Sam Altman ranks four ways to get your first 100 users: email people you know and charge them from day one, do targeted outreach to likely customers, run repeated press stunts like Airbnb did, or skip buying ads on Facebook and Google entirely.
Questions this video answers
Four.
Approximately 2–3%.
Chapters
In terms of getting those users, everyone thinks that they're just going to put up this website, tell one person about it, it's going to take off like wildfire. That's not what usually happens. So there are four common strategies to get your first hundred users. I'm going to go through them in order of roughly best to worst. You can email people you already know and you can ask them to be your customers. You can call in all the favors with anyone you can think of, someone you took a random class with, someone you were friends with in high school. If it's a paid product, you should actually charge. This is important. Remember, people are going to be inclined to do you favors. They're going to be too nice in what they tell you. So if it's a paid product, charge them. Another strategy is to research people that you think might use your product and then email them or whatever and ask them to try it. Conversion rates here are low, maybe 2, 3%. So you'll have to do this to more. But you can send targeted emails and say, hey, I just made this new product. I'd really appreciate if you would try it out. Most people want to be helpful. They probably will. You can do social media, hacker news forms, press, whatever. If this is going to be your growth strategy, you need to figure out a way for it to be ongoing, not a one big pop, and then go away. Most people who do this find that it works once. Then they call up the journalist and say, will you write about me again? And the journalist says, anything changed? No, but I really need users. Will you please write? The journalist still says no. Airbnb is an example of a company that made this work as an ongoing process. And they would do the craziest things. They just kept coming up with press stunt after press stunt. They would mail journalists giant boxes of cereal. So they got on their desk and they were able to get it to keep going. But that's hard. And finally, the laziest and least impressive thing you can do is to just buy ads on Facebook or Google and point people to your website. This is not what I recommend. I don't know of any startup that's gotten big starting this way. I include it because it's the idea that most people try.
