Getting your first 1,000 users is a lot different from growing your customer base up to 100,000 or even just 10,000. In your startup’s early stages, you don’t need to worry about scalability as much as getting the biggest bang for your buck. That requires getting crafty, which also makes it fun.

Codegiant just hit 1000 users. It’s time to recap 25 days and talk about our growth story.

The secret to marketing is…. Build a great product.

Here’s what we always ensured throughout our journey -

Build something that users love Talk to your users

Our product has a beautiful design.

Nearly all of the positive early feedback was related to our design and user interface. Our beautiful UI was a pleasure to use for our users and that helped our growth.

Your audience is the biggest marketing tool for your business

But, despite that we had to do a bunch of things to spread the word about our product.

Here’s a list of what we did to spread a word among our target audience -

Launch on Product Hunt

We did a very effective launch on Product Hunt and managed to get good traction and feedback from the launch. We got about 450+ sign ups and some amazing feedback. Here is a story of our PH launch success —Our Product Hunt Launch Story 😻

2. Technology Meetups

It is really important to connect with your target audience and gather important feedback from these users. There are a lot of developer meetups that keep happening in different parts of the world.

We felt that as a part of our launch strategy, we should be a part of one such developer meetup and get better connected to our audience. So, we attended and introduced our product at a React developers meetup in Bangalore — The Silicon Valley of India.

Takeaway: Go where your users are going. If you have a tool that is focussed on getting developers, go and talk to these developers and gather as much feedback as possible.

3. Business Tools Directory Listings

Online discovery is really important for SaaS tools. Getting listed on different business tools directory is really important for discovery of SaaS tools.

We listed our website on different business tools directories such as

We were recognised as a ‘Rising Star’ and a tool with ‘Great User Experience’ by FinancesOnline.

Codegiant recognised by FinancesOnline

Takeaway: Strengthen your online discovery. Let your users find you from different business directories and do come up as an alternative when businesses are looking to switch from one tool to another.

4. Twitter Buzz

Twitter is a brilliant channel to keep your users connected and engaged. We ensured that we were active on Twitter to answer user queries/concerns and also did good engagement that the developers community would love.

Our stats speak for themselves -

Codegiant’s twitter engagement

Takeaway: Twitter is no longer optional. As a business, you must go to where your customers are. The Twitter platform is a big part of our strategy and we will continue to stay connected to our users through this channel.

5. Blogging (and an evolving content strategy)

Content is king. To say we were “blogging” back then would be a massive overstatement, but we did write a few pieces that got shared quite a bit, and brought us some new users. Funnily enough, the piece that brought in the most new users was about how we had just gotten a whole bunch of users.

Takeaway: Start blogging, ASAP. Think about what content your target customers would find valuable, and give them lots of it, for free. For early stage startups, it’s one of the most cost effective ways to establish your brand and build an audience.

Conclusion

Getting the first 1000 users for your product does not happen overnight or at the snap of your fingers. It takes time, but with the simple and effective tricks above, your first 1000 users will lead to thousands and more in the future.

About Codegiant

Codegiant includes pretty yet powerful tools for agile project management. It is meant to be a single platform for project management. People are loving it as a great alternative to Jira as it is faster with better UI/UX and is free to use for up to 5 users.

Codegiant includes issue tracking, hosted Git repositories, continuous integration and documentation in a single platform. Slack Integrations, API integrations are also in place with Codegiant.