The hack
Write and call your friends and colleagues to try your product.
Why it works
Referral is the best marketing channel. People trust people they know more than they are random strangers. It’s that simple.
Friends and colleagues are the best potential customers because they come from your professional and hobby circles.
Are you a hiring manager building a new tool to help hiring managers with sourcing new candidates? You probably know a ton of other hiring managers, you can reach out to. Are you into tennis? You probably have a few tennis friends, you can show your new court-finding app.
How to do it
Try to personalize your messaging for everyone. If you talk on WhatsApp, write them on WhatsApp, if you call, call them. Don’t make it feel like it’s something else.
Close friends are easy to reach, where it gets difficult is reaching out to old colleagues and acquaintances.
There is a good method from Simon Sinek, on how to ask people you haven’t seen in ages for a favor: Always start with the ask — why are you writing to them. And only then ask how they are, or mention something from the past.
“Hey, how have you been? Saw you getting married soon, that’s amazing! Btw I am launching this new startup, would love you to test it…” This screams — I don’t care about your answer, I really just want to get something out of you.
Now compare it to: “Hey man, know this is out of the blue: I am launching this new startup, and would love it if you could help me test is… Btw how have you been? Saw you getting married, that’s amazing…” This feels much more genuine — I am honest about why I am writing, and I also want to know how you are.
The ask
Make the onboarding experience as smooth as possible for them. Don’t just ask them to sign up on their own. Ask them for 15 minutes of their time. Give them a personalized walkthrough and tell them the whole founding back story.
This way you can make sure that they:
- Use it properly → you’ll get instant feedback if something doesn’t work. Things make sense to you because you’ve spent days building it. It might not be so obvious to someone seeing it for the first time.
- Have a personalized experience → you are also the product. The early adopters will often try new things because of the people who made them, not because they desperately need them. Make yourself the reason they believe in the product.
- Have a story and know how to pitch it → people love shareable stories. Give them a simple story they can share with friends and wrap in your one-sentence product pitch. Telling a story of an old friend from high school building a startup and you being the first tester — that’s a story you’ll share with friends.
Sharing with friends
The six degree of separation states that you can connect to anyone in the world just with six “friend-of-a-friend” hops away from anyone in the world. The real number is now closer to just four people thanks to social media.
If you can make you product and story remarkable people will share it organically. If everyone you tell it to only shares it with one extra person, and that person shares it with one extra person, and so on — you’ve gone viral and won marketing.
Here is how remarkable ideas spread from the marketing mastermind Seth Godin.
Why does this matter?
You are a remarkable story. You’re building something interesting out of nothing. Play into that role and make yourself the reason why people share your story with others.
Bonus 1: Famous examples
Taken from Lenny’s newsletter.
Strava
We started with friends and asked them to invite a few friends. We got to about 100 with direct friends, and then it spread to about 1,000 by the end of the first 12 months by word of mouth. - Michael Horvath, CEO and co-founder
Lyft
Before we launched the Lyft waitlist, we first sent personal email invites to our friends. - Emily Castor Warren, early employee
Reid [Hoffman] and the rest of the founding team all sent invites to our professional contacts on launch day. We asked all those folks to try the v1 product and invite their professional contacts. In total that was maybe a couple thousand individuals. During the first seven days, most of the 12,000-odd people who signed up were either 1st degree (e.g. directly knew someone on the founding team) or 2nd degree (‘friend of a friend’ of someone on the founding team) connections. So virtually all of the people who signed up in the first week were part of the startup ecosystem (so, predisposed to try out new products) and had a direct or indirect connection to the LinkedIn team (therefore more willing to check out a colleague/friend’s new project). - Lee Hower, founding team, via Quora
Bonus 2: Start with invite only
There is something inherently intriguing about invite-only.
The desire for exclusivity and being better than other people seems to be embedded in every human being. Companies like Clubhouse and Superhuman made it the pillar of their marketing strategy.
Making your product invite-only will increase the virality amongst your early adopters. As you can imagine, sharing you’re a member of an exclusive community that only you can invite more people to is a cool story to tell your friends.
See more examples of invite-only products before deciding if this is right for you.
