How we got our first 1,000 beta signups

Published in

Antler

5 min readOct 20, 2020

This is the story of how the founding team at Meetric got its first 1,000 beta signups for its upcoming product.

This is not one of these insane success stories where we got 1,000 in 48 hours… It took us a few months to get there — but if you’re curious to know what we did and learned along the way, read on.

If you don’t know what Meetric is, it’s a tool to easily record notes & actions discussed in meetings.

Each ‘Meetric meeting’ is attached to the relevant event in your calendar and can easily show past notes/actions from related meetings.

It also takes care of the admin for you: sending the meeting recap by email, chasing people on their actions, etc.

Meetric’s business model is freemium, meaning most of its users can try and use it for free.

Freemium’s major drawback though is its ARPU. Because most users will never end up paying, the ARPU can be low initially, meaning the CPL needs to be even lower, a few dollars max.

What didn’t work

Twitter ads

We tried Twitter ads and even though the CPC was low, the sign-up conversion on the website https://meetric.app was extremely poor (which led me to think a lot of these clicks were bots in the first place).

Google ads

We advertised on search terms and quickly discovered that long-tail keywords in our space (‘meeting action tracker’) have very little traffic and popular keywords (‘meeting notes’) have a high CPC.

LinkedIn ads

Even though its ad platform has great targeting (role/industry/seniority/etc.), the CPC is also too high ($3 to $7).

Quiz

We built a quiz around meetings: ‘Which business leader are you in meetings?’. At the end of the quiz, we’d talk about Meetric. We promoted the quiz through social media and social ads, and even though we had >100 entries, very few signed-up to Meetric.

Saas directories

We listed Meetric in a few Saas directories but have not got much out of it. Some were too small with not enough traffic (Alexa ranking is a good indicator for this), others are extremely popular and competitive (Capterra being one of them).

Hashtags conversations

We followed certain hashtags relevant to Meetric on Twitter & LinkedIn and participated in discussions containing them but it didn’t drive any signups, unfortunately.

What worked

Startup community ~100 signups

Startup people are avid tech adopters: they’re already using Saas products and usually enjoy testing out new ones (especially if it’s going to make their lives easier).

We found startup Facebook groups in our city/area and simply did a bit of self-promotion once a month on what we were up to.

There are a few relevant subreddits around startups we’ve posted in which also brought signups.

Beta product directories ~100 signups

We tried a few and only 2 worked.

BetaList is the first one, you create your startup profile and pay ~$100 to skip the waiting line.

ProductHunt Upcoming is the second one. To get featured in this list, you purchase their ‘Ship’ product ~$60 to create your startup page and upload your list of existing email signups to add social proof when you get featured.

We’ll list on ProductHunt (not the Upcoming list) once Meetric is fully released with stronger retention metrics.

Twitter follower outreach ~100 signups

Our Twitter account is only a few months old. It hasn’t been active much but already has ~600 followers.

To get this number, we did one thing: follow the Twitter followers of our competitors.

We assumed if someone follows the Twitter account of a similar solution, this person could be interested in Meetric, follow us back and possibly sign-up to Meetric.

Using the chrome extension Superpowers for Twitter and a tool like PhantomBuster, we automated this process: 1) follow all the followers of X account 2) send an intro message about Meetric to anyone who follows us back.

And in addition to getting signups, we ended up having conversations with very interesting people relevant in our space (investors, startup advisors, etc.)

Antler community ~200 signups

Meetric was born of the Antler Accelerator Program in April 2020.

Antler looks after its portfolio companies and provided us with a platform to put our name out there:

Virtual demo day
Slack global Antler community
Antler Medium publication
Antler Linkedin posts
Antler PR

Through Antler, we get lots of people hearing about Meetric and signing up. Leveraging this community has been a big help.

LinkedIn connection outreach ~200 signups

Meetric can be used by many roles across companies, specifically customer-facing roles but also internal roles interacting with multiple teams.

We needed to find these people and tell them about Meetric.

Coupling LinkedIn search with PhantomBuster, we could export CSVs of thousands of people in these roles. We didn’t get their email address but we got their names and LinkedIn profiles.

Using PhantomBuster, we automated our individual reach out to all these people through LinkedIn (using ‘connection request’) and promote Meetric.

We were able to test different roles and see which ones convert the best, helping us refine our key target audience, with little time invested.

Facebook & Instagram ads ~100 signups

Learning from our LinkedIn outreach, we gave social ads a try with a small budget, creating a few ad sets targeting different roles & interests.

For each ad set, we created 4 ad variations using different ad formats (video, images, etc.) and messaging relevant to the targeted audience.

Our CPL is around $10 within a few weeks of experimentation (decent cost advertising to a ‘cold’ audience) and we’re working to reduce it to a few $.

This approach also allows us to experiment with different messaging which we re-use in other channels and on the website.

Product virality ~200 signups

From day 1, we’ve built the product in a way it leverages virality.

You can use Meetric in any of your meetings, even if you’re the only participant in the meeting to use it.

After the meeting, we’ll send a nice email meeting recap to all the participants of your meeting with the actions and notes you’ve written down in Meetric.