From Tinder to Hey Marketers
Building an app has never been easier with the advent of no-code and low-code platforms.
You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars anymore, but a few bucks and hours can get you your minimum viable product.
However, building is just the first step of the entrepreneurial journey. Marketing is another critical factor you need to take into account.
Product development without marketing is like french fries without ketchup. You need to be able to market your product to get the critical mass of 1,000 users.
Let’s take a look at some startups, from the billion-dollar companies to the small bootstrapped startups, to understand the best practices and see how you can apply the same methodologies to your product.
Spoiler alert: what is necessary is to prepare the supply of products (job listings, cabs, hot people, quality information) so that the users will be attracted enough to join the platform.
1. Tinder: 15,000 users within a week from launching, 24 million active users in 30 months
Tinder’s value proposition is that you could put yourself on the market within 10 seconds, as opposed to the long surveys you had to fill in on other services.
Who will be enticed by a quick, free dating service? College students.
Since some of the team members were in sororities, they required people to download the Tinder app to get on the guestlist whenever the sorority had a party. Once all the hot and cute girls were on the platform, it was an easy pitch to the fraternities.
This is the key: preparing the necessary merits for users to join. It will kick-start the cycle of hyper-growth rolling.
With a solid user base on college campuses, the users naturally told their friends and family about the app, making the app go viral on other campuses.
After succeeding in college, Tinder did not rely on mass marketing or Facebook ads. Instead, they recreated the organic experience using celebrities and influencers.
TL;DR: Tinder’s service requires users to be close by, so it had to be localized a tight network yet. So they decided to focus on college fraternities and sororities. Tinder’s founders also did the actual legwork to go the users and understand their core needs.
“It happened around January. We had been picking up on college campuses, then everyone went home and told their cousins and older brothers and friends about it, and all of a sudden Tinder started growing like a virus.” — Sean Rad, founder of Tinder.
2. Uber
Uber also wanted to grow organically and through word of mouth. Hence, the founders of Uber focused on providing the best experience for when the users felt the most pain.
To provide the best experience, Uber did not start with Uber Pool or standard Uber. Instead, Uber decided to start with Uber X, with luxurious black cars driven by professional drivers. That’s like a professional chauffeur driving you around.
And Uber approached people experiencing the pain of not being able to flag cabs by targeting cities with a massive dislocation between supply and demand for taxis. The street team waited for the moment where there were large concerts, sporting events, or an influx of people to run promotions.
As a customer, you could easily flag a cab, which happened to be a great experience and at a low price. Customers fell in love with the knowledge and flocked towards the platform.
Another example of hooking consumers based on solid customer merit.
3. Hey Marketers
The above are billion-dollar companies that started more than ten years ago, and you may claim that it is not relevant for the individual creator in 2021. So let’s look at a more small-scale, relatable service: Hey Marketers.
Hey Marketers is a remote platform built on No-Code tools by a non-technical marketer, Corey Haines. It is a job posting platform specifically for markers.
When starting the platform, to make the website appealing to marketers, Corey scraped many marketing positions online manually. Once that was done, he tweeted about his project and posted the project on Product Hunt, earning 5th in the daily ranking.
This allowed the website to have 1,000 visits, kick-starting the project. After the website started to gain traffic, he still worked on Google SEO (Search Engine Optimization), mail marketing, and directly emailing HR managers.
In conclusion, even though it took manual work, he first started by making the platform attractive by scraping a bunch of marketing positions.
Takeaways
Even if you look at all the examples above or other platforms (Airbnb, Etsy, etc.), they all started by ensuring that the platform has an attractive supply of merits for the users.
The pattern goes like this: 1. Prepare an attractive supply for the customer. 2.Choose the right niche to market. 3. Provide the best experience for a specific group of people.
I have started a simple app where users can find the best spots of greenery in Tokyo. Right now, it still only has about 20 spots, but I plan to increase that to 100~200 spots so that people in Tokyo can find a way to take a breather during the COVID pandemic.
The app can be checked out here: https://ikoiapp.glideapp.io/
Further reading suggestions:
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Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown