How 22 Successful Companies Fought For Their First Customers

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How 22 Successful Companies Fought For Their First Customers

Customer acquisition stories are very enlightening because every company has a slightly different approach. Here are the stories of how 22 companies acquired and retained their first users.

Physical Traveling to Users

Tinder and Alibaba used in-person meetings to get a critical mass of users. 

Tinder went to college sororities and fraternities. Whitney Wofle spoke at sororities and had girls sign up at the end of her presentation. She then went to a fraternity and showed them the cute girls that signed up causing them to sign up too.

Jack Ma sent his salesforce to factories to let them know they could sell their goods online.

Created Their Own Content for Their Sites

Quora and Reddit had a chicken and egg problem. How do you get content if you have no users? How do you get users if you have no content on your site? 

They solved this by creating content themselves. Now each site is able to rely on others to populate content to generate traffic.

Referrals 

In April 2010 alone, Dropbox users sent 2.8 million referral invites. Dropbox also had a network effect where you needed an account to access documents. 

Social Media Pages

Lolly Wolly Doodle is a hand-made dress manufacturer. Founder Brandi Temple asked users to comment their email, size, quantity, and customizations to make a purchase on a Facebook page. She did more sales on her first day on Facebook than months on eBay.

Freemium Model

Evernote CEO, Phil Libin, noticed that the longer a user used their product, the more likely they were to pay for the product. The more data you have on Evernote, the more a person needs to use it.

For Yammer, "Any employee in a company can come to our website and sign up for Yammer, thus creating a Yammer network for his/her company. That is how we have gotten into 90,000+ companies and organizations in just over 2 years," says founder David Sacks. From there, they convert 15% of their customers to a premium option.

Content Creation

OkCupid created a content creation arm, OkTrends. OkTrends would post stats and other hot-topic issues related to dating which would catch eyes on Facebook and Twitter. From those posts, it was an easy funnel into their site.

Targeted Outreach

The founders of Etsy initially started by creating a website called getcrafty.com. While creating it, they realized there was a need for a marketplace for handmade crafts.

The founders reached out to the craft community while they were building Etsy to get feedback as they went. They were able to generate interest and had direct feedback as they built Etsy.

Using Platforms Larger than Yours

Leo Wildrich, who is a co-founder of Buffer, a social media brand management company, wrote 150 guest posts on other blogs. He didn’t have a large platform of his own, so he offered to write for free on larger platforms.  

Market Across a Variety of Channels

ASOS was able to build a following by sending magazines to promote their e-commerce brand in 2007. Print might not be as viable now, but the principle remains the same: market across multiple channels.

Test Continuously 

Founder and CEO of Nasty Gal, Sophia Amourso, would post pictures on MySpace of models in clothes to get customer reactions before selling the item on eBay. If there wasn’t a positive reaction on MySpace, then she would change the model or try a different look. She used MySpace as her test group before selling items.

Guerilla Marketing

Twitter and Foursquare both exploded at SXSW. Foursquare didn’t have a booth like other companies, so they set up a game of four square outside the convention hall that gathered thousands of people. They made sure everyone knew about their company when attendees approached.

Twitter had a tv screen that live-streamed all of the tweets that came through during the event. People could see their own tweets on a massive screen which encouraged more interaction between event-goers. 

Get Involved with Your Community

During a bus worker strike in Boston, Uber offered free rides to and from any Boston Public School. They gained massive publicity and had a positive image in their community. Their hyper-local strategy helped them rapidly expand into new cities.

Focus on One Community at a Time

Taskrabbit started with a mothers group in Boston. It was a small group, but Taskrabbit provided a valuable service to them. From there, the moms’ group spoke with other moms and it grew from there. If your product/service is that great, people will want to talk about it!

Personally Follow Up with Your Early Users

Airbnb took advice from Paul Graham to heart and “did things that didn’t scale.” They would fly to NYC every weekend and went door to door taking pictures to improve the quality of their listings. During these photography sessions, they were also able to learn what was working and what wasn’t for their first users.

Incentivize Participation

Yelp users would have a shiny “Elite” badge next to their name for the most dedicated reviewers. There were also other benefits that Elite members received like invite-only events or a first chance to get an RSVP.

Reach Out to Lost Customers

Alex Turnball, the CEO and founder of Groove, would reach out to customers who left. He was genuine with his outreach and was able to discover problems he otherwise didn’t know about. Even if customers didn’t come back immediately, this helped Groove’s reputation. 

Link to the article from Melissa Tsang.

End Note

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Have a great day,

Nick