My biggest takeaways from this research:
- Just seven strategies account for every consumer apps’ early growth.
- Most startups found their early users from just a single strategy. A few like Product Hunt and Pinterest found success using a handful. No one found success from more than three.
- The most popular strategies involve going to your user directly — online, offline, and through friends. Doing things that don’t scale.
- To execute on any of these strategies, it’s important to first narrowly define your target user. Andy Johns recently shared some great advice about this.
- The tactics that you use to get your first 1,000 users are very different from your next 10,000. A topic for a different post.