Abraham Shafi's Blog, How we got 18,000 beta users in 4 weeks

How we got 18,000 beta users in 4 weeks

We got 18,000 users in our 4-week private beta by emailing relevant bloggers demo codes for their readers. In a Hacker News thread about getting users there were some recommendations to start your own blog and build an audience. That sounds hard. It’s much easier to just borrow other peoples’ audiences when you need them.

Find small blogs (10k-50k subscribers) relevant to your market and offer them 100-1000 signups with a custom-branded demo code. The blogger likes getting an exclusive for her readers, and the readers like getting insider access to a hot new tool. Contact a bunch of them at once, we felt lucky to have a roughly 20% hit rate.

To find these blogs you can try looking for stuff via Google blog search, although it frequently returns a lot of spam sites. We found searching delicious tags was a better way since it’s got more of a human filter around it.

The best way to find blogs is to give personal demo codes to people who missed out on a blog code in exchange for a list of blogs they read. This demo code application form can also get you a wealth of other market information if you ask more questions. It was on a form like this that our users told us what our premium/pay features should be.

Keep track of the contacts at the blogs that post your demo codes. When you launch, email them again and they’ll cover you once more. This also results in a burst of coverage around launch so you seem to be everywhere.

October 26, 2009

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