The journey of getting 100 users in a week
Finding the first few users is always a daunting task, we always wonder where to start, what to post, how to write that perfect intro that goes viral.
But that's usually not the case.
Before building the MVP I actually used an excel sheet to validate the core use case and that took me just a few hours. I have written another post about How I validated an MVP just using an excel.
What are we building?
A community of verified and opted-in professionals who can connect with each other over phone calls.
You can find other and book calls with them for advice, sales pitch, market research, hiring etc.
It speeds up your outreach to folks who are open to connecting for those specific reasons.
Its called InstaConnect.
Time to develop MVP
We took a week time to put together a simple web page with the following functionalities:
- Login using Linkedin
- Mobile number verification
- Search panel where users can search for others and find their InstaConnect number
- Cloud telephony logic — one person can call others through a virtual number
- Invite code/Referrals
- Deducting and adding Karma to users
- Notification over SMS
These are all the core functionalities that were required to test the MVP and the flow.
We did not really worried about UI/UX as such and kept it a single page app without any fancy functionalities.
Here is the snapshot.
Just a single page.
Coming to the journey of 100 users
I used only two channels to acquire these 100 users:
- Linkedin (90% users)
- Cold emails (10% users)
I already have around 18,000+ followers on Linkedin. And I consistently write about B2B sales, lead generation and my posts usually get around 8–10K views and sometimes 100K+ as well.
So I won't say it happened overnight but it was a result of last one year of my efforts which eventually let people believe in what I post.
So I posted this on my wall.
Around 42 comments and I included my InstaConnect number.
So anyone who would like to speak with me to get the advice they have to call me on InstaConnect number.
My number on InstaConnect is +91 93193 60960 extension 10.
Once a person called, they got an IVR message that said please register first and they got SMS with a link to register.
So they registered and then called me.
This got me around 10 users in day 1.
So I used this as an experiment to test the flow of signup, SMS notification etc. Once I had confidence that things are working so I went to Linkedin again for my second post.
This post was direct announcing InstaConnect with an explanation video that I shot by myself using Loom.
I got 82 comments on this post and that led to around 30 signups.
So a total of about 40 signups.
After that, I had posted 3 more posts on Linkedin on alternate days.
With these, I got a total of about 90 users.
Using cold emails to target specific titles
The benefit of a cold email is that you can control the kind of audience you want to bring in.
I wanted to add founders as users to InstaConnect so I created an email campaign.
Since I am also the founder of EasyLeadz, which is a B2B database and lead generation company. It was just a few minutes task for me to build an automated campaign to reach out to founders.
I sent an email to around 250 founders and got around 30 users from that campaign.
This is the email copy I used.
My goal was to get to 100 users as quickly as possible so that I can work with those users, get their feedback and build it based on what they need.
Till this time, the focus was on the India region.
Now I have decided to add 100 users for USA region as well.
The reason I am doing this is that I want to understand the usage between users in India and users in the USA and based on deciding that market I want to focus upon.
Shameless plug
If you are in India or in USA you can signup for the private beta of InstaConnect on this link.
What's next?
I am working on finding 100 users in the USA region. It's difficult because we have not done it before, our time zone is different, the audience is different, way of messaging is different, thought process is different, we dont have any network or connections in the USA.
So just working on a few channels to find users based out of USA.
I will write another post about that soon.
