How to bag early users rapidly when you’re cash-strapped

It’s not easy being an entrepreneur. There’s not much initial capital to speak of and there are few safety nets if failure looks imminent. In a lot of cases, founders are burning through their personal savings, driven solely by the hope of a better future.

For startups to succeed it is critical to attract early adopters, build traction, and double down on strategies to retain users. Having a clear vision on how to monetize is also key. Unfortunately for bootstrapped startups, there’s not a lot of cash to play with and experiment on what works.

Edith Yeung, partner at 500 Mobile Collective, spoke today at the Kickstart stage at Tech in Asia Tokyo 2015 about the mobile customer lifecycle and elaborated on methods startups could utilize to help them get those early users, and get them rapidly.

For acquisition, concentrating on both app store and mobile web SEO is integral, she said. It’s important to build mobile optimized websites and drive traffic back to the appropriate app store. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, then you’re missing out. Desktop visitors should be targeted with a notification to download the app.

Edith stressed upon the necessity of PR, blogging, and promoting video content through sites like YouTube. However, she also spoke about the need to understand your target audience and the sites they frequent. “Many startups feel it’s integral to be featured on TechCrunch, but that may not drive up user acquisition. In some cases, a story on Lifehacker can be much more relevant,” she explained.

Another strategy could be to analyze your competition and see which blogs and media outlets have featured them. Pitch your startup to these specific blogs rather than adopt a general strategy of approaching the big names of the media world.

Working with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like Samsung or Huawei isn’t suitable for early-stage startups. The process of approval is lengthy, time-consuming, and cumbersome, and that time could be utilized in more productive tasks. However, for mature startups, getting your app pre-loaded onto a smartphone can certainly help with user acquisition.

Edith elaborated that targeted ads on Facebook can certainly help with acquisition. If startups have some marketing cash, then it would make sense to use the social media platform.

Other tips included adding the Google Plus sign-in button to your site, which automatically prompts users to install the app when their phone hovers over it. However, this works only for Android phones. App referral is also another important growth hacking strategy. Startups should aim to be amongst the top 25 ranked apps, but to maintain that ranking they need to be raking in a few thousand installs on a daily basis. To sustain this effort it would make sense to partner with other developers.

Activation

After you’ve acquired users, what are you doing to ensure they’re engaging with the app? Edith explained it’s important to have a user friendly onboarding process, with approximately three to five screenshots explaining the benefits of the app to users. “Always think from the user point of view, not the product,” she stressed. “What are the actions you want people to do from the beginning?”

A welcome email when a user activates the service is a nifty trick to make them feel welcome and appreciated. It’s also integral not to be too pushy. Some apps will send a number of push notifications per day, but that might irritate users and drive them away. Alternatively, if the app asks a user for permission to send push notifications, it will significantly reduce the possibility of uninstallation.

Retention

Monetization