What we learn from the first 1.000 users
For most startups, getting to a 1.000 users is a serious marathon. People say it gets a lot easier after the first 1.000, and even more so after the first 10.000. I wouldn’t necessarily agree with it, since it really depends on how active these folks are, if they ever return after their first visit and so forth. Anyways, here’s what we learned from our 1.000 users at http://www.twentypeople.com
1. There are many, many different ‘types’ of users
We cater to corporate users as well as individuals. So we figured, that means we are targeting two audiences: Employers, and well, regular (and extraordinary) people. So we went ahead, figuring out what ‘regular user’ wants to do and why ‘corporate user’ would stop by. Communicating with both types of users, actually surprised us by leading us to realize that there is actually a pretty large amount of different ‘regular users’ – and I don’t mean personalities only. A few archetypes we noticed:
- Early-adopter Startup Founder
Tries to figure out if you’re big yet, if there’s anything he/she likes and could incorporate into their service. Saw it on Hacker News or met the founders at a conference/event. Will never really use the service. Just wants to evaluate the potential. - Privacy-Warrior
Complains about not being able to use the site without creating an account. Will always want to use a demo account. Will eventually sign-up, never specify a real name, access the site often with cookies turned off, using Firefox, often from Linux. Will fill out feedback form, mostly contains a message very similar to: ‘Your site does not work with cookies disabled. I can not use it and people will not want to turn on cookies just for this site all the time. This is a privacy fail.’ - Power-User
Signs up and does everything there is to do. EVERYTHING. Fills out every form, clicks every checkbox and spends more than half an hour on the site, if not more. You never met the person before, have no idea where they are from and there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll never be able to contact them for feedback. Only about half of them actually respond to your awkward excitement e-mail, thanking them for their engagement in this. - Super-Minimal User
This person you should be testing for. Seriously. If your website becomes richer, or really starts unfolding once a minimum amount of information is entered, make sure you keep testing/iterating from the absolute minimum anyone can possibly just enter to get by with and work your way up, ensuring the user experience is fluid and makes sense. This person will try to use a fake e-mail account, doesn’t care about verification e-mails, will try to use an OpenID provider, possibly Google E-mail or Twitter rather than Facebook and just try to get behind authorization without identifying too much / getting any future e-mails. Once in, the person will click around, not enter anything, at all, pursue no selections that would shape the user characteristics (gender/interests/skills/etc.) and just expect to get to the absolute beef of the service. This is a big problem if there is no data to work with. The return on time spent on twentypeople.com becomes much, much bigger once you pass a certain time involved, defining your personal preferences. So with a no-involvement user, there’s barely any chance to give them great visuals/data to make them spend more time on this. Suggestion: Provide rich demo accounts, or explain which bits and pieces would severely enrich your experience at any point. - The Developer
Signs up, wants to figure out what this is about and also understand the technologies, workflows and overall implementation. Will point out any flaws, like visible script file extensions, lack of HTTPS, absence of smart URL forwards, call out certain frameworks, like why jQuery might not be ideal, why Bootstrap looks so old and cheap and definitely call you out on rendering flaws between IE/Firefox/Safari and Chrome. Will provide you with helpful advice, but is not interested in really using the service. Just wants to evaluate it, from dev to dev. - The VC
Signs up, enters some data, clicks on what he/she considers a tiny bit above minimum information, stops half-way through (typically being on the phone during that time, pending to answer a question), asks rest of the questions on the phone, closes browser and will likely never come back to use the site. - The Computer Novice
You don’t really know how they found you so early in the process, but they are here. They will try to sign up, and probably use the wrong user-type (mix up corporate users vs. normal users), make a typo when entering their e-mail address or contact you because their login does not work. Support helps them to login, everything works with support, nothing worked without. Developers spend a day to figure out what happened, won’t find anything wrong with the authentication. Almost always uses Windows, Internet Explorer 7 or 8 and will scare the shit out of your developers. Casually notifies you about major UI issues (blaming themselves of wrongdoing), will try to use the services, possibly fail to continue since the site might be too complex for them to fully emerge into it. Anything you touch, regarding UI/UX, talk to these folks. Watch them, communicate with them. They resemble the computer literacy of your parents, or that friend who never really touches a computer other than using Facebook and checking Hotmail. They are the masses you need to become big. make sure they understand the service, very well.
2. Nobody sees what you see
You have been iterating of the idea, the concept, the pitch, the tests, the features – everything, a hundred times. You know exactly what this site does. You summarize it, put it on the front page and assume people will basically unzip this small summary on the front page to the huge concept you have in your head, right now. That’s not happening. There’s nothing more fun, shocking, devastating and motivating, than being at a party, talking to two people who have recently tested your service. Take the opportunity: Fetch a third person. Ask one of the users to explain the site to the third person (who ideally never used the site). You’ll be (likely) shocked to hear how another person, not familiar with your great master plan, will describe your site, in a simple sentence. They will cut, disregard, forget and ignore everything you worked on so hard, they’ll use one sentence to describe how they think the site is to be perceived. It gets really exciting (devastating, etc.) when the second user joins in, only to correct the first user, explaining how, strangely, he/she thought the site was actually supposed to be used for this and that… It’ll be a defining moment, trust me.
Make sure you keep doing this. I often ask my girlfriend, parents or even friends not very literate with computers to take a look at the site for a minute, maybe allow one or two clicks and then have them summarize whatever they know about it. This tells you a lot about how much you still need to refine your statement, the two lines on your front page.
3. The first thousand are just stopping by
Most of your first 1.000 users will never come back. This is really sad. But they’ve been confronted with several iterations of your idea, where with every iteration, maybe a bunch of them will actually stick around for long. But the type of people who decide to use your service, because they saw it on Hacker News, heard about it at a conference or through a tech blog, are the kind of people who probably have over 500 accounts total, having signed up with every other startup/service just as well. They come, see, and leave. They didn’t show up because you are solving their problem, for which they were trying to hunt down a solution. They stop by for completely different reasons. Don’t get all sad about this. Some will stick. And, most importantly, they’ll enable you to pitch your idea to more people, test your features with not 5, but hundreds of people (send out an e-mail, it’ll re-active a lot of these folks for a few moments) and boost confidence, somewhat.
4. They won’t tell you much about the potential of your idea
One thing I constantly read across all these startup advice blog posts is the idea that once you pass a certain number of users and you keep listening/watching them closely, they will clearly guide you through re-shaping the product to absolute success. This is wrong, in my opinion. They will certainly help with new ideas, pivots and such, but their opinions are very different than the opinion your average user will have. The average users will start to show up afterwards, once you pass the first thousand. Make sure you keep that in mind when iterating. Suggestions/thoughts will be strong, coming from the first thousand, you will be happy and open to integrate/iterate on them, and things will become very confusing very fast. MAKE IT MORE PRIVATE! You allow to hide usernames. MAKE IT MORE USEFUL AND PERSONAL. You suggest to re-enable usernames. THERE ARE TOO MANY CHOICES. You auto-select preferences. THE DEFAULTS ARE CREEPY AND ANNOYING. And so forth…
5. They represent your hard work
Passing a thousand users, for most people/startups, is a big achievement. You might hit bulls-eye being covered on TechCrunch, maybe you even launched through TechCrunch Disrupt, DEMO or anything like that. Then your first 1.000 users will be easy to accumulate. But if you are, like most of us, booting from the ground up, you’ll be required to spend a lot of time, hard work, desperation to reach the magic 1.000. It’s definitely a magic number in many ways, but I find the most magical part about that is this:
Once you reach the area of around a thousand sign ups, you’ll notice how things keep going all by itself. You stop posting on Twitter, you don’t mention your service much or have some quiet time in the press/blogs – yet, people still sign up. On some days, up to 20 new people come along, out of Google, someone’s suggestion and other mysterious sources. They are the interesting ones, they’ll often stick around much longer, than anybody else.
As usual, use the comments to share your experiences. Would love to hear about your first 1.000. Contact me at @mittermayr or follow my company at @tphq (http://www.twentypeople.com). Would love to hear your thoughts!
