Acquiring the first 500 users in 50 days!

Hello everyone! We just hit this number! Got our first 500 customers at Leanbe and I decided to share how we managed to do that here with you all. Maybe this will turn into a fruitful discussion and help new startups that are about to launch. To to keep it simple and short, I've broken it down into several points. Presenting it with a timeline. Also, I should mention that our product Leanbe is a roadmap generation platform that also allows collecting feedback, prioritizing future actions, and updating users. It's meant to be used by product owners and managers. So, here we go. 1. To start off, we prepared a product launch campaign after extensive research. The launch was scheduled for Sep. 13. We used as many ways of announcing ourselves as possible and generating a discourse over the issue we're trying to solve with our product. This includes our own social media pages, different groups on Facebook, Reddit, podcasts, Quora, webinars, basically anything that was available. 2. Second, just 10 days after, we launched Leanbe on Product Hunt with a discount to see how the professional tech community and interested people would react. This was fairly unexpected, honestly. Leanbe raised so much interest that it got the badges of the product of the Day, Week, and even Month one after another! The first bigger segment of users was from our Product Hunt campaign. And that's logical because we had put a lot of effort into building it. 3. Several weeks after the Product Hunt campaign we started a limited-time Lifetime Deal campaign with an irresistible offer: 93% OFF the annual value of the best plan we have. For a lifetime. 4. We hit that even better when we had an additional offer of 20% OFF the lifetime deal on this Halloween. Email campaigns, group posts, social media made it work. Without running ads. Yes, that's true, we didn't run an ad. During all this period. So here are my main tips: - If you're really sure your product is solving a big issue, don't be afraid to show it to the world. - Do your research, voice it out, run awareness-raising campaigns, generate discussions. Let the world think and speak about it. - Make irresistible offers. Make them really good, really smart, and limit the time of the offer. - Don't think of gaining much money, think of acquiring a strong and loyal user base. If your product is useful and smart they're going to be your ambassadors. - Be generous in your offers. It's the holiday season. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas are around the corner. Even if you have an attractive offer, do the unexpected: have an additional special offer on top of that. I call it "jaw-dropping marketing". :) - And about the timing: keep your special offers as long as needed. But don't run them endlessly. That should be a special treat. You can maybe set a real milestone for yourself and bring your offer to an end once you reach it. And the last one, whenever you're sending a campaign, end it with another campaign. That's to say, each big campaign ending is itself a big campaign to think, work on and prepare. At Leanbe, we had a milestone of 500 users. We are now bringing the LTD campaign to an end this Sunday. And if you're interested in how we're closing out LTD, please check our website and ask as many questions as you have. Happy to help :) Link to our website: https://bit.ly/2ZX3RqE