tech-company, advertising, lean-startup, financing, launchI’m a solo-entrepreneur, and I launched my product in France (for now) two weeks ago.
My product is an iOS/Android app in the domain of social network with a very innovative concept.
I have currently 500 users for two weeks, with a total of 600 downloads.
Advertising was only through Facebook groups and some twitter posts, nothing professional yet.
Feedbacks are really good (people really see the benefit of such an application, whose concept exists nowhere), I just expect to target far more users.
Indeed, benefit of my product comes with a great amount of users.
What should I do now in order to make my product grow and known from a larger public ?
Advertising (agency ?) ?
Should I try to attract investors at this step ?
I’m alone, developed the whole of the product totally alone (2 years with cutting edge technologies).
I’m very talented in technical domain but and I’m a kinda newbie in the “growth” domain.
Just searching for some helps from experienced founders.
Congratulations,
Not to be a downer, but are you even sure your users are active? or have they had a pleasant experience the times they’ve used the app? or have they had an aha moment yet? If yes, great. But otherwise, it’s missing something and you should ask the ones who didn’t come back what was wrong. If you can’t get enough users for your app to be useful, then you should really try to make it useful with the current user base.
If the users love it, can’t you make the app so that it’s at least tiny bit viral?
Your app sounds like it’s local (you mention needing 20k users in Paris), why not just go get users off the streets? Better even, you talk about needing some people taking the first step and posting photos, then figure out who those people could be: extroverts, probably young, those who would share with friends, maybe go to a disco, get yourself a t-shirt with your app name, logo and website, and get those users while they wait outside.
You may want to read Paul Graham’s essays about doing things that don’t scale and building something a few users love, if you haven’t already.
It sounds early to seek investments before you can even show your app is getting a bit of traction. And don’t even think about outsourcing your marketing to an agency, this is your job.
Good luck
Core issue I see with your question is that you appear to assume that more users will solve your problem.
I would suggest focusing on defining what the “minimum viable network” is for your product, and then find an existing network of that size to use it.
Reason this is important is that my experience is that “mega” networks are not the issue that’s most pressing, but the function of your product within a viable network.
You could seek investments.
You could advertise using your own funds.
You could advertise for free - writing posts on different forums, on social networks, asking magazines/people/youtube channels to review your app, etc. I heard a story about a guy who made a product and then went full-time on advertising it - 10 hour per day for a month he wrote posts, emailed people asking them to feature his product in their work and so on, and he got tons of users.
The third one might get you an explosion of users, if somebody popular reviews your app.
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