How to get your first 100k active users

Not that you need my vote, but I agree with all of this. In particular:<p>- Go true native, not hybrid<p>- Use ads for testing ideas<p>- Don&#x27;t forget about email!<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;s smart.<p>But still, I&#x27;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&#x27;d be spread out so thin that they&#x27;d find little utility in the app and stop using it. So you&#x27;d have 100k users in your database, but a tiny fraction of that in terms of actual active users. But maybe that doesn&#x27;t even matter, since you wouldn&#x27;t have had all those inactive users anyway?<p>Could you speak to that? I&#x27;d love to hear how many of those 100k users are DAU or MAU, but understand if you can&#x27;t share that :)<p>Congrats!

&quot;Grow even before you launch&quot; and &quot;Go big or go home&quot; really resonate with me.<p>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&#x27;m getting a little wiser over the years :)<p>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&#x27;re building a product for college students, which is a big group, so it&#x27;s a toss-up whether to go after a certain category of students or go after them all. We&#x27;re casting a wide net for now with the idea that our product will resonate with certain subgroups which we can focus later.

This 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.<p>Since then, we&#x27;ve done close to zero marketing, and it&#x27;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.<p>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 &quot;A new user was just created!&quot;-messages nonetheless!

Best takeaways from the article (no particular order):<p><pre><code> - Retool ads as a way to test for and identify demand. - Bait people with truly useful content where they&#x27;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. </code></pre> That last point is good to know, and perhaps the most important, but it&#x27;s way easier said than done. Especially if you aren&#x27;t a social butterfly.<p>Also, the &quot;don&#x27;t use cross platform&quot; preached in the article isn&#x27;t very convincing. You can get excellent performance with well-coded cross-platform build tools, and in far less time.

&quot;Get featured by apple&#x2F;google&quot;<p>Honestly, its like giving financial advice and saying &quot;Ok, win the lottery or marry someone rich&quot;

BTW, I&#x27;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&#x27;s my superpower!

&quot;Relying on push notifications alone&quot;<p>Yeah no. Apps using push notification for marketing&#x2F;dark purposes is super irritating and for that reason I block notifications by default from all apps.

Sorry if it&#x27;s already mentioned, but I found it frustrating that I could not get to the winnie homepage (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.winnie.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.winnie.com</a>) from the blog. Even the &quot;Home&quot; nav link at the top of the blog just points to the blog&#x27;s homepage.

&gt; Do the work to get featured by Apple &amp; Google<p>Sigh...this is one of the last things to worry about. It&#x27;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.<p>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 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;versions&#x2F;oreo&#x2F;android-8.0.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;versions&#x2F;oreo&#x2F;android-8....</a> . 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&#x27;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.

Great tips for an aspiring startup founder. I agree completely.<p>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&#x2F;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 &#x2F; developer console? Nope!<p>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...<p>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.<p>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.

I love this kind of posts, by sharing the anecdotes of what worked and what didn&#x27;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.

Kudos - 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.

You could just use fake users like Reddit did.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;06&#x2F;22&#x2F;reddit-fake-users&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;06&#x2F;22&#x2F;reddit-fake-users&#x2F;</a>

Thanks 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?<p>I&#x27;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.

This is very interesting strategy. Thanks for the good article.<p>Could you elaborate on the content-growth strategy? I&#x27;m really curious since in some business ideas I&#x27;m usually stuck with &quot;chicken and egg&quot; 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?

What if your product doesn&#x27;t really have any inherent network effects? How do you incentivise your paying customers to share the platform that&#x27;s giving them a competitive edge (my SaaS is B2B)?

The 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!

Very interesting perspective w.r.t going native. Does that mean you would advise to use Swift&#x2F;Obj-C &amp; Java&#x2F;Kotlin as opposed to React Native?

Great 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

How about getting 100 active users paying you $500&#x2F;month each?

Interesting use of the word &quot;users&quot;.

Great post. We just got out of stealth - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raveanalytics.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raveanalytics.com</a> .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.

Great 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 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raveanalytics.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raveanalytics.com</a> .We could definitely use some of the advice here to fuel our growth.<p>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.