Building a User Acquisition Machine: Finding Early Customer Acquisition on a Minimum Budget

Building A User Acquisition Machine
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Table of Contents
3 Stages of a Startup
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Startup Economics Simplified
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Finding a Problem/Solution Fit
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Finding a Product/Market Fit
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Early Customer Acquisition on a Minimum Budget
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10
Startup Marketing Funnel

Growth Hacking
Case Studies: 12 Examples of Successful Growth Hacks
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11
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12
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15
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16
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17
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Press
Viral Marketing
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
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18
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19
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21
More User Acquisition Strategies

References
3 Stages of Startup
The standard way of beginning a startup involves (1) being blessed with an awesome idea, (2) writing a business plan and (3) executing the business plan step-by-step. The statistics show
that 99% of startups fail. The reason? Not enough customers. The problem with the traditional model is that unlike small business, startups are designed for fast growth and they usually
start with an innovative product, business model or market. These contain many variables, therefore it is impossible to predict the right approach to user acquisition without seeking
constant feedback and involving users in the process from the beginning.
The statistics show that over 65% of startups end up changing their business plans on the go. The reason is simple. Before you enter the market, your assumptions are merely a guesstimate
if not outright fantasies. You will have limited time to break even or gain sufficient growth in order to get to the next round of financing once you start. Therefore betting all your money, your
entire career and all of your time on one strategy may not be the wisest choice, especially considering the 99% fail rate in the startup industry. Seeking validation and market feedback
needs to be done as soon as possible to alleviate the risk involved with your strategy. This whitepaper is divided in 3 parts, the third of them, user acquisition, being the most extensive.
Customer Discovery
Customer Development
User Acquisition
A startup starts with an idea. Usually the idea is a solution to

some problem or some kind of improvement of the status
quo. In the customer discovery process your goal is to find
out if this problem has a market and that it is a problem/
improvement that is monetizable i.e. big enough that
customers are willing to pay for it.
In the customer development process, you are trying to sell

the product and validate whether customers will buy and
use it and also whether the economics of your startup even
work. i.e How much does it cost to acquire users and will it
ever become profitable?
At this point, you already know you have a product users

will buy and a business model that can be scaled. This is the
stage where startups should start spending money and
effort on marketing. This is important because it can save
you a lot of money and time selling something users either
dont want or some that doesnt quite work on the
important financial front.
At the end of the process you should achieve a Problem/

Solution Fit and build up your prototype.
After this process you should end up with a Product/Market

Fit and only after you have achieved this, should you start
scaling your startup.
Customer Discovery
Customer Development
Problem/Solution
Fit
Product/Market
Fit
User Acquisition
Scale
1.
Economics Simplified
Conserve Cash
Invest Aggressively
Searching For Problem/Solution Fit
Searching For Product/Market Fit
Scale/User Acquisition
You Have Identified Your Repeatable & Scalable Business Model
Your cost to acquire a customer (CAC) is significantly less than the amount of revenue they can generate in
their lifetime (LTV). A serial entrepreneur and a VC David Skok, recommends the LTV to be at least 3x the
CAC, and the CAC to be recoverable within 12 months.
You can keep increasing your sources of leads/traffic without reaching a limit.
You can keep repeating your process without losing productivity.
2.
1. Problem/Solution Fit
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
Henry Ford
Finding a Problem/Solution Fit

Henry Ford already found his solution/product fit when he started his first car factory. He knew people wanted faster horses or in other words they wanted a faster means of personal
transport. He didnt ask them how to build it but he knew they would pay for it.
At this stage your goal is to find out if the product is worth building, before you start investing money and time into building it. At the end of the process you should have your initial
prototype, or at least a definition of it, to get started. This process is about getting out of the building and talking to potential users about their problems in the market area your product is
targeting. Just like Henry Ford, you are not interested in learning how to build it but whether it makes sense to build it (do people need a faster means of transport and will they pay for it).
If you are concerned about somebody stealing your idea read this great blog post by serial entrepreneur and a VC Chris Dixon, before you start.
How To Interview Customers
How to Reach Potential Customers
In the very early stage you want to start with talking to your potential customers. Before
you start you should have a hypothesis that you want to validate formed. For example
Customers are fed up with Facebook and Google stealing their data, they want more
control over their data on the public web
Starbucks test: Go to Starbucks, pick a random person, tell them your brother has a
business idea and offer to pay for their coffee if they are willing to provide honest
feedback.
AdWords campaign: Google offers a free $150 Adwords credit. You can create a
landing page describing your solution, add an email signup form and use the credit to
drive traffic to it. Depending on how many users you manage to capture you can ask
them to fill out a survey via email. Launchrock will provide you with a free landing page.
Beta signup page: Once you've created your beta signup page, you can also distribute
it using early adopter platforms such as Betali.st and its alternatives.
Join meetups and talk to people: Find relevant meetups, events or conferences in your
area, join them and talk to people. meetups.com is a great place to start.
Direct emailing: Tony Hsieh (and many others) got his first 30 customers through direct
emailing and later sold his company for $265 million to Microsoft. Use websites like
Quora or Linkedin to find relevant people.
Get 30 minutes with the most successful entrepreneur you know: Alternatively you can
use ohours to get a meeting with experienced people in your area. Another solution is
clarity.fm that allows you to talk to top entrepreneurs for about $85.
Forums: Relevant forums and websites such as Reddit, Hacker News or LinkedIn groups
can be a good place to reach out to early adopters for valuable feedback.
One very good article on this topic sums up the interviewing rules as follows:
Don't just talk about your idea. Talk about the customers pain/problems.
Do not ask about the future. E.g we built X would you use it?
!
The following five questions should provide you with enough insight to form the
conclusion.
1. Whats the hardest part about [problem context] ?
2. Can you tell me about the last time that happened?
3. Why was that hard?
4. What, if anything, have you done to solve that problem?
5. What dont you love about the solutions youve tried?
!
Aside from customer interviews you can conduct a variety of tests online and offline. If
your test involves direct emailing, a 50% response is considered to be a pass. If it involves
a landing page a 10% conversion rate should be an absolute minimum.
Before you start remove personal bias.
Helpful Links:
Steve Blank: Customer Development is Not a Focus Group
Quora: What is Your Favourite Method for Doing Problem Interviews
4.
2. Product/Market Fit
They can't always tell you what they want, but they can always tell you what's wrong.
Bill Gates
Finding a Product/Market Fit

Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market, according to Marc Andreessen, to whom the term is often attributed. He compares this to a
startups team and product: the best team with the best product will fail if the market is not there (using product and service interchangeably). He says its the only thing that matters and
that companies should strive obsessively to achieve it until they do.
Statistically 70% of startups fail because of premature scaling, making it the number 1 reason why startups fail. According to Sean Ellis who advised over 100 startups, premature scaling is
frustrating, expensive and unsustainable killing many startups with otherwise strong potential. Finding a Product/Market Fit is a pre-scale process, ensuring you are wont be in that 70%.
How To Get There
Identifying a Repeatable, Scalable Sales Model
At this point you have a prototype with some initial users gained from the previous stage
and you are already acquiring more using some of the low cost marketing techniques (see
next page). You should keep your burn rate as low as possible and keep collecting data in
order to improve your model until you achieve a product/market fit.
According to David Skok youve found a repeatable and scalable sales model when:
How To Measure a Product/Market Fit

According to Sean Ellis the achievement of product/market fit can be measured according
to a specific metric: when, in a survey, at least 40% of users say they would be very
disappointed without your product or service. He determined this 40% benchmark by
comparing results across 100s startups. The key question was:
How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?
1. Very disappointed
2. Somewhat disappointed
3. Not disappointed (it isnt really that useful)
4. N/A I no longer use [product]
1. The process you go through to acquire a paying customer is clearly repeatable.
If your process involves salespeople, you can add new hires and they can achieve the
same productivity level as the original sales team.
If its a touchless web sales model, your web traffic converts in a predictable way
through your web site.
2. The process is scalable.
You can increase the sources of your leads and/or web traffic without reaching a nearterm limit.
The resources (e.g. salespeople) in your conversion funnel can easily be scaled without
reaching a near-term limit.
3. Your cost to acquire a customer (CAC) is significantly less than the amount you can
monetize them over the customers lifetime.
In a SaaS business, I recommend that lifetime value (LTV) should be more than three
times higher than CAC.
It should also be possible to recover CAC in less than 12 months for a capital-efficient
startup.
LTV should be calculated using gross profit (not revenue) after cost of goods, cost to
serve and cost of on-boarding.
Ellis recommends sending the survey to a random sample of people who have:
Experienced the core of your product offering
Used your product at least twice
Used your product in the last two weeks
For more details you can read about the whole process in the original Venture Hacks
article by Hiten Shah and Sean Ellis.
Helpful Links:
Ash Maurya: 10 Steps To Product Market Fit
6.

$0 Marketing Budget Strategy
More User Acquisition Tips for Early Stage Startup
The following list is a great example of some of the $0 budget techniques that were
originally used by Noah Kagan who scaled Mint to over a million users in 6 months and
Appsumo to 500,000 in 1 year.
Email users who signed up on your landing page in the early stage and invite them to join
Get listed in as many startup directories as possible
Offering A-lister tech commentators like Robert Scoble early access / in-person demos
Pitch startup news outlets like TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, Mashable, etc.
Pitch local news outlets ("Local Entrepreneurs Tackle a Big Problem")
Reddit advertising (read why), Facebook interest-targeted PPC and StumbleUpon

advertising (all relatively cheap)
Setup Google alerts, Twitter saved searches, and other monitoring tools for people asking
questions about the type of service you provide.
6. Go to the r/subreddit (page on Reddit) related to your business and leave comments
Create controversy related to an industry topic.
7. Search 5-10 keywords related to you on Google and leave comments on those related
pages (dont be spammy, offer valuable response, advice etc. )
Get double-sided business cards. One side with your contact info, the other side with 3
bullets (max), or a simple tagline that pitches your product succinctly.
8. Give away free content or ask partners for freebies
Pitch a demo at a tech show
9. Write guest posts for any site that is related. Use Technorati or ask your existing
customers which sites they like to go to.
Leverage your first customers / users as much as possible. Ask for referrals, incentivize
them to invite others, show them off for social proof, etc.
10. Email the existing users you have asking for them to refer other people. This sounds
obvious but hardly ANYONE does it. It helps if your product doesn't suck ass.
Get featured on Craigslist , niche classifieds and ecommerce sites that compete with
Craigslist.
11. Leave video responses on popular-related YouTube videos
Monitor competitors for controversy / unpopular changes. Become the leading source of
news about that topic. Offer incentives for people to switch.
Partner/Piggyback on big platforms, for example Trulia made a partnership with CNN
Money to power their real estate search. Instagram built a cross-posting feature
leveraging Facebook and Twitter.
1. Create your target marketing sheet.

2. Manually reach out and connect with your first 1000 customers. It is likely that they are
MORE important than the next 99,000 people you'll get.
3. Partner with similar companies and create benefits for them to email their free users
4. Reach out to Meetup groups who generally have 200-1,000 person mailing lists
5. Befriend owners of Facebook pages and see if you can do contests for an in-kind trade
12. Raise your prices so you don't need to get so many people :)
13. Manually reach out to Twitter / Facebook followers of your competitors
14. Look at new channels that have less competition (rules) like snapchat, Pinterest,
Instagram to drive traffic
15. Consider international channels where traffic is cheaper
16. Evaluate doing mobile related marketing - its more affordable (less competition)
17. Get your product featured on promoting sites like AppSumo, Groupon, DailyWorth,
Thrillist, DailyCandy etc.
7.
3. Scale/User Acquisition
We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things.
Herb Kelleher

One of the mistakes first-time entrepreneurs often make is to assume that visitors on their website are ready to buy their product or service right away. But in reality, the average visitor to
your website isnt ready to make a buying decision yet. In order to grow a successful business, you need to understand the concept of the funnel and the stages that fall between
casual website visitor and revenue.
The left side defines the metric and the right side names some of the marketing strategies applicable to each of the stages.
People come to your homepage or other landing

pages from various channels.
channels, from press to blogs
to search engine traffic to word of mouth.
People have a happy first experience while on your site,

usually culminating in some action like the creation of an
account or giving you their email address for more
information.
People become active users of your product,
coming back to use it multiple times and staying
engaged each time.
People share your product with their friends, who

then have to be activated, retained, etc.
You monetize people using your product, either

through advertising, sales, subscriptions etc.
Helpful Links:
Acquisition / Traffic
Advertising, SEO/SEM, Social

Media, Content Marketing, PR
Activation / Leads
Signup Forms, Newsletters,

Sweepstakes, Social Widgets
Retention / Qualified Leads
Email Marketing, Retargeting
Referral
Viral Marketing, Growth Hacking
Revenue
Conversion Rate Optimization
Dave McClure: Startup Metrics For Pirates, Ash Maurya: 3 Rules To Actionable Metrics, Traffic Sources, Conversion Rates, Anatomy of Launching Fab.com
9.
Growth Hacking
A traditional marketing plan has a very broad focus, and while the discipline itself is very important, as such it is not directly applicable in early stage startup. In the first phase of a startup
you dont need someone to build and manage a marketing team or manage outside vendors or even establish a strategic marketing plan to achieve corporate objectives or many of
the other things that marketers are tasked with doing. Early in a startup you need one thing. Growth.
Growth hacking is a relatively new term and it is controversial as a discipline. However is is also a philosophy or a mindset important for startups to follow when executing their user
acquisition strategies.
Growth Hacking Explained
Why Growth Hacking?
More than marketing: Growth hacking can be best described as a cross discipline
between data analysis, marketing and product management, with a narrow focus on
growth.
Creativity: A person with a growth hacker mindset finds non-traditional ways to drive
growth. This goes beyond creative forms of ads, it can be a feature of a product or
finding a new channel for reaching out to customers. A good example of a growth hack
is an Instagram cross-posting to Facebook and Twitter, which allowed Instagram to
leverage the large audience of these platforms.
Critical thinking: As a growth hacker you dont just assume something will be a good
growth hack before you commit full resources, you conduct a simple and cost efficient
experiment and measure the results.
Always learning: In fact, growth hacking is about conducting experiments all the time
and comparing them with each other in order to find the strategies with the best return
on investment (ROI) as well as optimizing deployed strategies to drive the ROI up.
The whole process can be simplified to following feedback loop:
Idea > Test > Measure > Learn > Repeat.
Idea / Hypothesis
Startups live in extreme uncertainty: Unlike big companies or traditional small

businesses, startups are companies that often have an innovative product, business
model or market and a limited time to succeed. While predictable marketing models
are already established in traditional industries, startups often have to start from scratch
and discover or create new marketing channels, customers and business models.
Startups are about fast growth: The main difference between a small business and a
startup is that unlike small businesses (e.g restaurants) startups are companies built to
conquer the world in a very short period of time (e.g Google, Facebook). Startups have
to think about how to achieve 1000x the number of new users than a traditional
marketing method would yield.
Time & Money: Startups have limited budgets and a limited time frame to succeed.
Suppose you begin a startup with a $150k budget. That is about how much Coca-Cola
spends on a couple of newspaper ads. But unlike Coca-Cola you have a limited time to
break even or to demonstrate growth in order to raise another round of financing.
Effectiveness: As all of the above suggests, growth hacking is about conducting as

many experiments as possible to find your scalable and repeatable user acquisition
strategy as soon as possible. However it does not stop there, growth hacking recognizes
no limits - once a startup finds its scalable business model the effort goes into
optimizing it to drive up the ROI as well as retaining acquired users.
Helpful Links:
Quicksprout: The Definitive Guide To Growth Hacking
HackPad: Growth Hacking Cookbook
Sixteen Ventures: 21 Growth Hacks To Test Today
Learn / Data
Experiment
Kissmetrics: 35 Resources to Help You Become a Growth Hacker
10.

Dropbox
Hotmail
AirBnB
Candy Crush
Dropbox is one of the fastest growing

startups. Aside from having a great product,
dropbox implemented a referral system
which allowed users to get extra space for
each referred friend who signed up. It
helped to take Dropbox from 100,000 users
to 4,000,000 in under two years. This post
outlines their other hacks.
When Hotmail launched in 1996 it grew fast.

They had a killer marketing idea add a
tagline Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email
service. Get it now. at the end of every
single email sent from hotmail to promote
the service. Every time you sent an email you
were spreading a marketing message virally.
That led to a $400 million acquisition by
Microsoft
Early in its days AirBnB achieved a high

growth thanks to their Craigslist integration.
Theyve picked a platform with 10s of
millions of users and created a feature with
automated cross posting of your AirBnB
listing. You can read about the details in this
this great post by Andrew Chen.
Candy Crush was one of the top grossing

iPhone games in 2013. They were gaining
over 45 million users per month. When users
run out of lives, they can either pay, wait 30
minutes or invite their friends to help them
out
Instagram
Twitter
Pinterest
Mint
Similar to AirBnB Instagram included a

feature that allowed cross posting to
platforms like Facebook and Twitter. As a
result Instagram was able to leverage the
distribution of some very large existing
platforms to help accelerate the growth of
its service in the early days. You can read
more about their other hacks here.
Early on, Twitter identified that when a user

follows more than 20 people they become
an active user. Twitter made it a key
objective to get users to this point as quickly
as possible. One of the ways that they did
this was making suggestions of people who
the user could follow during the registration
process.
Much like Twitter, Pinterest faced a similar

chicken and egg problem. In order to
engage new users and get them to use it,
they implemented an auto-follow feature.
Upon signing up for Pinterest new users are
automatically following a select group of
high quality users and thus they get hooked
and stay.
Mint was one of the first startups to

implement a successful content strategy.
They built a unique personal finance blog,
very content-rich, that spoke to a young
professional crowd that they felt was being
neglected. The blog became #1 in personal
finance, and drove traffic to the app.
Spotify
ber
Groupon
Karma Hotspot (Hardware)
When Spotify launched in the US, instead of

building their user base from scratch, they
were one of the first companies to integrate
their product into the Facebook News Feed.
That allowed the startup to spread virally
across the platform gaining a significant
traction.
ber learned that 95% of all riders have

heard about ber from other ber riders.
The experience was so great that most were
happy to share. However, ber has
designed their strategy to leverage this
growth by focusing on creating local
network effects in their launch city. You can
read all the details on this link.
Founded in winter 2008, Groupon went

public 3 years later at a $30 billion valuation.
One of the main reasons it grew so fast was
that each groupon had to achieve a
minimum number of sales to be activated.
Users would therefore actively promote the
deal to their friends to join and purchase in
order to use the voucher themselves.
Karma Hotspot is a new prepaid 4G mobile

hotspot service. The device rewards you for
sharing your hotspot with friends and
strangers. Every time a new user finds your
hotspot and logs onto it, youre rewarded
with 100 megabytes of extra data. More
details in this article.
11.
Content Marketing
Content marketing means creating and sharing informative, valuable, and free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of
content you share needs to be closely related to what you sell; in other words, youre educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.
The primary goal with content marketing is not typically to make a direct sale, it is to obtain permission to deliver content over an extended period of time, preferably through email. The
secondary goal is to become a thought leader in your industry. The benefits of this is that your content gets you on the radar of larger publications, who will then link to you naturally.
Why Content Marketing?
Good content gets shared and referred to. This builds traffic and SEO.
7 in 10 consumers prefer to learn about a company through articles, not ads.
Social media and blogs account for 23% of all time spent online.
Interesting content is a top 3 reason people follow brands on social media.
Setting Up a Blog
Setting up a blog is a simple matter of downloading the software, uploading it to your
server and following the setup instructions. WordPress, for example, is free and offers many
amazing plugins.
Use Wordpress: Most major blogs use Wordpress for SEO benefits and the wealth of
plugins to choose from.
Pick a good design: Design builds trust. Make it simple, remove the clutter. You can pick
some of the premium themes at websites like ThemeForest
Make it shareable: Dont forget to install social widgets to allow sharing
Add forms: The aim of your blog is to collect users contact details or point them towards
your product. You can use the freemium Padiact tool to capture email addresses and the
free hellobar to notify users about special offers.
Enable subscriptions via feed: Creating an RSS feed using Feedburner is a recommended
option. Put visible buttons on the sidebar or the top / bottom of your blog.
Building Traffic
Select a niche: The truth about marketing is that if you target everyone, you'll hit no one.
So you need to define the niche that you want to serve. Needless to say it should be
something specific to your market.
Do research that gets inside your readers head: There are two reasons getting inside a
readers head will skyrocket your sales. 1. You will learn information that will help you to
create a product or service that matches their wants and needs. 2. You can use their exact
language in your copywriting to reach them at a deeper level. A visitor insight tool like
Qualaroo provides a widget that collects such insight from your visitors.
Write awesome headlines: Be specific and dont worry about spending as much as 50%
of your time on headlines, many top bloggers do so. There are plenty of great posts on
writing headlines, such as How to Write Headlines That Work.
Plan ahead and be consistent: Most blogs fail because they lose consistency or simply
give up. If you can keep posting high quality content on a regular basis for over 6 months,
you will see both traffic and SEO results.
Time your sharing: Buffer tool makes it easy to time your posts as well as find out when
your followers are most active online. Participate in sharing communities such as Reddit,
Hacker News, Pinterest etc.
Guest blogging: Guest blogging is a fantastic way to spread your brand to new folks
who've never seen your work before, and it can be useful in earning early links and
references back to your site. However, make sure you focus on high quality content and
get bloggers on a personal level rather than from some link sharing website, since Google
started to penalize some of these websites and their users.
Connect your web profiles with your blog: Many of you likely have profiles on services
like YouTube, Slideshare, Yahoo!, DeviantArt, Facebook etc. Whatever you're producing
on the web and wherever you're doing it, tie it back to your blog. Dont forget to include it
in your email signature too.
Use PPC to drive traffic: Set aside some small PPC budget to drive initial traffic.
12.
Types of Content
Blog posts
Magazine articles
Video
Podcasts
Articles that talk about issues related to your

core message and secondary messages.
They can range anywhere from 100 words to
2,000 words, depending on the format you
choose and what your readers prefer.
Like a blog post, these posts talk about

issues related to your core message, but
instead of publishing them digitally, you
publish them in a print magazine. That
magazine may be your brand's magazine, a
trade (industry) magazine, or a consumer
magazine such as Inc., Fortune, Time, etc.
Not all content is housed on your website.

You can create a channel on YouTube or
Vimeo that provides another access point to
your business. Some content marketers
upload videos to YouTube, then repost them
on their blog. Others create a video blog, or
vlog, that lives on YouTube.
Podcasts are audio articles or radio shows,

often published in iTunes, Stitcher Radio, or
Blubrry. Podcasting is gaining renewed
popularity now because people who don't
have time to read are able to listen to
articles while they are on their daily
commute or doing other activities.
Webinars and Teleseminars
Speeches, workshops, interviews
Powerpoint presentations
Tutorials, guides
You can present information to a live

audience during webinars and teleseminars,
then use the recording and slides as content
on your website, in newsletters, and in
programs/products.
According to popular blogger Gregory

Ciotti this type of content is The absolute
BEST way to get links, as its far more
scalable than guest blogging. You can
interview other interesting people or get
featured in other media. Your end-goal here
should be to land features on big-time
p u b l i c at i o n s : Fa s t Co m p a n y, Fo r b e s ,
TechCrunch, Gawker sites, etc.
Offer them on your website. Turn them into

infographics. Use them in blog posts.
Upload them to Slideshare.
You can create a Web page that provides

links to additional information, essentially
making a lesson plan for learning something
new. This is a great way to build authority in
your area of expertise. Remember to tell
people what to do if they need additional
help. (See how easy it is to drive business
objectives with your content!)
Infographics
White papers and special reports
Newsletters
Ebooks and products/programs
Infographics are creative presentations of

facts and figures rather than dry-as-toast
reports. If they're well done, they are also
very sharable. When you create on and
publish it in infographic directories it can
result in many links, as they often get picked
up by other bloggers and journalists here.
People want useful information that helps

them make better decisions. That's why
white papers, special reports, and other
researched information make such great
pre mi ums an d fre e off er s . Yo u ca n
periodically offer these as a value-add to
your followers, or you can offer them as an
incentive for signing up to your email list.
Content marketing is about building

relationships. What better way than to send
your content to people's inboxes rather than
making them visit your website every day? A
newsletter also helps you build your email
list, which allows you to make email offers as
well.
Ebooks and books are a great way to build

authority and trust. You can easily produce a
short ebook and sell it on Amazon. Then turn
it into a PDF and offer it on your website as
well.
13.
Converting Your Content Traffic
Lead Nurturing: Lead nurturing starts by collecting contact information in exchange for
something the visitor deems of value, but with little risk. Often, this entails some form of
information or product trial intended to help solve the visitors problem. Email addresses,
RSS subscriptions and similar methods of engagement all serve to keep a visitors memory
and impression of a company or product at the forefront. Later, the contact information
provided offers you the ability to educate, inspire, or otherwise engage a potential new
customer.
Webinars: If you have a product or service, you should consider doing a weekly webinar.
The webinar shouldnt just be about your product or service, but instead it should be
around something that benefits your potential customers. the tricky part about webinars
is that you have to convince people who are watching them to sign up for your product or
service. Here are some ways to do it:
1. Ask them to sign up: you can tell people who are watching your webinar to sign up
for your product or service. According to top marketer Neil Patel if you get 10% of
the people to convert, you are doing really well
2. Offer a free trial: when people are signing up to watch your webinar, include a
check box that gives them an option to sign up for a free trial of your product.
Remarketing: Once you have a large audience reading your blog, you want to remarket to
them. Through services like Retargeter and Perfect Audience you can retarget all of your
blog readers so that when they browse random sites like TMZ, theyll see a banner ad for
your company.
Calls to action: There are numerous ways you can drive traffic from your blog to your main
website. The easiest way to do it is by using calls to action. There are 4 effective calls to
action you can easily use:
Collect emails: Another way to monetize a blog is through emails. Its a much longer
process than the previous methods, but the conversion rates tend to be higher. Lets start
with the ways you can collect emails on your blog:
1. Popup: by leveraging tools like PopUp Domination, 1% to 3% of your readers should
end up giving you their email address.
2. Sidebar: by adding an email opt-in form within your sidebar, you should be able to
convert .5% to 2% of your readers into email subscribers.
3. Blog posts: at the end of each blog post, you can add an email collection box.
Typically .75 to 2% of your readers will convert into email subscribers with this
option.
Once you have the email addresses, you want to create an email drip system. Typically, the
email drip consists of at least seven emails, and it is sent to people automatically over
time. With services like MailChimp, Aweber or SendGrid, you can easily create a drip.
Within those emails, you need to educate your customer base and sell to them over time.
According to Neil Patel, a good email drip should convert at around 5%. The key to email
copywriting is to educate first, build trust second, and then sell.
Dont oversell: If your website is too pushy with annoying pop ups your readers will leave
and never come back.
Consider turning off comments: If youre pushing for a call to action of a sale (even if that
sale is a signup or a subscription, etc.) then you might consider disabling comments for
that post. Why let people get distracted by adding to the conversation, if what you really
want is for them to click buy?
1. Hello Bar: a little bar with text and a button on top of your site
2. Navigation Link: added to your navigation bar referring back to your product
3. Static Ad: a still ad on the side of the site
4. Scrolling Ad: when you scroll it moves with you
Case Studies, eBooks and Whitepapers: Using your calls to action, you can offer some
relevant and helpful learning materials in exchange for users giving you their email
addresses.
Special promotions: One of the easiest ways to convert readers into customers is to offer
them special promotions. You can do a blog post that offers readers a special discount, or
a bundled deal.
Helpful Links:
Quicksprout: The Advanced Guide To Content Marketing
Rand Fishkin: 21 Tactics To Increase Your Blog Traffic
Ramit Sethi Exposed: How He Earns Millions Blogging
Quora: What Are The Best Practices For Converting Blog Traffic
14.
Email Marketing
Email is extremely direct. It is also extremely flexible: giving you a lot of options to work with when developing copy and design. These two factors combined make email a highly
converting and powerful platform. It is also a powerful tool to retain and engage blog and newsletter subscribers and convert them into paying customers over time.
When someone visits your site, the chances are they will never come back. If you can capture their email (with permission) the communication keeps going on and you can practically reach
out to them until they convert, if your campaigns are useful, engaging and unobtrusive.
The Setup
Create an email marketing account: There are many providers, among the most trusted
ones are Mailchimp, Sendgrid and AWeber. If you are looking for a super cost efficient
way to manage your campaign, consider setting up Amazon SES or more specifically a
new tool for managing it called Sendy. For comparison Sendy allows you to send out
10,000 emails at a cost of $1 via Amazon SES vs $200 if you use Mailchimp.
Get a newsletter template design: Often times, plain text emails convert better, however
you can get some great looking free templates from CampaignMonitor.
Make your subject lines engaging: Subject lines can make the difference between
whether an email is classed as spam or something worth opening to read
Test your emails before sending: If your email is in custom designed HTML, the chances
are it wont display properly across all email clients. For that reason you should use tools
like Litmus, which allow you to conduct easy $1 tests. Mail-Tester is a free tool that
measures the spaminess of your emails.
Measure your results: Most email solutions provide analytics. It is up to you to collect the
data over time and compare different variables for the best results. E.g. opens, clickthrough, sales vs. subject line etc.
Time your emails: Kissmetrics have a great post on the science of email timing.
Unsubscribe: It is important to give your recipients the ability to unsubscribe from emails.
First, it is required by the CAN-Spam Act. Second, if you dont give them this option, they
are more likely to click on the spam complaint button, which will cause more harm than
allowing them to unsubscribe. However, there are some creative ways to drive down the
unsubscribe rates.
Campaign
Newsletters: These are the traditional emails you might send each week or month with
product updates, offers, sales updates or similar. Ideally you want to keep 90% of them
casual and non spammy and ensure that you time your hard sell for the right occasions.
Trigger-based campaigns: These are campaigns triggered by your customers behaviour.

Examples include cart abandonment (following up on customers that dont complete a
purchase), welcome emails after a trial sign up, post-purchase emails and other similar
campaigns.
Drip campaigns: Drip campaigns include new subscriber welcome series and other
programs designed to gradually introduce customers to your brand. An interesting form
of drip campaigns are educational email seminars (E.g. "Learn how to increase your
sales") designed to capture users' email addresses and engage them.
Helpful Links:
Vero: Email Marketing Guide
15.
Press
Public Relations is a strong distribution channel due to its low cost and repeatable nature. PR certainly has a human capital cost, but can be fairly easy to execute with the right story. It can
also be highly segmented i.e verticals, industries, and audiences. It can help bring forth social proof. "As seen on CNN, TechCrunch, and the New York Times" will always be a seller.
If you are on a shoestring budget and you cant afford a PR firm (which is not a good idea for startups anyway) you will have to approach this matter yourself.
The Basics
According to tech journalists such as Ben Parr and Jennifer Van Grove of Mashable, or MG
Siegler of TechCrunch, the following steps are an optimal way to approach it PR:
Get an introduction: According to Ben Parr this is often the best way, since journalists get
thousands of emails most of which likely end up deleted. They are far more likely to pay
attention if there is an introduction from another founder, VC or friend.
Build the connections: Find them at events, meet them through your friends.
Know who to pitch: Some journalists focus on mobile, others on consumer web, make
sure you are pitching to the right person
Make the pitch short and engaging: Get to the point quickly, have something interesting
to say or involve a question.
Have some news: What type of coverage are you looking for? (launch, funding, new
feature release etc. ) Is it exclusive? According to Van Grove, it is OK to pitch even if there
is no significant news and you are simply announcing your new start up. There are sections
profiling new startups.
Consider offering something: For example CrazyEgg created a list of all of the popular
news blogs in the tech space and offered the writers a free $99 Crazy Egg account. They
helped them set up Crazy Egg on their blog so they could see how it worked. However
they didnt just give them a premium account to play with, they also helped them analyze
the reports and gave them feedback on what they should change with their overall
design.
The Pitching Process

According to Ex-VentureBeat writer Conrad Egusa the process can be divided into the
following steps:
Deciding on your story: At their core, publications and journalists look to write about
meaningful new announcements. It is important that these announcements be new. In
general, the following announcements are newsworthy: Company Launches, Product
Launches, Fundraising Events, Acquisitions, Milestones
Enter the press release: Once you have chosen an announcement we move to the next
step, which is developing the press release. According to Egusa the majority of stories
written about companies originate from press releases, with roughly 50% of the story
ideas at VentureBeat being generated from emails sent to tips@venturebeat.com.
Creating the email: Once you have a press release, email it to journalists. As advised,
make it short, personal and humanly.
The Exclusive: Egusa recommends offering an exclusive. Exclusive means that a

particular publication has the first right to publish the article. After the article is
published, the entrepreneur can wait a short period of time before contacting other
media outlets.
Furthering coverage: When the article comes online, you should promote the press to
friends, investors, partners, and more. You should then email hundreds of other
publications to further coverage.
Repeating the process: Repeat whenever you have a meaningful announcement.
Helpful Links:
Jason Babtiste: How I Pitched TechCrunch
16.
Viral Marketing
One of the most useful types of metrics to come out of the last five years of social software is the viral factor. Popularized by the boom of development on the Facebook platform in 2007,
a viral factor is a number, typically between 0.0 and 1.0. It describes a basic business problem that affects literally every business in the world: Given that I get a new customer today, how
many new customers will they bring in over the next N days? In other words viral growth is when 1 customer brings you more than 1 referral.
Viral loop is what causes virality of the product and it is something that is rooted in the features or design of the product. Achieving viral loop can be also described as changing the user
flow from Register > Use Product -> Evaluate Product > Tell Friends to:
Register
Tell Friends
The Viral Loop
Use Product
Evaluate Product
Building Your Viral Loop
Viral loop is designing a system where a product spreads before or right at the point of
becoming a user. Think about how the Washington Post shares the news youve read in
your Faceboook feed right at the point of clicking into the article (or any of the growth
hacks described earlier). It is important to note that the viral loop needs to be directly
correlated to a positive user experience, otherwise you will practically become spam.
According to Andrew Chen who is considered to be an expert on viral marketing, the

following are the necessary steps towards building your viral loop:
Whats your viral media? The first (and last) choice you have to make is where people
are going to receive an entryway into your viral loop. That might be e-mail, Facebook
newsfeed, or blogs.
To understand where the viral loop physically sits, you need to ask yourself Which
features actually let a user of your product reach out and connect with a non-user?
Whats your funnel design? The next choice to make is the design of your viral funnel.
First off, you want it to be short and as accessible as possible, since each page is a
barrier youre asking your users to leap over. Assume up to 80 -90% attrition if you are
asking them to register with an email/username/password, for example. If you can make
it very short, 2 to 3 pages at the most with a progressive commitment of personal
information, youll get further along in your design.
Whats the viral hook in your product? A viral hook is what encourages users to
evangelize your product. It might be: an appeal to curiosity (someone tagged a photo
of you), a social proof (50 of your friends joined this group) etc. A viral hook is what
makes users take action.
What are the on-ramps to your viral loops? Once youre done with a very tight viral
loop, then its time to create the on-ramps. In this case, you are looking at places like
your website homepage, paid advertising, traditional marketing campaigns, SEO, etc. to
create places where users can discover your viral loop and begin the process.
According to Adam Nash, CEO of Wealthfront, to design a virality you should focus on
these 3 steps:
1. Clearly articulate and design out the features where members can touch nonmembers. Wireframes and flows are sufficient. When you succeed, test out the
mathematics of it (you need a coefficient of 1.1)
2. Instrument those flows with detailed metrics. These are necessary for each step of the
viral cycle to match your model.
3. Develop, release, measure, iterate. This is the place where the length of your product
cycles matter. Release an iteration every 2 days, and you might have success in 2
weeks. Take 3-4 weeks per iteration, and it could be half a year before you nail your
cycle. Speed matters.
17.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion is when a visitor to your website takes an action that you want them to take. It could be signing up for an email newsletter, creating an account with a login/password, making a
purchase, downloading your app, or something else entirely. Whatever it is you want your visitors to do, this action is what you're going to measure and what you're looking to optimize.
CRO can be defined as the method of using analytics and user feedback to improve the performance of your website. In other words, conversion rate optimization is finding out why visitors
arent converting and fixing it. The whole discipline is relatively rich and this chapter provides you with a brief overview.
To learn about CRO in detail try reading Beginners Guide to CRO by Sean Ellis.
A Few Key Terms
Conversion Rate: To get your Conversion Rate, you divide the total number of
conversions by the number of visitors to your site. For example, a site with 5000 visitors
and 50 conversions has a conversion rate of 1%.
Call to Action (CTA): The primary button, link or other user interface element that asks
the user to take an action that leads to (or towards) a conversion. A Buy Now button on
Amazon.com, a Sign Up button on an email registration field and a Download Now
on an app landing page are examples of different Calls to Action.
Conversion Funnel: The primary pathway (or flow) of the user experience where visitors
complete a conversion. On Amazon.com the funnel may be Home page > search results
page > product page > checkout.
A/B or Split Testing: The testing of one version of a page or interface element against
another version of the same thing. Each element is measured by its effectiveness in
comparison to the other. For example, a red button measured in effectiveness to a
green button. In A/B testing only one thing is tested at a time.
Multivariate Testing (MVT): The testing of multiple variations of many different page
elements in various combinations to determine the best performing elements and
combinations. For example, a multivariate landing test may test many variations of the
pictures, copy, and calls to action used on the page in many combinations to find the
best performer.
Basic Toolbox
Analytics: Software to track and report on whats happening on your site day in and day
out. You want an analytics package such as Google Analytics, KISSMetrics or similar that
has advanced analysis tools like audience segmentation and conversion tracking.
Segmentation can produce data for different sets of people, and you can isolate hiccups
or trouble spots in your conversion funnel.
User Surveys: Analytics can only communicate so much about your users needs.
You need something that gives you the ability to gain insights directly from users in the
moment, to hear their concerns in their own words; there is no such thing as too much
user feedback.
User Testing: Software like Optimizely and other testing tools allow you to directly
observe how users are interacting with your site. You can test potential changes and
document how they play out in real life.
Where to Start
To start with, is your Call to Action clear and easy to find?
Are your Graphics relevant, well-placed, clean, and unique? Or are they distracting and
overwhelming in number? Do you have a lot of unnecessary (or maybe misplaced or
not-yet-necessary) text?
Take a look at your sites Usability. Can users easily search your site for what theyre
looking for? If youre in e-commerce, is it easy to complete your checkout process? How
many pages and clicks does it take to complete the key conversions youre measuring?
Is there a mobile version of your website? Keep your navigation, registration, contact,
and payment uncluttered and easy to find and operate.
Is it clear to your visitors that their Security is your top priority?

Is it easy to trust your site?
Are your Search Engine Optimization efforts up-to-date, accurate, and relevant? Are you
using accurate titles, relevant keywords and proper meta data? Images should have
correct names, and keywords should be used properly. Titles should be clear and
descriptive. If these items are not relevant, people may come to your site looking for
something you dont offer, while those who seek your services are unable to find you.
Do you have Customer Testimonials letting visitors know how happy others are with
your services? Social proof is a powerful conversion rate driver.
18.
More User Acquisition Strategies

Advertising
Search Traffic
User Acquisition
Advertising is something youve probably come across in

some form or another. Other names for this topic include
Search Engine Marketing (SEM), online advertising, or payper-click (PPC) marketing. Very often, marketers use these
terms interchangeably to describe the same concept
traffic purchased through online ads. Marketers frequently
shy away from this technique because it costs money. This
perspective will put you at a significant disadvantage. Its
not uncommon for companies to run PPC campaigns with
uncapped budgets. Why? Because you should be
generating an ROI anyway.
Search engines are a powerful channel for connecting with

new audiences. Companies like Google and Bing look to
connect their customers with the best user experiences
possible. The first step towards a strong SEO strategy is to
make sure that your website content and products are the
best that they can be. Step 2 is to communicate that user
experience information to search engines so that you rank
in the right place. SEO is competitive and has a reputation
of being a black art.
Affiliate programs can be major drivers of distribution for

certain products. Information products tend to do the best
here, but they can be effective for all types of commerce.
There are hundreds of affiliate networks to sign-up with as
well as running your own. The key to many of these
networks for larger scale companies is not the software
itself, but the affiliates and affiliate managers. In order to
attract top tier affiliates, also be prepared to be flexible on
your terms. Smaller affiliates will be okay with net 30
payouts, but top tier affiliates may want direct wire transfers
with weekly payments.
A good place to start is reading The 5 Minute Guide To

Cheap Startup Advertising by Founder of Hubspot,
Dharmesh Shah.
SEO can be quite a complex topic to tackle in one or two

pages. The best way to start is to download the following
manuals:
MOZ: Beninner's Giude to SEO
This brief guide by Sixteen Ventures might be a good start

for you (SaaS focused but very helpful)
Quicksprout: Advanced Guide to SEO
Events & Conferences
Social Media
Partnerships
Events and Conferences are great ways to not only generate

some auxiliary revenue, but they are a great way to gather
and educate your prospective customers. Simple meetups
with refreshments that gather your customers is another
way to go about things. Another more grandiose way of
going about things is throwing your own conferences, but
this comes at a cost.
Your social media strategy is more than just a Facebook

profile or Twitter feed. When executed correctly, social
media is a powerful customer engagement engine and web
traffic driver. Its easy to get sucked into the hype and create
profiles on every single social site. This is the wrong
approach. What you should do instead is to focus on a few
key channels where your brand is most likely to reach key
customers and prospects.
There are a lot of businesses that have a large user base but
dont make much money from each user. In essence, their
margins are low.
To start developing a presence on key social networks

including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Quora.
Focus on the networks that best position your organization
to reach target audiences. Look out for other mainstream
social networks that are relevant to your product and have a
vibrant and engaged community.
Those businesses are always looking for new ways to make

more money from each of their users. If you can offer their
users a special version of your product for free, or at a
discounted price, they can typically drive you thousands of
signups. All you have to do is to give them a 10 to 30% cut
of the revenue that comes from their users.
A good example of this is hosting companies. They typically
have thin margins and are looking for ways to make more
money off their user base. This is the main reason why, for
example, GoDaddy constantly upsells you when you are
checking out.
19.
APIs
Direct Sales
3rd Party Social Platforms
APIs are the new business development for the 21st

century. Integrating with other companies used to require a
lot of time, negotiations, and often money. Now? It just
requires an API key and some imagination. Not all APIs have
allowance for commercial access and some have a limit, but
thats a problem that can be dealt with. Dropbox just
introduced their API and you can see it popping up in
almost every work related iPad app.
A direct sales channel can be very important in B2B plays

where the cost of having a direct salesperson exceeds the
lifetime value of the aggregate customers they can exceed.
To many in the startup world, it might seem absurd to have
a direct sales team, but in enterprise and B2B sales, its a
viable channel when done right.
Using 3rd party social platforms in different ways than just

your basic Facebook integration. 3rd party social platform
usage examples include games from Zynga or Geni.com
integrating as an app inside Facebook.com. Another
example would be HubSpot with TwitterGrader. Integrating
social platforms inside your destination is one thing, but
making stand alone apps inside of sites such as Facebook is
a whole other form of distribution.
Especially in early days, you should consider getting your

first few users by direct selling. Appsumo started this way
and even payment startup Stripe didnt shy away. Dropbox
founder once shared that in the early days he studied a lot
of books on selling to learn and do the craft himself, despite
being a geek at the time.
Traditional Media
Lead Nurturing
People still subscribe to cable, read newspapers, and listen

to the radio. If youre trying to reach normals, not just early
adopters, and establish some credibility, then traditional
media is still a huge channel. Its bigger when it comes to PR
and even ad dollars. Seems hard to believe, but its true.
There's a reason Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Silverpop, etc. are

on fire. Make 100% sure anyone that comes to your site
with any interest is connected with over time, with as many
useful touches as make sense. The right time for your lead
to buy, or even try, might not be today, but that doesn't
mean they aren't a great potential customer down the road.
Lead nurturing doesn't produce results overnight, but it is
the best way to increase revenue. According to Jason
Lemkin who sold his startup EchoSign to Adobe, some of
their best leads have been in lead nurturing for 3+ years!
Mobile Platform Distribution
!
Pandora increased its usage exponentially after the app
store appeared. It almost doubled their growth overnight.
The best companies such as Dropbox or Evernote have
mobile applications across all different platforms. iPhone,
Android, blackberry, WinPhone7, iPad, and mobile web are
all important. Every user counts and app stores are a chance
to reach new users.
Referral Programs
!
Referral Programs are slightly different than affiliate
programs. Referral programs are less about traditional
affiliate channels and more about using your existing
customers to spread word about your product. The reward
can be cash, but it often comes in the form of in-app
rewards.
For example, Dropbox gives you 250MB for every user that
signs up from your referrals. They also employ a two sided
referral that rewarded the user that signed up with more
storage. Gilt also has a referral program, but the reward is in
cash when the user you refer makes their first purchase.
Think about it like this: User X invites User Y. User Y now
makes $75 purchase. User X now receives $25 free, but
makes a $75 purchase themselves due to the referral
reward. ($75+$75-$25)== There is a net win of $125 due to
the reward loop even while giving away $25.
20.
References
3 Stages of Startup
Ash Maurya: 10 Steps To Product Market Fit
Economics Simplified
David Skok: Accelerate Your Startup: Develop a Repeatable Sales Model
Problem/Solution fit
CustomerDevLabs: How I Interview Customers
Canvas: Nail It Then Scale It
Product/Market Fit
Quora: How Do You Define Product Market Fit
David Skok: Accelerate Your Startup: Develop a Repeatable Sales Model

Quora: What Are Some Techniques Startups Use To Initially Draw Attention To Their
Product
What are key strategies to acquire first 100K users with zero marketing budget?

GrowHack: Introducing The Lean Marketing Funnel
Dave McClure: Startup Metrics For Pirates
Growth Hacking
Quicksprout: The Definitive Guide To Growth Hacking
TNW: The actual difference between growth hacking and marketing
Converting Traffic
JeffBullas: How to Convert Website Traffic into Paying Customers
Quicksprout: How to Convert Blog Readers Into Customers
Chris Brogan: How To Convert Traffic to a Sale
Email Marketing
Vero: Email Marketing Guide
Press
Quora: How can one get TechCrunch and Mashable to review a startup
Quora: How do you get TechCrunch to cover your startup?
Jason Babtiste: 16 Ways Your Startup Needs To Be Getting Customers
Quicksprout: How We Grew Crazy Egg to 100,000 Users With A $10,000 Marketing
Budget
Sean Ellis: Deconstructing PR: Advice From A Former VentureBeat Writer
Viral Marketing
Andrew Chen: Whats your viral loop? Understanding the engine of adoption
Adam Nash: User Acquisition: Viral Factor Basics
Conversion Rate Optimization

Qualaroo: What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
More User Acquisition Techniques

Jason Babtiste: 16 Ways Your Startup Needs To Be Getting Customers

Adam Breckler: Top 10 growth hacks of all time
Content Marketing
Gregory Ciotti: Content Strategy for Startups
ProBlogger: Ramit Sethi Exposed: How He Earns Millions Blogging
Outbound Engine: 7 Benefits of Content Marketing for Small Businesses
Quickdprout: The Advanced Guide To Content Marketing
21.
For more information about this whitepaper contact Appster
Appster is the fastest growing web & mobile app development company in Australia serving clients international from Australia to
North America and Europe. Our focus is on business ROI first whilst delivering outstanding functionality and design. This is why weve
had dozens of top 100 apps, developed multi-million dollar startups and worked with everyone from BRW Young rich members to
Billion dollar company founders. We develop apps using the SCRUM framework, leading to an AGILE and LEAN development
experience. We specialise in working with disruptive game changer ideas and large enterprises looking to innovate their business
models with mobile-first technology.

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Building A User Acquisition Machine

About Appster | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google Plus | Contact Us

Startup Economics Simplified

Finding a Problem/Solution Fit

Finding a Product/Market Fit

Early Customer Acquisition on a Minimum Budget

Startup Marketing Funnel

Case Studies: 12 Examples of Successful Growth Hacks

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

More User Acquisition Strategies

A startup starts with an idea. Usually the idea is a solution to

In the customer development process, you are trying to sell

At this point, you already know you have a product users

At the end of the process you should achieve a Problem/

After this process you should end up with a Product/Market

About Appster | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google Plus | Contact Us

Searching For Problem/Solution Fit

Searching For Product/Market Fit

You Have Identified Your Repeatable & Scalable Business Model

You can keep repeating your process without losing productivity.

About Appster | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google Plus | Contact Us

Finding a Problem/Solution Fit

How To Interview Customers

How to Reach Potential Customers

About Appster | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google Plus | Contact Us

Finding a Product/Market Fit

How To Get There

Identifying a Repeatable, Scalable Sales Model

How To Measure a Product/Market Fit

1. The process you go through to acquire a paying customer is clearly repeatable.

2. The process is scalable.

Experienced the core of your product offering

Used your product at least twice

Used your product in the last two weeks

About Appster | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google Plus | Contact Us

Early Customer Acquisition on a Minimum Budget

More User Acquisition Tips for Early Stage Startup

Get listed in as many startup directories as possible

Pitch local news outlets ("Local Entrepreneurs Tackle a Big Problem")

Reddit advertising (read why), Facebook interest-targeted PPC and StumbleUpon

Create controversy related to an industry topic.

8. Give away free content or ask partners for freebies

Pitch a demo at a tech show

11. Leave video responses on popular-related YouTube videos

1. Create your target marketing sheet.

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Startup Marketing Funnel

People come to your homepage or other landing

People have a happy first experience while on your site,

People share your product with their friends, who

You monetize people using your product, either

Advertising, SEO/SEM, Social

Signup Forms, Newsletters,

Retention / Qualified Leads

Email Marketing, Retargeting

Viral Marketing, Growth Hacking

Conversion Rate Optimization

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Growth Hacking Explained

Why Growth Hacking?

Startups live in extreme uncertainty: Unlike big companies or traditional small

Effectiveness: As all of the above suggests, growth hacking is about conducting as