Introduction

This is not a marketing book.

There are enough of those available already. If you want to learn the basic fundamentals of becoming a good marketer, there are great resources out there, and no need for an additional source to muddy those waters.

This is, rather, a list of hacks and a way of thinking I have developed over years of experimentation and research in user acquisition. It’s a no-BS guide for the hackers and makers who have something interesting to show the world but don’t know how to show it.

Since new products have no existing audience to leverage, the first few users who aren’t friends and family are always the hardest. Marketing advice instructing you to better engage your audience doesn’t matter, because you don’t have an audience to engage. For that reason, we’ll focus mostly on acquiring those first few users.

While the focus is on the first users, don’t think that these methods grow old or tired for any type of company. As your user base grows, you can scale up these same practices or tweak them a little bit to better engage your now-existing audience.

Many of the techniques exploit unintentional (and at times unpreventable) loopholes in certain systems. Because each system is unique, it’s important to look at the methods available in terms of the platforms we’re using them on. Though there is certainly crossover (a lot of what works on Twitter works with a twist on Instagram), each platform has intricacies that must be explored in depth.

Because of this, the topics are divided according to medium, and are in no particular order. Jump around and use those that are the best fit for your product.

Disclaimer: A lot of these methods could be used for spam. Indeed, reverse engineering the aspects of spam that work is one of the most interesting ways to look at Internet marketing — most legitimate marketing practices can become spam, and vice versa. While definitions of what is “spam” is to you may vary, pissing people off will always come back to bite you.