“When building for your first thousand users, you’re not looking for statistical significance – you’re looking for insights. One deep conversation with a user who loves your product is worth more than a hundred lukewarm surveys.”
Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman
Getting your first 1,000 users is an important early milestone for any B2C startup. It’s a sign that there’s interest in your product and that you’re on the right track. But how do you get there? What are the most effective strategies for early B2C growth?
In my previous post, I covered how to get to product market fit (PMF), and how to avoid fake PMF. This post is about how to get to your first 1,000 users, and how to get to know your users better, in particular for B2C startups.
Let’s dive into what actually works, based on insights from industry leaders like Rachitsky, First Round Capital, A16Z and my own experience as a product manager.
7 strategies to acquire B2C users in the earliest stage
Research from Lenny Rachitsky’s extensive survey of 600+ startups reveals a surprising truth: the path to your first 1,000 users rarely follows the conventional playbook. Success often comes down to a few core strategies executed with depth, along with an intense focus on understanding early users.
- Leverage Your Network and Reach Out to Targeted Strangers:
- Start with your closest connections: This is the easiest and fastest way to get started. Leverage your personal and professional networks, email your contacts, post on social media, and ask for feedback. However, keep in mind that your friends may not be your target audience, so don’t get discouraged if they’re not interested.
- Reach out to targeted strangers: This is a more time-consuming approach, but it can be effective for marketplace startups. Identify your ideal customers and reach out to them directly through email, DMs, or even phone calls.
- Go where your target audience hangs out: This is the most popular and effective strategy. Find out where your target audience spends their time online and offline, and get in front of them. This could involve attending industry events, joining online forums, or posting on relevant social media platforms.
- Find online communities: Identify niche online forums, subreddits, or social media groups where your target audience spends time (LinkedIn and FB Groups, Product Hunt, Discord, Slack groups etc).. Engage with these communities by answering questions, sharing valuable content, and subtly promoting your product.
- Explore offline opportunities: Not enough people do this, but consider college campuses, industry events, or meetups that align with the affinity of the group. The idea is to get physical placement: This strategy involves placing your product in physical locations where your target audience will see it. This could involve distributing flyers, putting up stickers, or even setting up a booth at a local event.
- Generate Excitement and Word-of-Mouth:
- Create a waitlist: This creates a sense of exclusivity and anticipation around your product. When people see others waiting to try your product, they are more likely to be interested.
- Run contests and giveaways: Offer incentives for people to sign up and share your product with their network. This can be a cost-effective way to boost initial awareness and engagement.
- Enlist influencers: Influencers can help you reach a wider audience and generate buzz for your product. Identify influencers who align with your brand and target audience, and partner with them to promote your product. You can offer them free products, discounts, or even pay them for their services.
- Identify relevant influencers: Find individuals with a following within your target audience and try to get them talking about your product. This could involve offering free access, collaborating on content, or even paying for sponsored posts.
- Get on podcasts! While not hugely scalable for most podcasts, hosts featuring startups are always looking for their next guest. Can you get people excited about your startup?
- Get press: Getting featured in publications can help you gain credibility and reach a wider audience. Craft a compelling story about your product and pitch it to journalists who cover your industry.
- Create viral content: Viral content can help you reach a massive audience in a short amount of time. However, it’s difficult to predict what will go viral, and this strategy is often more luck than skill. If you have a knack for creating engaging content, it’s worth a shot.
- Start a blog: Write articles and create content that is relevant to your target audience. This can attract organic traffic, establish you as an authority, and give you material to share on social media. It’s so much easier to create content these days with generative AI. Make sure you’re planning ahead.
- Experiment with different formats: Consider micro-blogging on social media, creating videos, or even hosting a podcast. The key is to provide value and engage your audience in a way that feels authentic.
- Build a Community Before Launch:
- Start an email list: Collect email addresses through your website or landing page. This allows you to build anticipation and communicate directly with potential users.
- Engage with early signups: Offer exclusive content or early access to build excitement and gather valuable feedback.
- Offer a Simple, Valuable Product:
- Focus on solving a specific pain point: Don’t try to do too much at first. Create a product that effectively addresses a specific need for your target audience.
- Make it easy to use and understand: The easier it is for people to get value from your product, the more likely they are to stick around and tell others
- Too many startups, especially in AI, focus on the technology vs. on the benefits for the users. I wrote about this in “Are you telling a story or pitching features?“
Top Channels for Consumer Apps
The most successful early-stage B2C companies typically rely on a mix of organic and direct channels. While the exact percentages vary by product type, several sources recommend aiming for a mix of 40/30/20/10:
- 40% – Word of mouth and direct referrals Particularly powerful for products with built-in network effects or clear value propositions. Superhuman’s famous waitlist strategy, for instance, grew entirely through word of mouth by optimizing for their “very disappointed” metric.
- 30% – Organic community building – Products that solve specific community pain points often find their first users through focused community engagement. Reddit’s founders famously created numerous fake accounts to seed initial content and create the impression of activity, eventually building enough momentum for real community engagement. Building your own strong community should be your end goal, but in the early days, you can tap on existing communities like Reddit, Hacker News, Newsletters, Podcasts, etc.
- 20% – Direct outreach and partnerships – things like Content and SEO – Many successful B2C companies found their early users through content that addressed specific pain points. Canva, for example, initially grew by creating targeted design tutorials that brought in their core audience of non-designer professionals.
- 10% – Everything else (including paid acquisition on Google/ Youtube Meta, X, etc)
For example, GTM strategist Maja Voje also created interesting visual for zero budget go to market plan to get your first 1000 users by tapping into Linkedin to launch AI products:
Let’s dive in to each one of these with concrete examples.
Crafting a High-Impact Word-of-Mouth Engine
Successful word of mouth isn’t accidental—it’s engineered. The top predictors of strong word-of-mouth growth, according to Rachitsky’s research, are:
- Time to “Wow” Moment: The faster a user experiences value, the more likely they are to recommend it.
- Frequency of Value Delivery: Daily engagement beats weekly; weekly beats monthly.
- Social Proof Within the Product: Make it easy for users to see others benefiting from your product.
For example, Superhuman’s email client grew largely through word of mouth by optimizing for a single metric: the percentage of users who would feel “very disappointed” if they lost access. By focusing on this, they cultivated a loyal user base willing to pay a premium.
It’s been a while since I read it, but in the book Contagious, by Jonah Berger, the author describes how things catch on. The summary below should give you some ideas as to what feeling you want to invoke in people to have them share your product. Sharing a product involves risk for the person sharing (social currency) and they are more likely to share content that has perceived practical value for their audience.
Building Community as a Growth Engine
An analysis by First Round Capital found that successful B2C startups spend 20% of their time building community in their first year, with this figure increasing to 50% among companies that reached 1M+ users. This is because community building compounds, creating a network effect that attracts and retains users.
To build a community around your product it’s essential to start with a strong foundation. Before launching your community, ensure you have the basic infrastructure in place. This includes:
- A website that acts as a central hub for information and interaction
- A professional domain name that lends credibility to your efforts
- Social media accounts across relevant platforms to broaden your reach and engagement
Back in the day, there was Digg, Delicious, and other places where you could ‘list’ your startup. Today, building a community can start with creating valuable content, supporting discussions in relevant forums like Product Hunt, Reddit or Hacker News, or even launching a dedicated online group or Discord channel. This type of foundation grows organically as members share and invite others. While building an email list is not exactly building community, capturing the email of people who expressed interest in engaging with the product is essential to activate them later on.
The Concentric Circle Theory of Growth
In Y Combinator’s Startup School, Gustaf Alströmer describes early-stage growth as expanding in concentric circles:
- Inner Circle (0-100 users): Direct relationships, high-touch onboarding, and personal referrals.
- Second Circle (100-1,000): Friends of friends and professional networks.
- Outer Circle (1,000+): Viral growth and scalable acquisition channels.
Each circle requires distinct tactics. The inner circle relies on manual engagement, the second on social referrals and partnerships, and the outer on scalable methods like content marketing or SEO.
I recommend watching the video ?
Never stop iterating and experimenting
The journey to your first 1,000 users isn’t about shortcuts or growth hacks—it’s about understanding these foundational principles and applying them with consistency. Regularly gathering user feedback and analyzing engagement data is key as no strategy remains effective for a sustained period. What worked in the first few weeks might wear off and it’s crucial to continue to experiment with new product loops and marketing experiments to reach new users.
Gaming founders know this well. As a founder of a unicorn gaming startup once told me, they spend a ton of money a month on advertising to acquire users. Whenever they discover a channel that performs better than others, they divert most of their budget to that channel, until it starts going down in efficiency. Rinse and repeat.
As you grow beyond your first 1,000 users the priorities change accordingly and you’ll start working on engagement and retention, north star metrics and scaling up some of these early experiments into go to market motion. I hope to dive into these in a future post.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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