How Do You Get Early Traction For Your Startup?

It’s hard to build a great product but sometimes finding an audience is even more difficult. Here are some tips, collection by the Product Hunt team.

Every entrepreneur at some point asks the burning question, “How do I grow my startup?” When you’re just launching your company, the idea of growing a customer base out of thin air seems quite daunting—and it certainly can be. How do you identify your target market? Where can you find them? How do you get them to sign up to learn more about your product—let alone pay for it?

Below, you’ll find sage advice from seasoned entrepreneurs on tactics they’ve used to grow their businesses. One important note: While hockey stick growth is every founder’s dream, it’s not the only (or most common) way startups grow. Figure out what sustainable growth looks like for your business as you pluck inspiration from the strategies below. Happy growing!

Do you think promoting products organically by creating value propositions is a better alternative to automated ads such as AdWords , social networks, etc. ? — Soham

You don’t have a great product if you can’t pick up traction without spending money and getting word of mouth. I do think it’s a better alternative. Sean Ellis [of GrowthHackers] gave me the challenge of growing the product without any marketing spend. I did not spend one dollar on marketing to grow GrowthHackers. It was tough, but we made it happen. — Everette Taylor, VP of Marketing @ Skurt

Best advice to early stage startups on getting those first 10-100 paying customers? — Alex Rodriguez

The first ten should be easy. If you talk to ten people that are right in your target market, four of them should want to sign up right then. (And that’s the trick: knowing exactly who your target audience is. Don’t waste your time casting a wide net. Go where you’re loved.) A sustainable 40% conversion rate is amazing. Give everything for free at first. Don’t let them worry about anything except getting their hands on your product. Then talk to them. I was a solo founder and employee for two years. I talked to everyone, whether they loved or hated the site, but I learned a lot. Do not be afraid of criticism, it is your best form of guidance. Get tough, then get going.

On getting to 100, make sure you have time to reflect at each milestone—and then, on starting to charge them. At each place, learn who your customers are, why they signed up, what’s keeping them there, and if/why they left. Basically, learn what the real value is—then lean heavy on that. Your operations structure will change at each milestone. Don’t be a runaway train. Evaluate and have a plan. — Bea Arthur, Founder & CEO @ In Your Corner

Right now it seems like most investors just focus on growth and metrics, but not all great things grow quickly. What do you say to entrepreneurs building products that take more technology to build up front? — Josh Elman

Mostly, I think “overnight successes” generally [happen] in about the thousandth day or more of existence. Everything interesting takes time. So have a view of the world you want to build, and start to figure out how to make it. Find people who believe in your vision, get them to come along with you. Raise enough money to go. Don’t grow burn too fast. But mostly: make sure you know what your north star is; why you’re doing it; what you want to build eventually. — John Lilly, Partner at Greylock & former CEO at Mozilla

What are some growth tactics early stage startup founders can implement without a large budget? — Emily Hodgins

If you are in the B2B space and need to get results, there are two tactics that yield results pretty quickly. The first is to try paid search ads. The second is to create an event where you bring together the experts in your particular product area, and get them to debate where the market is going. Use this event as a hook to talk to prospects and invite them to the event to start building a relationship with them.

I also often tell B2B startups to do outbound cold calling, the way that a sales development rep would do it. You’re probably surprised with this answer given that I am all about inbound marketing, and this is very much outbound. The reason why I don’t put inbound content marketing first is because it typically takes time to ramp up, and as an early stage startup, you need results fast. Using the event I described above gives you a great reason to call them where you are offering them value, as opposed to selling (which they hate). You might have seen somewhere that I like to treat customers like a bank account: you have to deposit money before you can expect to be able to draw it out. —David Skok, General Partner @ Matrix Partners

When building something, how do we balance between what we feel strongly about and getting users to validate it? — Rajesh Agarwal

I have no fucking idea, but if you ignore users/customers and focus on your own gut instinct, you better goddamn be right. Most people are not Steve Jobs…and even Steve Jobs wasn’t Steve Jobs all the time. Watch customer behavior. Test all the fucking time. Keep iterating based on real-world data, not in your own fucking head. Your intuition will be 1000x better if you test it against the real world and users/customers. —Dave McClure, Founder of 500 Startups

What made you decide to go full-time on the ConvertKit business at a time when your teaching/publishing business was going so well? How did that change the trajectory of the company? — Barrett Brooks

It was a conversation with Hiten Shah. He told me to admit that ConvertKit was a failure and shut it down…or to take it seriously and give it the time, money and attention it deserves and build it into a real business.

This was our revenue the first 20 months:

And below you can see what happened after I invested in ConvertKit and started working on it full-time. —Nathan Barry, Founder @ ConvertKit

You’ve had growth that the large majority of funded startups would kill to have. What have been the biggest struggles both on the product and the business side with having growth skyrocket? — Josh Pigford

Since I don’t have any experience scaling a team, that was definitely a huge challenge. So far the biggest challenge has been managing cashflow and the amount of cash in the bank. Since we’re totally self-funded (just $55,000) and growing quickly, I’m reinvesting everything in supporting that growth. So most months we just post a profit of a couple thousand dollars.

That means that our cash balance — though it grows every month — is constantly shrinking in relation to our monthly expenses. So it’s been very hard to stay disciplined with expenses and keep saving money. At some point in the future we may raise a funding round to solve this problem, but not right now. —Nathan Barry, Founder @ ConvertKit

Can you walk us through how you grew the community from the first few users to the first thousand at Twitch? — Sydney Liu

We were fortunate enough at Twitch to have a running start, because there was already an organic gaming community from Justin.tv that we could tap into. You can’t make communities. The right metaphor is planting a forest. At most, you try to make sure the conditions are right and plant the right set of initial trees, but after that your control is limited to altering the parameters of the environment to the degree that’s even possible.

The root of community is the same as communication, and that’s not an accident. Communities will form anywhere that people regularly communicate with each other. So to grow a community, find some way to help people connect and talk with each other. After that, there’s not much more you can do except deal with the occasional weevil infestation. —Emmett Shear, CEO @ Twitch

How did you grow Alfred’s costumer base in the first few months? — Cornelius S. Hager

In the first few months, we grew our customer base with dozens of experiments: offline postcards under people’s doors, talking to people in Starbucks, reaching out to people on Craigslist and Facebook. [We did] anything that would teach us something about the need people had and the things that got them to make the very considered purchase of asking for help. Over time, your product is your best marketing. Your execution is your best sales channel. Word of mouth is how great products and services grow. — Marcela Sapone, Co-founder & CEO, HelloAlfred

When you start any sort of growth hacking for new businesses, do you have a framework that you work with? — Jay X. R. Liu

For products that have found product/market fit, I focus on finding feedback loops. How does one group of people end up “generating” the next set of users? Sometimes that’s an SEO loop (e.g. discover content, some % make content, that gets indexed, more people find it). [Other times it’s] viral (e.g. get invited, then invite others). You can optimize these loops over time. — Andrew Chen, Supply Growth @ Uber

How did you steer conversations related to monetization in the early stages? Was user growth your initial priority? — Vinay Mimani

If you’re pitching your startup you have to show some kind of hockey stick growth curve, right? You have two options: (1) growth and (2) revenue. If you’re [focusing on] revenue, you have to be wary that people don’t price you at a multiple of your revenue when you’re still small. If you’re [focusing] on growth you better be exponential, which was our case — whew. If you have both, you win. —Alex Chung, Founder & CEO, Giphy

What are some underrated channels to use right now to promote your product? — Juraj Pal

When you’re first starting out, you should use all the channels that the big guys can’t use because they are focused on scale. So mailing lists, forums, online communities, offline gatherings, etc. Those are all great. Then you prove out the product and over time, scale your product into bigger channels. — Andrew Chen, Supply Growth @ Uber

What’s the most surprising thing you learned when researching and writing Traction? What’s the best thing you implemented in growing DuckDuckGo? — Chris Kay

That all 19 channels have been used by all types of companies in all phases of growth, and often the most under-utilized channels for a given industry are the best candidates. As a result, creative brainstorming across all of these channels is an essential step in getting Traction (including in the Bullseye framework we propose).

At DuckDuckGo, we’ve run this framework and switched channels a number of times — including at different times focusing on SEO, content marketing, social ads, publicity, and business development. Probably the best thing (at the time) was doing our micro-sites like http://donttrack.us. The runner-up [tactic] was being one of the first advertisers on reddit’s ad platform, which when it started had, like, 7% CTR! That’s what I mean by using under-utilized channels and channel strategies. — Gabriel Weinberg, Founder & CEO @ DuckDuckGo + Co-author of Traction

We hope you found some useful tips and tricks from the incredible entrepreneurs above. If you want to join a future LIVE Chat, you can find the full schedule here.