Category: Community, Entrepreneurship, General, Marketing

Startup Tips: Getting to that first 10,000

This post was written by the great Vincent Lauria on how they grew Lefora.com so fast.

So how did Lefora get to 10,000 communities in just 3.5 months? I think it can be broken down into just 3 steps:

1. Solve a Problem
2. Develop alongside a real audience
3. Support the early community

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1. Solve a Problem
Research – Not just web stats, but go out and talk to potential customers. We talked to tons of communities and forums to learn their biggest pain points and how we could solve them.

2. Develop alongside a real audience
Sounds easy… and it is. We hit on multiple fronts, from directly inviting existing communities onto our software (it only takes a personal email), to SEOing the site for relevant keywords, to advertising our services for people looking to create a forum (we’re talking just $2-3 a day, no big ad budget), to acquiring a site that was going out of business – leveraging the branding they had left on their service (again this was on an extremely ‘low budget’). We did all this before ‘launching’ in the web2.0 blogosphere.

3. Support the early community
When you’re getting your first ‘real’ users but are still in ‘active’ development, it’s vital that you let them know there might be some kinks, but you are there to support them and need their feedback. We did this through a support forum, a ‘live chat’ widget, and personal emails. A live chat widget may be running on your desktop 8-10 hours a day, but early on, you’re only going to get interrupted for 15-30 min a day – and get some of the richest feedback and sales opportunities a website can offer.

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Our service didn’t require massive amounts of people to be on the network in order for it to be a sustainable service. It just had to provide tools for an existing or newly forming community, they didn’t care how many other ‘users’ or ‘friends’ were already on the site. Look how facebook started with such a small community (harvard), before jumping to other ivy league schools, before opening it up to all colleges.

Moving forward, the next wave of ‘social software’ is going to be services directed towards ‘communities’. From craft work communities to parenting to hiking to… Services that address the needs of communities will have many opportunities ahead.

Suggested Reading for any new startup: Steve Blank’s “The Four Steps to the Epiphany“.

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