How we (Didn’t) Hack our way to 10,000 Users and what you can learn from it

I woke up today with a message from my business partner letting me know our startup, Proposeful, had just hit 10,000 users in 80+ countries.

I want to share how we did it, because this is not a story of overnight success, little effort, failing fast or huge VC investment.

This is a story of over 2 years of hard work with no obvious signs that we were on the right track until very recently. It’s a story of refusing to give up.

Here are the lessons I learned and why we kept going.

#1. It might take years

Are you seriously committed to putting in 1–3 years of work with zero monetary gain?

Or were you hoping you’d break even in 3 months?

We took 3 months just to get our first paying client — U$ 10, yay! — and well over 18 months to reach any significant revenue. And we still invest most of it back into the company.

Thinking that you’ll start seeing money and users pouring in right from the start makes you unmotivated when you’re faced with the reality of what it really takes to build a business.

Most startups won’t ever break even or be profitable, they’ll just give up. Either because they run out of time or patience. Here’s how to keep yourself going when things get confusing.

#2. Build an audience first

The real challenge of building a business is not creating a product or service, it’s getting attention from the market. A lot of people subconsciously know that and start building before ever speaking to the market, which almost always ends up in failure.

It’s a much better strategy to start building an audience around a topic or industry you’re interested in before building a product.

Not only will that allow you to ask your audience what they really need and would be willing to pay for, it will help you spread awareness about your product and finding your first customers, clients or beta testers.

There are many ways to go around building an audience but it mostly comes down to content. Video, audio or written word. Teach, inspire, motivate or entertain people with a common interest and they’ll come back for more.

If you manage to build an audience, you’re thousands of times more likely to succeed building a business because the real hard part is already done.

#3. Experiment freely with pricing

Your pricing strategy will not only affect your revenue, it will affect the perception of your product as a whole.

When your customer is making a purchase decision they will measure your product or service against your competitors and having the wrong price — both too high or too low — will hurt you immensely.

I believe you should experiment will new prices or packages constantly. We tested everything between U$2 a month (seriously) and U$ 100 a month for our most basic package and we saw how that affected our conversion, which allowed us to understand exactly how much value we provide to the average user and how to optimize our growth.

Don’t be afraid to test a much higher or much lower price, you might be surprised by how positive that change might be.

#4. Know what your endgame is

I believe that having a clear goal for your company and for your part in it on the next 5 to 10 years is the absolute best way to keep yourself motivated and consistent.

There are three basic outcomes to building a businesses:

• You intend to keep it as a life long lifestyle business;
• You intend to grow it to a point, exit and do something else;
• You intend to grow it to the point of an IPO;

Each of those requires a different mindset and knowing where you fit will help you make decisions faster. For example, if your goal is to create a lifestyle business, you’ll probably not want to grow aggressively to the point where it consumes all of your time and profits, but that attitude would be necessary if you’re aiming an IPO in 10 years.

If you don’t know what your goals in this business are, you risk handling decisions with inconsistence and reaching none of those goals.

Remember, all three options are great. Choose what makes you happier. The only wrong choice would be not choosing at all.

#5. Things compound into your success

I’m a markerter and a developer so I very much fit what you’d think a “growth hacker” looks like.

Indeed, I did a lot of clever things that quickly affected our growth, but none of those created a shortcut. We didn’t grow 10x in a month because of any of them. Things just kept adding up until growth was inevitable.

And I wish everyone understood that’s what it takes and we could all just be more patient. You need to put in consistent, hard and smart work and over the course of months everything you built — every article you wrote, every client you helped, every ad you ran, every partnership you closed — will start working together to help you reach more people, sell more stuff and find new opportunities.

Look at whoever you admire, no matter if it’s an entrepreneur, YouTuber, musician, scientist or athlete and you’ll see that none of them hacker anything. They worked, studied and tried new things everyday for years and built sustainable success.

If you’re handed exposition and success overnight and have not been building a solid structure to lay it on top of you’ll just become another one hit wonder like that song you love by who knows who.

#6. Build a business, not a startup

To close, I feel that calling tech business startups created a sort of detachment from what they really are: business.

Yes, a lot of the behemoths of today were startups that were only able to exist because of venture capital backing allowing them to amass millions of users without any revenue. That, however, happened ten to fifteen years ago and the market changed drastically.

VCs are much more interested in business capable of generating revenue. It shows them the founders understand how business work and are only playing with house money. Also, if you focus on building a real business from day one you might never need VC money at all, which is even better in the long term.

But TK, you said build an audience first. And now you’re saying I should be focusing on revenue. What the hell?

Building an audience first doesn’t mean you need to be burning money. Yes, startups like WhatsApp and Instagram used their tools to build an audience of users using venture capital money to pay for their operation but you can’t count on that. The chances that you have a product that will gain that much adoption AND can find backers on today’s market and almost zero.

So what you can do is build an audience while spending little resources — as it’s very cheap to create content now — or build an audience while monetizing it.

That’s exactly what we do, for example. The goal of our company is to reach the entire SMBs industry and we’re doing so but providing quality content and a useful tools while monetizing the heavy users of our tools. This allows us to create sustainable, steady growth without burning through cash.

I know not everyone can afford to be patient but, if you can, be patient

I’m all sim for hustling. I never switch off. Work is on my mind all day long and it’s both my job and my hobby.

But the thing that helped me above all else is patience. I’m lucky enough to be in a moment of my life were I can afford to live humbly, be patient and try to build a business that will give me the life I won’t for my future.

And if you can afford it too — if you don’t need the corporate salary to pay rent and support your family — I hope you don’t throw it away just because you’re not patient. Just because you want money and recognition today.

If you can afford to try to build the life of your dreams — whatever it looks like — it’s basically your duty to give it your all, because there are people who can’t afford it. And you could be one of them.

So, please, work hard everyday. But be patient.