Growth Playbook
How to Get Your First 1,000 Users
The first 1,000 users usually come from unscalable channels: friends, communities, cold outreach. This guide is the playbook.
The 5 Unscalable Channels That Work
Rank-ordered by conversion
- 1. Personal outreach to 100 friends/network — 20-40% conversion
- 2. Communities you're already in (Slack, Discord, subreddits) — 5-10%
- 3. Product Hunt launch — 500-2K users if it takes off
- 4. Cold DM to relevant creators / influencers — 2-5%
- 5. Content-marketing seed posts (Twitter, LinkedIn) — 1-3%
How to Time Each
Sequence
- Week 1-2: Personal outreach + community drops
- Week 3: Product Hunt launch (once you have some social proof)
- Week 4+: Cold DMs to creators with your Product Hunt outcome as proof
- Ongoing: Content marketing for compounding pipeline
Retention as the Real Metric
What matters
- D7 retention should be 30%+ for consumer, 60%+ for B2B
- If retention is weak, more acquisition just fills a leaky bucket
- Diagnose the drop-off point before you spend on acquisition
When to Shift to Scalable Channels
Signals
- You have 1K+ users with strong retention
- You know your ideal user profile precisely
- You can afford to spend $30-50 CAC and it still makes sense
- Then: paid ads, SEO, referral loops, partnerships
Related Resources
Master These with a Coach
The cohort covers all of this with live feedback from FAANG PMs.