As a frequent early adopter, I'd say the most important thing you can do after providing a useful product in order to retain early users is to actively provide excellent support. I'll tolerate buggy software longer if it is easy to report bugs (and I know that reported bugs actually get looked at).

Interacting directly with early users also "humanizes" your company, which makes people both more forgiving of early mistakes as well as more likely to put a little bit of extra effort into helping you get better.

Good points. Social news (HN, reddit) is a great place to find early adopters, and interact directly with them.

I launched http://iDoneThis.com here on HN in January and now we have 5,000 users. A benefit to that was not only finding early adopters and engaging with them, but in that engagement, you have the opportunity to find what people want and improve the product. One thing we discovered from the international audience at HN is that our site didn't work with unicode, and folks abroad wanted to be able to adjust their timezone from the default US/Pacific. We added those features and now we have a huge following in Japan.

I wrote a bit more about how we got our first 5,000 users here: http://blog.idonethis.com/post/4779807862/how-we-got-our-fir...

Organic SEO. This isn't necessarily limited to early adopters: it is not obvious to the average Internet user that an attractively presented website which ranks #1 to their query is a new entrant in the field.

Most of my customers assume, all evidence to the contrary, that my products are made by some megacorp somewhere. (Most common guess that I've heard: made by Google, because they found it on the Googles.)

Anyone interested should read the parent commenter's blog entry on this topic: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/07/17/seo-for-software-compani... -- I found it very useful.

Go listen through the Mixergy archives - http://mixergy.com/ - it's one of the most common questions that Andrew asks people. Something that I learned is that the answers are wildly different for everyone (and not solely by industry or company type).

Blog posts which bring in organic traffic.

Listing on the Chrome Web store.

Asking friends and friends of friends.

Asking former colleagues.

Participating on relevant forums just answering people's questions, NOT pitching your product.

Tweeting product updates.

Using Olark to stalk visitors.

Emailing 3-5 popular, connected and intelligent strangers everyday to get feedback.

Writing a book.

Cross promoting and selling other popular products in the field to get to know customers.

This is why many experienced entrepreneurs tell you to ask someone who has money, or a business owner if there's anything you could do to improve their life... because they'll be your first customer, and they'll be spreading the word about you even when you're building the prototype.

Steve Blank is teaching an entrepreneurship course at Stanford and blogging about it. They're currently working on customer acquisition strategies:

http://steveblank.com/2011/04/15/the-leanlaunch-pad-at-stanf...

He came to Michigan to speak a few weeks back and he recommended to me a presentation from Dave McClure that covered some of the same stuff. It's pretty jam packed full of info but really useful none the less.

There's a few of these floating around, this is the most recent one I could find: http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pir...

This is a great deck. Look at slide 22 if you want some good ideas relating to this topic.

You may see the video of the presentation : http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5336115

Depends if you're B2B, or B2C.

For both, though, giving some incentive to be an "early adopter" is a must.

My company is SaaS; to get some initial momentum, we offered early adopters their first year at a discounted rate, additional functionality at a fraction of the normal price, and an account credit if they connect us to another customer that ends up working with us.

We actually still do the latter; nothing is better than having your customers be your evangelists.

and yes, the comment above is correct. It depends on the industry, business type, etc. etc.

For SaaS, what I mentioned is just one of many methods...

We gave free trials. One of the most important things for us was image. We work with oil and gas companies and getting a couple of Canada's top producers on board was paramount for us.

We needed the "well if big guy X" is using it then maybe it's worth checking out.

We met with some big guys and asked what else they would need to make it work for them. A few tweaks later and a 6 month free trial (plus discounted first year) and we were off to the races.

There are some customers who love us because we love feedback and work hard to implement the really good ideas.

Providing a free trial + personalized tweaks gave us the start we needed. It worked doubly well because we targeted the companies who have respect in the industry first.

Canadas top oil and gas companies needed free trials? Wow.

At most large companies it's not spending money that is a problem but the approval/budget process - its probably a lot easier to get approval for something that is already being used on a temporary free trial basis than going through the usual formal product selection process.

The money wasn't the issue. The fact that there was literally not a single company signed up was the issue. Why would a top company pay for a service that -- as of that time -- no one was using.

The fact of the matter is, it was two guys coming up to a massive company saying "Hey! We've got this site where you can advertise all these items you want to get rid of... but we've got no traffic and you will be the first person on it." There's literally no incentive for them.

Our service depends on having clients to be valuable. So there wasn't any value in our service at the time. However, as soon as you get one of the big guys signed up and putting their items on our site, we instantly add value and get the "hey, if Company X is putting their stuff up there, I want to be there too!" effect.

That makes more sense :).

Bartering was helpful in getting the first customers with my startup: http://ai.redsymbol.net/2010/09/boostrapping-your-business-w...

In general, it'll probably work better with B2B offerings.

You'll have to build an audience first. I read a lot of the mixergy Entrepreneur majority of the successfull ones all had audience or contacts before they had customers. An audience or contact is different from a customer because they are just people who are interested in you, whereas customers go a step further and buy. However an audience or contact allows you to make offers and build a customer base.

You can build an audience by making friends on hacker news, if you're known for making great contributions to the hacker community you can build audience. So it's important to be genuinely interested in the community. Once you have an audience you can make them an offer, and if it's any good you'll have customers. And interesting recent example of this is edw519 ebook. Ed genuinely enjoys the hacker news community and people enjoy his contributions which are basically his comments/submissions. I doubt his intentions was ever to sell an ebook of his comments, but he is doing that now, and the site promoting it has been viewed 20923 times, and that's only because he is part of the community and has an audience. see: http://edweissman.com/i-turned-my-hacker-news-comments-into-...

It's a small experiment on Ed's part, but it won't be worthwhile without an audience. If you're interested in more specific ways to build an audience stay tuned.

Also read: http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/04/the-easiest-way-to-succ...

You don't have to "build an audience first" - that's just one of many possible strategies. It's often promoted by bloggers - who often happen to have found success because of their audience.

For example, Groupon never "had an audience" - they got on the telephone and rang up small businesses.

That's a great observation actually. When I originally created StartupLi.st in my tent while servine the US Navy on deployment in Afghanistan, the only way I could "gain an audience" was to make the effort to contact each startup before I featured them. It worked brilliantly, and will still be a strategy I'll use as http://startupli.st grows. Thanks again for your comment!

I recorded a video of the Matthew Wensing talking about how he bootstrapped Stormpulse. He spent a lot of time describing how he got the first clients and locked some big distribution channels. http://www.davidedicillo.com/social/a-great-story-on-bootstr...

I think it depends on the product you are lunching. However, in general following things may help to gain early users

1) Using social media (Facebook and twitter) for marketing

2) Make Facebook app/ Facebook fanpage it may help in viral growth

3) Search engine optimization

4) Service\content you are providing should be magnetic so that early visitors will be converted into early users

It definitely depends on what your startup is doing. Since it is addressing a need (hopefully) you should try to find people who have this need and target them. A local B2B company will do vastly different marketing from a social B2C company. Friends and family are great, maybe sponsor local events and go out with an iPad and show off the startup. Or maybe try advertising on stumble or facebook.

At my startup http://louderr.com we have been trying out as many ideas as possible to see what generates good CTR and loyal visitors. Word of mouth is working best, along with strategic advertising on social networks. Im looking forward to writing a blog post with lots of information about what worked and what didnt for us.

tl;dr: Guess and Check. Repeat. This is the hard part.

For early adopters, it's all about product endorsements. As someone who isn't from Silicon Valley, but reads all the major tech news sources and thought leader blogs, I set out on a mission to meet as many thought leaders as possible....Long story short, one tweet from a single thought leader converted to 500+ clickthrus to my site at product launch. Another product got 90 signed up alpha users from a single tweet. People who follow tech thought leaders are voraciously looking to find the next best thing in their space.

It's not easy, but once you establish those relationships, they continually pay dividends, if you don't abuse them.

A big question to answer is if you're social or standalone. That is do you need critical mass to be truly useful or if one person uses it, does that one person still get 99% of the benefit.

As a freelancer, I get to work directly with sales reps and franchise owners, so I am making a SaSS for them and so they will be my early adopters. I've already interviewed a dozen or so of my clients and am confident my service will be well received. At least the Beta will not be overly complex so I can tweak it in the right direction during Beta review. Here's hoping.

What's your startup?

My startup is http://StartupLi.st It is a new way for EVERY tech startup to create visibility, gain early adopters that will socially promote your startup, and build an interactive community around a startup's aggregated social activity streams. Social Customer Development. It's going live this week.... so stay tuned :)

Wait a minute. The owner of a start up that helps other startups gain early adopters is asking for advice on how to gain early adopters?

If you really think about it, @nickfrost is probably gaining early adopters by posting this. Nearly everyone that reads this post will be interested in http://startupli.st

Plus, no one has all the answers and I am glad that @nickfrost is welcoming other ideas.

Good point! Just as @swgoof said, I posted the question to view other people's perspectives on the topic of gaining early customers. It's great to read and perceive the present mindset of our fellow HN users in regards to this topic. Thanks a lot for your comment and your time!

The OP's startup is www.startupli.st, which is collaborating with betacandy

Thanks for doing that research! It's great to see that you have made the correlation between StartupLi.st and BetaCandy.com. StartupLi.st will launch first, and BetaCandy will launch in June. Those two brands are both under Beta Inc. Please read http://BetaHacks.com for more details.

We submitted our site to betali.st and received 400+ signups as a result. Would your site be similar to that?

Yes, absolutely! Every person in StartupList can VERY EASILY sign up for your startup, then recommend it to their friends within StartupList and even to their Twitter and Facebook social crowds. Your startups social stream will be connected and automatically aggregated to your startup's profile, so the activity stream is constantly real-time and interactive. Also, submit and relate news about your startup to Startup News to gain targeted readers as well as their opinions on the news you post. Please join http://startupli.st and add your startup to gain the full experience of early adopter interaction and development.

The best is to use networks... your friends, your friends friends, your advisors friends etc. They'll be more willing to put up with a less than perfect product, and if you make them happy, they will be customers for life and tell their friends. We had luck with this early on at FeeFighters and it has served us well, as our customers almost always refer us to other customers. (B2B site lowering credit card processing fees via instant reverse auction)