Bootstrapping to Grow to 10,000 Users Part 1: The Marketing Playbook Foundations

Photo by Kevin Grieve on Unsplash

Growing a B2C startup is hard. It’s even harder when you’re bootstrapping growth, have no resources for paid advertising aka growth marketing and when you’re not part of the ‘in’ influencer crowds on Twitter, Clubhouse, Instagram and YouTube (which you should start working on right now by the way). But it is doable to bootstrap your growth to 10,000 users. At Alpe we grew from 0–10,000 users over 6 months and in this post, I’ll chronicle what worked, what didn’t, what frustrated me the most and what I wish I’d known sooner.

I wish I had had a post like this. Because the growth playbook for early-stage startups isn’t well known. There simply aren’t many people who’ve done it. Sure, there are lots of growth PMs, growth managers and ninja’s from all kinds of fantastic companies — Uber, Airbnb, Monday.com, Lemonade and on, but most likely they don’t have relevant experience and advice for this stage. The stage when you have no funds, no team, no time, resources or simply users to do good A/B tests. I know because I spoke to them while researching how to grow. Simply, growing from 0–10,000 is an entirely different beast.

Our story

Context is everything, and here’s some about Alpe Audio so that you can best judge what here is relevant for you.

For young professionals who need to learn and master new topics, but have a busy lifestyle, Alpe is an audio education platform (think Coursera meets podcasts), that enables you to master topics from A-Z in the time you have — which is when you’re ‘on the go’ — commuting, running errands or out for a jog.

Our goal post launch wasn’t, in fact, to grow our top line users. It was to iterate on our product to reach high retention metrics for our users. Finding a benchmark for metrics for a company at this stage was very hard: what’s good retention, what’s bad? If a user finished an entire course but then churned — is that good because they enjoyed our content or is that bad because they left the platform?

Again, not many operators or investors have been at this stage, and so we had to settle for what made sense and what our own data and user interviews was telling us about how to measure a ‘successful’ user and their ‘willingness to pay’. For us these were the metrics that we aimed for:

1. At least 30% 90 day retention
2. Weekly active users logging in ~2 a week
3. WAUs learning ~50 minutes.

Weekly Average Listening time (minutes) for our Learners — Image by author

This was a challenge — we were bootstrapping, didn’t have much content or development resources and user expectations are higher than ever. We’re also competing with podcasts which besides being great and having an almost infinite amount of content are free to boot (this startup thing is a heavy lift!).

In order to iterate and improve on our retention metrics we needed a steady drip of users, each and every week, so that we could test features, hear feedback and improve our offering. For this, we needed to acquire those users. In short, we needed to grow.

This was our reason to grow and what our goal was all about. It wasn’t about a big bump of users, rather it was about steadily growing our weekly installs, which would drip down the funnel into our core learners — a much harder goal. It’s much easier to spend $500 on a one time promotion or giveaway to acquire traffic. It’s harder to build a customer acquisition mechanism that works steadily and compounds over time, but it’s really what we needed to improve Alpe.

I’ll break down our user growth journey into two buckets:

1. 0–1,000 users
2. 1,000–10,000 users

I chose this breakdown because 1,000 users is where our strategy changed, roughly speaking. For you that could be 400 or 1200 users, but that’s the ballpark.

Going from “Zero to one” (or 0–1,000)

Between user #1 and user #1000 we had several stages:

1. Private beta: MVP: 0–50 users — just seeing your product works and getting the rawest feedback possible.
2. Public beta: 50–400 users — iterating to improve your value proposition
3. Product launch: 400–1000 users — setting the foundations for growth

Step 1: Getting to 400 users

Getting to 400 users was straightforward. Between a team of two co-founders and 3 interns, finding 400 acquaintances whom we thought were good testers was a function of spending hours on our WhatsApp & Facebook. The main hurdle to get over is the shyness of reaching out to people you haven’t been in touch with for a while and asking them to download and check out your app.

Don’t worry about it. Most people were happy to help or at least said they were happy to :). Out of 200–300 messages I don’t believe we got even a single hard rejection. Sure there were people for whom Alpe wasn’t a good fit and so they didn’t download it, but all were supportive and didn’t take offense from a ‘please download my app message’.

When you do this, set aside time for it, don’t do it ‘on the go’ — you’re about to start conversations with 100 people you actually know and care about, so make sure to give them the time and attention they might want back from you. These are also people who you will need to follow up with for feedback in a week or two. Of all the cohorts of users you’ll onboard, this one is the one that provides the most feedback because they’re your direct contacts and are only a Whatsapp conversation away.

We didn’t onboard all these users at once, rather we spread them out over 4 weeks. We wanted to be able to iterate and measure improvements, so we had to manually drip this user growth in.

One aspect of this that I did not expect at all is the emotional challenge and difficulty of showing the app that I had been working so hard on (which was barely working) to essentially everyone in my life: friends, family and business contacts.

All of a sudden the app was my representative, my emissary, to the world. When it was full of bugs, I was full of bugs. And it was full of bugs. Horribly basic and embarrassing bugs — login issues, playback issues — everything. While all the feedback I received was well intentioned — it’s still tiring to receive constructive criticism for an entire day. This was emotionally draining. I covered this feeling more in depth in my post ‘Failing fast hurts’, so prepare yourself emotionally for this.

Two other strategies that worked:

1. Student focus groups: We reached out to several professors/innovation courses to pitch Alpe to and while not all were interested, most were, and some were happy to assign Alpe as a research project for students. This gave us an immediate cohort of engaged ‘beta testers’. 2–3 groups like this = 60–70 users. While these weren’t organic users per se, they provided valuable information and feedback.
2. Interviews: Throughout the summer we onboarded 3 interns & one full time employee. We interviewed ~75 candidates and yes, we expected them to download Alpe pre-interview and give us feedback during their interview.

What communities could be relevant to you?

Step 2: Going from 400–1000

Going from 400–1000 is where things start going beyond your personal circles. You’re no longer inviting friends and acquaintances with white glove treatment, rather it’s about finding the channels that you can lean into to start growing.

Up until this point, we had been interviewing every user personally — hopping on a phone call or a WhatsApp chat and analyzing their experience and actual app usage (tools like UXcam are valuable here). But now we needed larger weekly cohorts. We wanted to start analyzing funnels, user journeys & retention and test features at a faster pace. We needed larger cohorts for that so that data would be significant.

Bootstrapping user growth to 10,000 — Image by author

The 400–1000 phase is where we tested different growth avenues to see what would work for us. Importantly, we had already laid the foundations for the work we were about to do.

Bonus: Laying foundations for growth to reach 10,000 users

There are certain things to do from day zero, preferably before if you can:

• Set up social media presence for your company — We started out with Alpe.fm but eventually shifted over to Alpe Audio on all platforms (FB, IG, LinkedIn, Twitter).
• Spend two hours researching best practices on posting. Not so much you get frozen by perfectionism, not too little that your posts are ineffective. For example you want to know that LinkedIn works best with both images and text, that adding three to seven hashtags makes a difference to visibility and that commenting on a post is better than sharing. Facebook on the other hand is different — sharing is better than commenting and hashtags don’t matter.
• Start posting! When you do start to grow, people will be looking at your pages more and more — the more legit and rich they are, the better. If they’re empty, people won’t convert.
• Follow the right people. Every space has influencers and thought leaders as well as sub communities on Slack, Reddit and Discord. Join and follow them. Start seeing how the influencers think and what they post about. This will help curate your own feed for later with good relevant content and help you to engage with the right people. For example the creator economy has multiple relevant Slack channels (example here), a discord channel (example here) and newsletters (for example this)
• Find out where your users hang out online. Sparktoro.com is a good tool for this. Start getting acquainted with those places, whether it’s TikTok, Facebook, Reddit, Chess.com or specific forums. Setup multiple users for the high priority locations. This sounds ‘botty’ 🤖 but it isn’t. The idea isn’t to spam, it’s to:

1. Have different users so you can test different posts not as your actual handle.

Reason 1: Test out your content before posting from your actual account.

2. Interact with yourself to raise engagement — massively important for early stage startups when you don’t have a brand. Humans are a herd animal — we come to where the action is, you need to fake it until you make it.

Reason 2: Hey, if Disney can do it, so can you — generate engagement.

• Build out your profiles authenticity and functionality. The point above is especially true for communities like Reddit and Quora, where you have to first contribute to other answers before you can post your own stuff and get traction. So start early and build useful profiles — this can often take a month or two of organic work.
• Generate value on social media — start getting involved in conversations regarding your space on social media. By now you should be an expert in your space, doubly so if you’re following the right accounts. Start generating value for users in whatever internet communities are relevant to you.
• There are other things to lay groundwork for: mainly PR, SEO and ASO. Each large topics which are covered in our Alpe Audio Course: The Entrepreneurs Growth Playbook, but didn’t contribute materially to growing to 10,000 users so I’ve left out of the blog.

This might sound like a lot of things to do, and it is, but it’s manageable. Set aside 30 minutes a day as your marketing foundations time. In those 30 minutes get all of the above done — post, interact on social media and track what’s going on in your industry.

The growth effects of these start out slow, especially if you’re starting from a low base of users, but these things compound over time.

Once the foundations have been laid, it’s time to start testing different channels for growth. This stage will get you from 400–1000 users and lay the groundwork for getting to 10,000.

In part 2 of this blog I’ll cover our journey to 10,000, the channels of organic and paid marketing that we tried to get there (follow me on Twitter not to miss it). If you’re looking for a more structured walk-through of our entire playbook and framework you should definitely take our ‘Entrepreneurs Growth Playbook’ Course on Alpe Audio.