Kathryn Minshew, Acquiring Your First Users Out of Thin Air, The Lean Startup Conference 2013

all right so we want to introduce our first speaker Kathryn Minshew and today we are doing this morning we're going to have a lot of talk about customers this is a central theme of Lean Startup and so we are going big with customers but what if you don't have any that's a real problem we have this all idea like test everything with customers experiment your customers and if you don't have any what do you do so please welcome Kathryn to talk about that perfect hey everybody thanks so much for having me good morning my name is Kathryn Minshew and I'm here to talk to you today about a very very thorny problem that everyone in this room has faced or will face at some point and that is how do you magically acquire users out of thin air with no money so most people think about startups like the field of dreams which if you've seen it is famous for the tagline build it and they will come I wish that were the case in startups but no in most startups you can't simply build something and they will come you have to figure out how do you get the words out to people who don't know you who don't know anything about you and convince enough of them to come to your product or your website that you have a large enough user base to be able to test your hypotheses now most of us don't have incredible networks we may be able to get 10 or 50 or 100 beta testers but we're not necessarily going to be able to just send a quick email send a quick T tweet and instantly get the number of people that we need so I'm going to run you through a few strategies my background for this is to startups that I've done and there's a big difference between them one is dead and one is not dead and the biggest difference between dead and not dead in the case of the two companies I've built has been the user bases that we were able to acquire so the first one as you can see we started out with a couple hundred a couple thousand people we kept it pretty flat we were really not able to go beyond a very small group and we didn't really do very many tests or iterations or have enough people to test hypotheses against different populations for the second company we had 20,000 people we were able to reach first month 26,000 and a second 75,000 in the first and we were able to keep refining what we were doing and growing and achieved something that I think the team is very very proud of so what's the difference between these two I'm going to walk you through the five zero cost strategies that we stumbled upon for how to acquire users out of thin air and run through them one by one and at a very high level these are the five it's one design the very first user experience to ask for word of mouth but make it incredibly insanely easy for people three seek out like-minded groups as a starting point for know how to approach bloggers and reporters strategically and five becoming your own PR machine which is my personal favorite so I'll run through them quickly the first is designing the initial user experience and this is going to seem like a no-brainer to some of you because you're probably thinking you know of course like when people come to the site you want to think about what is it that they're landing on how are they thinking about that but ultimately if you don't get this one right it's really hard to make anything else matter because it's not about what people come to your well what people are thinking when they're coming to your site and you know they're seeing the copy that you've written the first 30 seconds it's definitely not about what they're thinking in the first three minutes after they've watched a video or a longer story you've put together it's really about what are they thinking in the first two seconds that very first impression of your site are they thinking this looks interesting I kind of get what they're trying to communicate with me I want to know more or are they thinking I have no idea what's going on here this looks like something that you know my friend's kid put together in high school because one of the differences between getting people who use your site and find value in it to share it with others as we're going to talk about is making it something with a sort of a holistic design experience for the first user so that they not only are willing to invest the time in it themselves but there's actually putting their neck out when they share it with others and say I think you should check this out I'm going to tweet about the site and you want to think about what is that first user experience in the case of my two companies we had just a couple of design changes that made it both easier to understand what we were doing and also just a little bit more visually beautiful so people felt like they were sharing something of value to others instead of asking people to take a chance on a site that was frankly in the first case very very ugly so secondly ask for word of mouth and make it insanely easy I'm sure a lot of you guys if you're involved in the startup community get emails from friends sometimes there four or five paragraphs long and they say hey I started this company this is everything that I've ever thought about it you know will you please spread the word but they're not necessarily very actionable and they often ask a lot of your time so what do I recommend instead what I did when I was launching the muse is actually put together a very short and concise email to a large group of people that I'd correspond with in some way and it had two or three lines about the company it had a longer description at the bottom if people wanted to read more but it wasn't something they had to wade through to get to the point and I wrote out very specific Facebook posts and tweets that I would like to ask them to share and I said you know I would love if you would support me by sharing this on social media here are three sample things you could write to do so so that all people literally had to do was copy and paste and I promise you the difference in getting people to spread the word about your product if you give them a copy pasting they can share on social media is absolutely tremendous versus asking them to think of a tweet or a Facebook post themself thirdly seek out like-minded groups for us when we started the muse this was things like the Stanford women in Law Group the Baldwin scholars of Duke it was small collections of people that have already self organized around a purpose that's somewhat related to the one you're trying to serve so if you're offering of something of value and you're approaching them away that is genuine we often asked for feedback on the product you'll often hear a very strong response and be able to get initial communities of users and not only that but because they're using often trying out or testing your product or site with each other they may give you more interesting feedback than a single individual trying it out by themselves now fourth amended a little bit more time on because this is one I think that is often very challenging for early-stage founders and certainly one where I made a ton of mistakes before we found our group with Muse and it's knowing how and when to approach bloggers and reporters so obviously before you even reach out to the first press person you want to think ahead of time who is the appropriate person for me to reach out to at this stage and we've talked a lot about yesterday about you know how what is it that you're looking for do you need a hundred beta testers do you need a thousand beta testers it's often not that necessarily the best way to reach out to Good Morning America the New York Times when you're first launching a product because if it's a true MVP people are necessarily going to you know the wide audience the world isn't necessarily going to be the right audience for that so how do you think about the trade bloggers the people who have again those small communities that are relevant to you and target them appropriately and once you've targeted them when you're writing an email I'm going to go back to keeping it concise but I think that's a very very important point you want to think about telling a story people love stories it's so much more interesting than a list of facts or a blast so I you know for us we found was really effective to think about paying a hero of the story constructing it so there was a narrative arc what is the problem that your hero or your product is overcoming what's the opportunity and how are you going to be unique and it's even better if you can relate this to larger trends so for example when we were starting a career site for Millennials there was some statistics that had just come out and a larger story around how a lot of Millennials with college degrees we're working as baristas or working in jobs where they were educationally overqualified pitching a story about your startup linked to a larger trend like that makes it much easier for a reporter who's interested to cover you I often think of it as how would this reporter make the case to their editor that we're the story they should spend time on this week and then finally this also probably goes without saying for some people but understanding that reporters are humans too they're often very fascinating ones they have great backstories and reasons for going into reporting and their job is to look at the trends happening in their area of interest in their field and surface the most important stories and its really great if your story can be one of those but sometimes that people end up treating reporters like story machines I don't think that's very fun for anyone and we found that again and again reporters who have turned us down because of the way that we interact with them and the professionalism and courtesy will end up coming back to us or coming back to the story months or even sometimes a year in the future so my final tip is becoming your own PR machine and I think this has actually been a secret to a lot the growth that we were able to achieve and a lot of the users we were able to find again on no budget and what does this mean it means that out there on the web there are thousands of blogs publications looking for great content and willing to let you talk about your company if you're willing to provide something compelling so when we started the music n we thought we need to reach an audience of young urban professionals Millennials fitting this sort of profile where are they and how do we find them and we approached those sites and offered to write posts for them on topics that would be interesting for their audience in exchange for a backlink in exchange for being able to use what we were doing as an example in the piece we started out with very small blogs we eventually moved to Forbes and after about a year and a half of the strategy I should add writing for Harvard Business Review Inc The Wall Street Journal and what's interesting is we didn't often get it on the first try in fact Forbes turned me down three times before they said yes and Harvard Business Review ignored my email for about a year and two months until they finally followed up but I was very very persistent I was very polite and I understood with every single interaction more about what they were looking for as a publication so those are my five tips they're not clearly the only ways to acquire users out of thin air but they are five of the most insanely easy and low cost that I've found and that gets to the whole heart of this crazy issue which is that ultimately to find your users and deliver something of value to them you need to get really laser focused on who they are what they want what's in it for them and where are they hiding now and when you go deliver that and encourage them to tell others those initial ten users become 100 who become 1,000 who become 10,000 and suddenly you're a whole lot harder to ignore thank you very much

Channel: Lean Startup Co.

Views: 68,101

Rating: 4.903265 out of 5

Keywords: Lean Startup, Kathryn Minshew, User Acquisition

Id: 2cOzUtD8pCg

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 17 2013