How much traffic do you need to get your first 1,000 users?

If you have a product nobody wants, you need infinite traffic. If you have a highly valuable product and the price is right, you need less.

My first questions to a startup founder struggling to earn users would be:

• Have you talked to the few people who are signing up and asked them why? What they use it for? Why they picked your product?
• Have you asked them what it’s missing that could make it more valuable?
• Have you watched a few people, quietly and in-person, who have never tried your product, go to your landing page, try to sign up, and use it?

Find your value

The #1 reason people sign up for products is that they see value in them. Value = usefulness / cost. If your product solves a really big problem, usefulness is high. If it costs too much, its perceived value could still be low.

Once you’ve built something that’s valuable to people, you also need to spread the word and make it easy to use.

The #1 reason people sign up for products is they see value in them. Value = usefulness / cost. [tweet this]

Spread the word

If nobody knows about your awesome product, only the crickets will sing your praises. If you get 600 new visitors a day, you’re reaching 219,000 new people per year. At that rate, it will take you 1456 years to have reached everyone in America.

To grow it faster, you’ll need to either reach more people, or make sure the 219,000 people you do reach are high quality prospects — people who likely need your product.

Make it easy to use

• Sign up process — How many hurdles must I jump to use your product? The right number is different for every product, and changes as your product grows. When you’re new, requiring personal info like a person’s email and Facebook friends can be too much. Once you have a strong fan base, requiring them can accelerate growth. Sometimes, even signing up at all is too high a hurdle. Airlines figured that out when they let people book flights as a guest, and sales went up.
• User onboarding process — Everything from your post-sign-up emails, to the first page the user sees will either engage them, or send them running to the competition. Good user onboarding can also affect signups through referrals. If I sign up, and can quickly start getting value, I’ll tell all my friends how great your product is. Those people will likely grind through an onerous sign-up process because a trusted friend told them the the juice is worth the squeeze.

Time to iterate

Now that you have a product, people are finding it, and they are signing up, you’re well on your way. It’s time to iterate on:

• Adding more value — so existing users tell their friends and new folks stick around
• Reaching more of the right people — more visits = more users
• Simplifying sign up and getting started — so fewer people drop out from the time they find you to the time they start seeing value

Struggling to get to 1000?

Here are a few books that might help:

• The Lean Startup and Scrum to build more value into the product.
• Positioning and Web Copy That Sells for marketing help.
• Don’t Make Me Think for usability testing, sign up, and onboarding optimization.

Interested in more tips and insight for startup founders? I offer a weekly email series — sign up for it here.

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