3 founders, 25 good listeners and a rainy Delhi afternoon. Topic: “Get to millions of visitors without spending money”. It was a perfect setting for sharing of experiences by those 3 doers (Ankur@Akosha, Rajat@Socialappshq, Pallav@Knowlarity) about their own experiences of getting users, when they started. Keeping in its tradition, Avinash and Nakul organized this month’s meet-up in the office of Akosha.
Ankur, started the afternoon with his thoughts on “Zero” cost marketing. He shared many simple things that start-ups can do or shouldn’t do. It is not easy in the beginning to get people to know about your product and/or brand. One would typically need to find innovative ways. He shared some of this tricks that Akosha followed and what worked and what not worked. One of the key takeaway was that one should never outsource SEO. The product is yours, outside people cannot help you out. You have to learn, try and make it perfect. One also need to know about google analytics, if one is launching a web product (or if I think about it, any web connected product. It could be a website or it could be an app). Audience also shared their experiences with SEO and many felt that if done correctly, it can do wonders.
Rajat also shared some neat ways where companies have taken help of SEO. If your product allows (or if you can find ways of doing so), you make others do your SEO work. e.g. you can do content partnerships where your content is shown by other leading websites.
Ankur talked about what @myakosha did for getting users. #pnmeetup pic.twitter.com/73MthX9nPn
— Ajay Bansal (@internet_india) June 15, 2013
Many other consumer connect ways were discussed like Twitter, email marketing. Email marketing generated quite a bit of discussion given that different people had different experience. However this is also a fact that email is a very powerful tool. A trick, which I find worth mentioning is, always run your campaign in 2 steps. You always get email databases from market or from “someone”. Run a dummy campaign to exclude bad addresses (you can use a dummy domain as well for this). In Part 2, exclude bad addresses and use your actual domain to send your emails.
Use a pile-on strategy to get viral vehicle. @rajatgarg79 from @socialappshq #pnmeetup @Product_Nation pic.twitter.com/wepxipWs6c — Ashish Bhagwat (@ashish_bhagwat) June 15, 2013
For finding leads, in your early days, one need to think out of the box. e.g. if you are in classifieds business, visiting your competitor sites would give you quite a number of leads. It is also true that finding fist few customers if often way more difficult than getting your next 1000 users. When you start, many a times you believe that world is your playground. Problem is that you keep looking for that first mate to play with. As Pallav (Founder Knowlarity) shared an anecdote about how he got first customer, there were many oohs and aahas I could hear among audience. Getting you first customer also tests one’s persistence as was evident in the anecdote shared by Rajat.
Rajat from @socialappshq talking about social media marketing. #pnmeetup pic.twitter.com/x4i1BLG9bz
— Ajay Bansal (@internet_india) June 15, 2013
In startup, we always need people who can hit the ground from day 1. There is no, as they say it, settling in time. This was very well explained by Pallav. An interesting graph shared by Pallav
Pallav @knowlarity talking about how to get that first customer. #prodmgmt #pnmeetup pic.twitter.com/mHqWBTHg23 — Ajay Bansal (@internet_india) June 15, 2013
In a Start-up, you are typically looking for a Maverick sales person.
Overall, an afternoon, from which I could find many practical take-aways. There may not really be Zero cost way to reach million users, however there are many ways to do this in price effective way.
Guest Post Contributed by Ajay Bansal, Director, Product Management at U2opia Mobile