Last night I made a quick post on Hacker News, asking the following question:

I am curious: what are your biggest PR/Marketing problems as a startup? Is it getting noticed? Getting coverage? Differentiation? What problems are startups having when it comes to marketing?

Looking through the comments I saw the following:

1 point by vaksel 10 hours ago | link
The chicken and the egg is probably the biggest problem. The new users don’t want to join/buy because you lack content/users/reputation etc

Followed by:

1 point by josefresco 5 hours ago | link
Tell me about it, my social site relies on heavy user participation (in fact requires it) to be useful to other users. And unlike Digg, my content is worthless 24 hours later meaning I can’t ‘seed’ the site with my own content effectively.

The Chicken And The Egg

When it comes to sites that are heavily dependent on user generated content, one problem stands out: They need to acquire users that will participate on their site, but users won’t sign up unless there are enough users there already. It happens all the time. Over on blogstring, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written some equivalent of the following statement:

“This site/service looks great and has some really interesting features, but until there are a lot of people there, I won’t really be able to get the most out of it.”

Think of any online service you use. How useful would facebook be if none of your friends were on it? How useful would twitter be if there were only a handful of users? All of the social services we use would be worthless if no one was using them.

And the problem isn’t easy to solve. It’s circular: You can’t get new users because there aren’t users there already. People don’t want to go into an empty restaurant, and the same goes for online services. The perceived utility of a web app is directly proportional to the amount of people already using it. So, how do you get new users so you can get new users?

How To Get Users So You Can Get More Users

So, again, I want to preface this list by saying that this is in no way exhaustive, and is just a jumping off point. Some of these items will be of the “duh” variety, but following these steps will be a good start.

1. The Friends And Family Round- Since this is the first item in the list, let’s assume you have no members whatsoever. In my article, “Promoting Your Startup- It’s All About Timing“, I talked about using your friends and family as your first group of users. From that post:
   “Friends and family- It’s a hell of a lot easier to apologize to your uncle Frank when a feature fails than a complete stranger that feels like they’re wasting their time when there’s a hiccup. I always like to email all of my friends and family and set their expectations, letting them know this is a project I’m working on that isn’t quite ready for the world yet. I tell them there are going to be problems, so please let me know when something isn’t quite right. Your friends and family are much more apt to take the time to beta test what you’re working on, and they’ll tell you when something is busted.”
2. Make It Easy To Sign Up- You live and die by your registration form. Trust me on this one. Make it absolutely idiot proof for a new user to sign up. There are several ways to accomplish this. I’ve seen some registrations that just require a username, password and email address, then once those are submitted, ask you more questions. In my experience, users are much more likely to sign up when just asked for 3 pieces of info compared to having a long, complicated, exhaustive form with 25 fields. Even if your service depends on having lots of information on each user, I’d recommend sacrificing the volume of data at the very beginning in order to get the user to initially register.Once they’re a member and you have their email address, you have a point of contact to get them to come back. You can always email the user saying “thanks so much for signing up a week ago. We’ve noticed that you haven’t been back since signing up. Was it something we said? If you have any questions at all about our service, feel free to contact us at ______”. It’s much better to have a registered user with a communication channel than no user at all because your form is far too long.
3. Contribute Content Yourself- Everyone knows Tom from myspace because he’s the default friend. Imagine what it would be like to be Tom when he was one of, say, 10 people on myspace. I’m guessing he spent all his time actually using the service himself. If you’re the first and only member of your new whatever, use it. Use it to create content often. If you’re expecting thousands (or millions) of users to sign up and use what you’ve built, you’d better use it yourself. Let’s say you have a social news site. Well, get out there and submit stories yourself, vote on them, etc. Set an example for other users.
4. SEO and Clear Copy- Make sure your site is as easy to find as possible. Make your content and your calls to action crystal clear, and lead with the benefit users will get. Though SEO will not solve all your problems, it will definitely hurt you if you ignore it. For instance, how many people find twitter through a google search of “microblog” or “short messaging”? My guess is very few. But on the other hand, not having copy related to the category of service you offer will put you out of the game.Having clear, concise copy that lets users know a) what you’re offering b) why they should care c) how the can sign up is really the core of what your copy should address. I’m beating a dead horse with all the twitter examples, but look at what they have on the home page:

   Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

   Look at that. Now that’s boiled down copy. We’re talking about a microblogging platform that can be used on multiple devices. Twitter is not a simple thing to understand, but the copy sure is.

5. Automatically Invite- I don’t really like this one, but for the purpose of this post, I should at least touch on it. You know how when you add an app on facebook, you inevitably get the “Add Friends” screen? That’s what I’m talking about here. A lot of services will automatically bring up a screen allowing you to invite your friends to join. Whether on facebook or through importing contacts from your email provider, this is one way to increase the referral conversion rate. I’m not a big fan because it’s annoying to the user, and if done incorrectly, the user could “spam” all of their contacts asking them to join inadvertently. That does not equal happy users.
6. Have Viral Hooks- Andrew Chen has an awesome post entitled “What’s Your Viral Loop?” where he talks about “the steps a user goes through between entering the site and inviting the next set of new users”. In one example, Andrew talks about Slide.com. Users findout about Slide.com when they see a widget embedded in someone’s myspace page. If they like it, they can just click on the widget itself and sign up for an account. After you’ve created an account, you can also click to post a bulletin to all of your myspace friends letting them know you’ve added the widget.This is great in multiple ways. First, by having an embeddable widget that can be placed on a myspace/facebook profile, you’ve created something that can be seen by a large population. Second, because the widget links to your signup page, every user that sees it is one click away from signing up for your service. Third, every time someone embeds your widget, you’ll have another link to your site, thus, giving you more google juice. The more incoming links, the higher your page rank. The higher your page rank, the higher your position in search results.
7. Give Credit For Users That Invite- This one is really dependent on the kind of service you offer. If you have a service that involves limiting the amount of x that users can access, it can work. For instance, there’s a service I’ve seen called jigsaw, which is a directory of business professionals. The idea is that jigsaw has contact info for hard-to-reach people. When you sign up, you get a few credits, which you spend to get contact information. If you enter contact info for someone that isn’t in the system already, you earn credits.This kind of credit system can also work to entice members to invite their friends. Tell them that if they invite a friend who then signs up, they’ll get one credit. Invite ten, get ten. You get the idea. Find a reward mechanism that will motivate users to invite others to join
8. Target Specific Groups- SpringPad is a great example of how a startups is targeting specific groups to get people to sign up to use their web app. SpringPad is an online notebook that keeps track of to-dos, contacts, appointments, etc. It’s a fairly general tool, but instead of just trying to appeal to everyone, springpad took a different approach: They looked at different target groups and created content and landing pages for each group, and a directory of content specific to each category.For instance, springpad looked at pregnant women as a group that would benefit from an online notebook. They then created a Family & Parenting section of SpringAdvice that contains useful, targeted content. At the end of each post, they have a “Use It” link, which launches the springpad application if a user is logged in, or a signup form for users that are not.

   No matter what you’re offering, I’d bet you can think of different groups of users that could benefit from what you’re offering. For instance, think of twitter. You could think that twitter would be useful for conference attendees. In that case, if you were twitter, you could write blog posts with useful information for attendees of specific conferences with links to sign up for your service.

9. Find Complainers- This one piggybacks nicely with #8. If your service solves a problem people have, then fire up google and find people complaining about what your app solves. Think about it: people love to complain online. It’s in our nature. Go out and find people that are complaining about something you can help and let them know you have the solution.Usually these complainers hang out in forums and blogs, so be careful not to sound like a spammer when you reach out to them. Let them know you have something that might help, and tell them that you’d be happy to answer any questions they may have.
10. Run A Contest- Sure, this one might be cheating, but it can work. If you have the ability to give something of value away, go for it. Run a weekly contest where you give away something to one of your users. Use the credit system and give people one credit for signing up, one for every friend they get to sign up, and for predefined goals (uploading a video, etc). Sure, you’re baiting them to sign up with a prize, but you’re also getting them to try out your features in order to gain additional chances to win. For more information on using a contest to promote a user acquisition campaign, see my post “Using Social Media Tools To Promote A User Acquisition Campaign“.

Well, that’s a good start. I hope you find something on this list useful, and I wish you all the best in getting new users to sign up for your service.

Tagged as: startup marketing, user acquisition