[Simply Business] Getting Your Startup to its First Million Users

I'm truly amazed with how 30 million people can be drawn to Instagram or 50 million to Draw Something, not to mention 800+ million users on Facebook. It's really interesting to see them grow, but what interests me more is how they can get their first million users. How did they do that? Of course the next obvious question is how you can implement their strategy to your own startup?

Rama wrote a great piece about this topic as well yesterday, he suggested that we go directly to phone manufacturers and telcos. If you're in a content or mobile app business then this is totally true. But it may not work if you're in e-commerce like me. I myself prefer a more simple and direct approach, so here are the top three ways that I learned from my  research.

Media & Celebrity Endorsement

Get some love from the media and celebrities. People are suckers for celebrities. Remember the Bieber effect on Instagram? Yeah that was awesome. Twitter also went mainstream when celebrities started using it. If you know any local celebrities then talk them into using and promoting your product. Danny Oei did exactly this with MindTalk by hiring Giring from the band Nidji as an endorser. Berniaga.com did the same (and with Nidji as well!). I would definitely prefer Sandra Dewi or Chantal Della Concetta but maybe that's just me.

Media also plays a big role in getting your first initial traction. You can do a big press conference in Kempinski Hotel and invite members of the press like from Kompas or Tempo, or you can win awards and pitching events. There's an abundanceofcompetitionsforstartups to participate in and I suggest you join everything, and win everything if you can.

Do press releases. Write engaging and story-worthy press release to send to the media. Sending press releases is free, just make sure you make it worth their while. Media needs a good story to tell so don't just send them your company profile. Be polite and tell them how your startup can/already change the world, or you want to beat an infamous startup or you are supported by famous people. Write something that people actually want to read.

Although it won't last, it's a good chance to get the word out there. If your product is good, people will stick with you.

Steal users from your competitors

Chance are there's another company that does something similar to you or have an abundance of users that you're targeting. Search for it and steal their users.

When I started gantibaju.com, the first thing I did was find as many Indonesian as possible on threadless.com and devianart.com. We got our first 1,000 users from those two places alone.

Go to where the crowd is. Don't create a new community, find existing ones and complement their goals so that they can help you reach yours.

Advertising

This is the most obvious choice but gets forgotten quite a lot. You can't always get everything for free you know, but you can get it for cheap. You can start investing in ads for cheap. Use Google and Facebook ads and determine your own budget. Those two are great for targeting specific users but will prove to be quite expensive if you're targeting too many points of interests.

Learn how to use it, experiment and adapt fast. The analytics are really useful and the result is instant. I spent my first cheap ad on Facebook for about $20 for a day and got 10,653 reach with 768 clicks and a total of Rp. 910,000 worth of transaction. I doubled it the next day and it pretty much doubled the transaction value as well. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys but at least it's predictable so it's relatively easy to plan and easy to stop when you don't have the budget.

If you got the money you can try TV commercials. Yahoo! Koprol did it with the Purple Door campaign and their membership skyrocketed from about 70 thousand to more than 1,5 million users. Tokobagus.com and Berniaga.com also have TV commercials. Remco Lupker, one of the directors of Tokobagus.com said it was worth it and they're already making their third campaign. Tokobagus.com burns a lot more than $500,000 for its TV campaigns so you better prepare your greens.

Now, you can try to mix and match the methods above to your liking but don't forget the most important thing: You need to actually have a great product! No matter how much promotion you do, it's not going to get a hundred thousand users, let alone a million. In a recent conversation with Aulia Masna, this is what he said to me;

I don't know how many members picplz has but I'm sure it's nowhere near Instagram even though it has been around for much longer and available on both Android and iOS. Path launched on iOS not long after Instagram but it got buried under the Instagram hype thanks to people already loving Instagram way too much at a very early stage.

So, What's your strategy on getting your first million users?

Aria Rajasa is the CEO of gantibaju.com, a clothing startup not dissimilar to Threadless but with a touch of Indonesia and a very strong design community. His passion in entrepreneurship has gotten him to start a number of companies since leaving university.