Article · About a 15 minute read

How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users

Lenny Rachitsky · Lenny's Newsletter Freemium Beginner

Most first 100 users advice is vague. This piece is the opposite: it groups the real cold start tactics into seven concrete plays and names the exact company behind each one, from Tinder pitching sororities in person to Dropbox seeding online communities. Read it as a menu to pick from, not a checklist to run top to bottom, since almost every founder here won just one channel that fit them.

  • The tactics sort into seven repeatable plays: go to users offline, find them online, invite friends, manufacture exclusivity, use influencers, get press, and build a community before launch.
  • Most companies got their first users from a single channel that fit their product, so the job is finding your one, not doing all of them.
  • Nearly all of it was unglamorous and manual: door to door, one community at a time, personal invites rather than a growth machine.
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It answers 11 questions

  1. Isn't doing things that don't scale a waste of time, shouldn't I automate from day one?
  2. My launch flopped and nobody cared, did I mess it up?
  3. What's the best channel to launch on, Product Hunt, Reddit, Hacker News, or LinkedIn?
  4. As a woman founder, or one building outside the big startup hubs, how do I turn my background into an edge?
  5. How do I get my first users for the MVP?
  6. How did real successful startups actually land their first customers?
  7. How do I build up an audience before I launch so it's not just crickets?
  8. I only have a landing page and a waitlist, how do I turn signups into paying customers?
  9. Should we ship an ugly, half-working version now or wait until it feels good enough to be proud of?
  10. How do I get my first 100 users when nobody has heard of me?
  11. How do I actually keep my first 10 customers so they don't quietly churn while I go chasing the next 10?

Read with it

  1. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  2. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  3. Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit Rahul Vohra
  4. The definitive talk that reframes launching from a one-shot event into a repeatable tactic, exactly this category's thesis. YC... YC Startup Library Video · ~25 min How to Launch (Again and Again) Kat Manalac (Y Combinator)
  5. Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky
  6. The consumer counterpart to finding B2B customers, focused on manually recruiting your first users for a consumer product. It... Lenny's Newsletter Article How to Find Your Early Adopters by Doing Things That Don't Scale Lenny Rachitsky
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