higher numbers of users, get as many people into it as you can.
- amitmathew 9y agoYeah, it's a tough one. Like most startup advice, the right answer should be "it depends". For me, I try to gauge whether the product and customer acquisition can be generalized. If both can be, which seems to be true in your case (and hopefully mine!), I think going wide is the right choice.
- GuiA 9y agoI worked at a startup where we had a “waiting list” model - a page where you gave us your email and you’d get an invite later. The CEO thought this was a good way to build up anticipation, and make sure things were fully polished before opening the floodgates. We got a few waves of attention, which meant we had about 30k emails on the list at some point. Of course, this large number put more pressure on us to “get things perfect before we launch”, and it was over a year before the CEO decided it was time to let everyone in. But by the time we did, people had lost interest, and our conversion rate was abysmal. While a bit buggy and unpolished, the product was still very functional a year before, and had we just let people in we’d probably have gotten very valuable feedback a year early. (I left the company a long time ago, and it is now in zombie mode)
- 40acres 9y agoVery interesting perspective w.r.t going native. Does that mean you would advise to use Swift/Obj-C & Java/Kotlin as opposed to React Native?
- annekate 9y agoIf you have the choice, yes. You'll regret React for many reasons but you are so, so much less likely to be featured with a React app, even a great one. Suck it up and learn Swift/Kotlin (not that hard) and if you can get your app featured that's a cool 10-20k installs for free.
- skeet 9y agoSorry, but this is bad advice.
- yeukhon 9y agoGreat tips for an aspiring startup founder. I agree completely. In particular the “mobile-only” resonates with me well. I have seen a number of products only provides a homepage to send me to their appstore/google play. In some cases I was trying to see what job openings were available. I was suprised to see no “career” page. Hmm Did they hide that in the webconsole / developer console? Nope! So please do not do that to both your users and your potential hires. Your modern website should be mobile friendly, and if you are mobile-focus like instant messenger, that makes sense - but I recommend adding a desktop version later. I have facebook messenger, WhatsApp and Telegram installed on my Macs so (1) I don’t need to switch gears constantly, and (2) there are times I need to transfer stuff over from desktop... Partnering with people in the same pace is a great idea. For example. Reaching out to Youtubers who are parents early on, brainstorm with them, and invite them to your paid sponsorship could help in your case. At last, I am surprised you are able to register winnie.com. I would have expected it taken and if so I wonder how much it cost to buy it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Ologn 9y ago> Do the work to get featured by Apple & Google Sigh...this is one of the last things to worry about. It's like hoping your roulette number hits. Doing a lot of work is like getting a second roulette wheel number towards getting featured, but a lot of work might improve your chances of success any how. Every year that goes by, this hope becomes less and less likely as the competition grows. Also, the advice on how to get featured on Google Play is not great advice. If I wanted a higher chance of being featured in Play, I would read this web page - https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/android-8.0.html https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/android-8.... . New features of the latest Android. Then I would make an app showcasing one of the new features that Android wants to highlight. If you look at featured apps, these are what get featured a lot. Think of it from Google's POV. Actually, Oreo has been out for a bit, so someone trying for Oreo is already behind the ball. There are videos of the Google people telling you what they look for when featuring, watch those.
- AWebOfBrown 9y agoI also think it's a bit ridiculous to start advising people to "go native" because of the possibility of being featured in the app store. The cost of doing two native apps is not small at all, and I imagine (not being a mobile dev) that being featured in the App store is a LOT easier for a family friendly app like OP's than the average. I'd also assume the vast majority of native apps don't get featured. It's well-intentioned advice, but the cost-benefit analysis is nowhere near that simple.
- Caligula 9y ago"Get featured by apple/google" Honestly, its like giving financial advice and saying "Ok, win the lottery or marry someone rich"
- giarc 9y agoExcept the author gave 4 or 5 great tips on how to achieve the goal of getting featured.
- fragsworth 9y agoIt's not really like winning the lottery. There's a lot of different kinds of promotional features they can give you, with different levels of publicity. You just have to make a high quality app that does something useful or new (or a good game), and ask their editorial team if they can promote your app. They'll usually give you some kind of promotion on the store. It's "editor's choice" and the other front/center features that you might equate to "winning the lottery". And yeah, you can't expect that unless you've already made something huge.
- folli 9y agoand how do you actually contact the editorial team?
- wahnfrieden 9y agoIf you look around there are ways to reach them. The author of A Dark Room made a thorough post on this on Reddit but he’s since taken it down; maybe there’s an archive.
- annekate 9y agogo to local Mac/iOS dev meetups and ask around. they also show up at conferences and of course at WWDC.
- annekate 9y agoIt’s not a lottery. I’ve done it several times over many years with different products and companies. The advice I laid out is basically how I did that. Of course you can’t control if you are featured or not just like you can’t control if you get a writeup in a big publication. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give yourself the best chance of getting it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hrykora 9y agoHard to take anyone seriously going for women's studies at MiT. I mean how dumb can you be? Muh.My sides.
- hrykora 9y agoHard to take her seriously when she is an sjw who discriminates against men and hires women. Read her post again. She says hiring women led to less bullshit. I call this bullshit. My prediction is that company will fold within a year due to catfighting. Hard to take every dumbo seriously these days.
- hrykora 9y agoJust another dumb app that tricks users. HN should be ashamed of itself for voting this as a top story. I want my 5 min. back.
- giarc 9y agoCurious how the app "tricks users"?
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- intrasight 9y agoHow about getting 100 active users paying you $500/month each?
- wellboy 9y agoOnly possible with SaaS and a few exceptions.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sebleon 9y agoKudos - 100k MAU is an extremely impressive feat. This is an excellent post, very succinct and punchy advice. Especially interesting to hear about the role of web and email in growth, advice around using ads to develop company positioning is great.
- tmatthewj 9y agoThanks for admitting the failures you picked on the way. Since you said Mobile-only was a terrible thing to do, how did you decide Winnie has to be a mobile app and not a simple mobile responsive website in the first place? I'm really curious how product folks decide to go mobile-first, especially in many cases where the user interacts with the app once a week or less frequently. Would love to know how you decided on this with the assumptions you made.
- subirm 9y agoGreat post. We just got out of stealth and have launched a site that makes it easy for retail investors to discover market structure in real time - https://raveanalytics.com https://raveanalytics.com .We could definitely use some of the advice here to fuel our growth. Going native on the mobile and email is something we are already working on. The advice about focusing on the demand side first is really interesting too.Network effect is great but its easier said than done and really hard to get it going.
- subirm 9y agoGreat post. We just got out of stealth - https://raveanalytics.com https://raveanalytics.com .We enable retail investors to discover market structure in real time. This is good advice for us to keep up our growth. We are already working on a native experience and email.The part about the network effects is quite interesting too. Its really hard to get network effects going.Makes sense to focus on the demand side first.
- subirm 9y agoGreat post. We at Rave Analytics just got out of stealth.We enable retail investors to discover market structure in real time. This is good advice for us to keep up our growth. We are already working on a native experience and email.The part about the network effects is quite interesting too. Its really hard to get network effect
- yakshaving_jgt 9y agoWhat if your product doesn't really have any inherent network effects? How do you incentivise your paying customers to share the platform that's giving them a competitive edge (my SaaS is B2B)?
- annekate 9y agoYou could do an ambassador program of some kind (check out The Skimm, they have a great one). But I wouldn't expect people to eagerly spread the word about solutions. For B2B you should be investing in content marketing and SEO above all else. Other clever ideas are like what Slack did; make it friendly enough for a consumer to use, and then that consumer ends up advocating for the product to their organization.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- agentofoblivion 9y agoInteresting use of the word "users".
- evanspa 9y agoSorry if it's already mentioned, but I found it frustrating that I could not get to the winnie homepage (http://www.winnie.com http://www.winnie.com) from the blog. Even the "Home" nav link at the top of the blog just points to the blog's homepage.