Weekly Roundup: Getting Your First 1,000 Subscribers, How to Bootstrap a Software Company, and More!

Welcome to our first weekly roundup! Each week, our team is going to be compiling a handful of the best articles we stumbled across during the previous week to provide you with a little inspiration to start your week off with. Sometimes the articles featured may be directly related to development, and sometimes not, but either way, you can rest assured that they will be insightful!

How the Biggest Consumer Apps Got Their First 1k Users (Click to Read More)

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What it is

Lenny Rachitsky is the author of Lenny’s Newsletter—a weekly newsletter that he uses to tackle reader questions about product, growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing them out at the office. You can send him your questions here, and in return, he’ll offer you some actionable, “real talk” advice.

Something we hear time and time again is that new app creators struggle with adoption. It’s one thing to know that you’re building something useful that others will want to use, and another thing entirely to know how to reach those people and convince them to give you app a try! Regardless of which market you’re breaking into, it’s important to have an acquisition strategy in place well in advance of launching your app.

In this article, Lenny digs into this topic further and shares the strategies that some of the biggest companies around today have used to secure their first 1,000 subscribers.

The takeaway (according to Lenny)

1. Just seven strategies account for every consumer apps’ early growth. 
2. Most startups found their early users from just a single strategy. A few like Product Hunt and Pinterest found success using a handful. No one found success from more than three.
3. The most popular strategies involve going to your user directly — online, offline, and through friends. Doing things that don’t scale.
4. To execute on any of these strategies, it’s important to first narrowly define your target user. Andy Johns recently shared some great advice about this.
5. The tactics that you use to get your first 1,000 users are very different from your next 10,000. A topic for a different post.

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Bootstrapping a Software Company (Click to Read More)

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What it is

Bootstrapping a software company is the best way to work for yourself and build wealth. Having grown four software companies to over a million in revenue each (one of which is WP Engine with over $100 million in revenue!), Jason Cohen is an entrepreneur who knows quite a bit about bootstrapping and customer acquisition. 

In this Twitter thread, Adam Keesling highlights Jason’s step-by-step plan for bootstrapping your next startup. This video is technically from 2013, but with the proliferation of small online businesses in the Creator Economy, there's never been a better time to bootstrap a software startup. 

Not interested in going through the thread? No worries—check out the full video above!

The takeaway

1. To create a software startup that earns at least $10k/month in revenue, focus on three areas: revenue, market, and customer acquisition.
2. In the internet age, it's easier to get 150 customers paying $66/mo rather than 1k customers paying $10/mo, so focus on getting 150 true customers instead.
3. When it comes to choosing your market, choose a market is that B2B over B2C. The way Jason puts it, consumers are more likely to complain about cost, but companies often do not.
4. When it comes to customer acquisition, Jason states that developing a strong ad strategy is better than developing a strong content strategy. As a matter of fact, he advises making social media and blogging a secondary focus entirely.
5. Whenever possible, choose a big market. A big market means that people actually want the product already, so demand is pre-validated, it's just a matter of finding a small niche that you can serve better.

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Django for Startup Founders: A better software architecture for SaaS startups and consumer apps (Click to Read More)

What it is

Alex Krupp is the co-founder & CEO of FWD:Everyone, a platform for sharing and publishing email conversations. He intermittently takes on software consulting engagements and has spent several years developing software for Fortune 500 companies, pre-seed startups, high-growth venture-backed startups, and everything in between.

At some point, Alex noticed that most, if not all, of the software architecture guides he’d come across were written by (and for the benefit of) enterprise companies, dev shops, or hackathon participants.

When doing consulting, he found this to be problematic because he’d get folks following design patterns that aren’t really meant for startups in the first place, which can actually be pretty damaging and expensive to fix.

As a result, he wrote an ebook trying to document the most common things that cause development velocity to slow down at startups, and what to do instead to maximize velocity and minimize total cost of ownership. About a third of these issues are specific to Python/Django, but the rest of the advice applies regardless of your tech stack!

The takeaway

1. To create a software startup that earns at least $10k/month in revenue, focus on three areas: revenue, market, and customer acquisition.
2. In the internet age, it's easier to get 150 customers paying $66/mo rather than 1k customers paying $10/mo, so focus on getting 150 true customers instead.
3. When it comes to choosing your market, choose a market is that B2B over B2C. The way Jason puts it, consumers are more likely to complain about cost, but companies often do not.
4. When it comes to customer acquisition, Jason states that developing a strong ad strategy is better than developing a strong content strategy. As a matter of fact, he advises making social media and blogging a secondary focus entirely.
5. Whenever possible, choose a big market. A big market means that people actually want the product already, so demand is pre-validated, it's just a matter of finding a small niche that you can serve better.

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“Showcase Projects” Can Deepen Your Relationships with Profitable Customers (Click to Read More)

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What it is

Showcase projects are arrangements in which a supplier’s dedicated, multi-capability team partners with a customer counterpart team to uncover new opportunities, deepen their relationship, and respond to emerging opportunities and risks. These projects provide opportunities to “learn by doing” on both sides of the joint team and develop an ongoing stream of joint innovations that benefit — and often transform — both companies. The authors present three key success factors for creating successful showcase projects and state that this process needs to be a permanent capability and a core ongoing company strategy in order to ensure your company’s long-run profit growth and strategic success.

The takeaway

1. In most B2B and B2C companies, 10–15% of customers contribute virtually all reported profits, and one quarter of this group produces the lion’s share of that amount. Management’s most important priority should be using showcase projects to grow and protect these elite customers.
2. Showcase projects create a wide-open set of previously unknown opportunities for mutual value creation—a critical strategic advantage when most competitors are stuck offering tactical improvements and jockeying to raise prices.
3. "Do fewer things better"—essentially, stop spreading your focus across your entire audience. Instead, focus on your showcase projects, or elite customers.
4. Engage your profit peak customers, particularly those in the top profit peak quartile, with multi-capability teams that are highly experienced in developing and managing showcase projects and tightly coordinated customer relationships.
5. Develop a joint channel map. As your showcase team engages with its customer counterpart team, the early conversations often revolve around how each company operates and generally includes site visits to both companies. As the process evolves, it is helpful to structure the process by developing a joint channel map to uncover opportunities for transformative improvement.
6. Sell the results internally. Reducing internal resistance is a major factor in moving from concept to successful implementation.

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Thanks for reading! Is there a topic you'd like to see surfaced here on the Crowdbotics' Blog? Share your thoughts with our Content Marketing Manager, Eryn at [email protected].