EDIDIONG'S PUBLIC DIARY

How To Acquire Users

FEB 08, 2015

If you launch your product without knowing how exactly users will find the product, it will likely fail. Let me give you a short overview of some methods of acquiring users:

1. Viral: This means that your users invite other users AS A CORE FUNCTIONALITY OF THE PRODUCT. E.g. Skype. This is not about putting a Facebook like button. It’s about your product being fundamentally viral. Here, you face the chicken-and-egg problem though (will talk about that some other time).
2. Search engine traffic: This means your product has to have thousands and thousands of pages of content, with more being pumped out every single day. E.g. Naij.com, Nairaland
3. Paid: If your product does not have growth from the other categories, then you will need to pay for growth. If you are going to pay for growth, then you need to know how much it costs to acquire a single customer, and how much money that customer will bring you over his lifetime. That number has to be positive. The larger it is, the better the fundamentals of your business.
4. Sales: a subset of paid is sales. Sales is where you have a team that goes out manually to sell the product. This is common in SME and Enterprise software. Sales is very expensive. So your product has to be high priced to make this feasible. I.e, you have to increase your customer lifetime value so that the expense on acquiring that customer makes sense.
5. Platform: You can also acquire users by being part of a platform that already has a lot of users — e.g. an app store. In such a case, your product will need to be very compelling, as you will compete with other similar products. Also, it is likely that you will have to keep the price of your product quite low, as the other products will quickly meet the quality of yours in polish.by Mark Essien