How do users find your product? How did you get the users you have now? If you run paid ads, what is your cost of acquisition?

Our blog post describing the challenge of building a complete notification brings us one lead a week. Given the search volume for relevant keywords, we plan to publish more valuable content to double down on organic user acquisition. Additionally, we are implementing several channels to generate growth - cold emails to targeted companies, a freemium model with a MagicBell branded widgets and partnership with providers of channel APIs (email/text/push). We hope to accelerate all these efforts with the additional funding from YC.

We plan on publishing vertical specific notes on particular domains to drive adoption from people within that domain. The "Open AWS Catalogue" (http://aws.dendron.so/) is an example of a domain specific publication to attract people from AWS into Dendron.

Most of our users initially will come from sales and marketing but in the medium-longer term, a free tier for students and individuals will help us get much more organic and word-of-mouth growth similar to Qualtrics and Benchling’s early GTM.

Most of our initial users have come from my pre-existing relationships with creators. We’ve generally found that content creators are vocal about the software that they enjoy using and for that reason we expect they will be our biggest engine for growth.

We will grow our users by continuing to enhance our core product through user research and nudging users towards referring friends and colleagues. We will accelerate virtuous growth cycles by building tools for data reuse, sharing, and collaboration. We'll further enhance network effects and lock-in by developing an API platform and an ecosystem of tools and a community around it. Plus, we'll start doing direct sales to reach new institutional and enterprise customer segments where we have low penetration. As a marketplace, balanced growth of both sides of the platform is important, and we've already solved the first stage of the chicken-and-egg problem with 30,000+ monthly active participants and 2000+ monthly active researchers. We have an allocation algorithm which distributes studies evenly to participants ensuring balanced platform growth.

5 strategies: - outbound - inside sales - sales people at our office calling / emailing enterprise companies offering our product - inbound - content marketing - corporate ventures (example is Oracle Global Startup Accelerator program, which we are part of and allows us to sell software to Oracle) - networking leagues, such as EO and general networking at events - trade shows, such as IMEX Europe.

There are 2 million people searching for small business phone systems every month on Google just in North America. So we want to spend money on AdWords initially as an acquisition source. Our initial target customers are people at the bottom of the decision making funnel, those searching for solutions on Google, AppStore, Play Store, etc. We will take the learnings from the kinds of users who sign up through these channels to create targeted FB and Twitter ads to capture people higher up that funnel. We will also focus strongly on organic growth through referral programs, SEO and ASO.

Bottom-up approach targeting other startups as beta users and rapidly expanding to target professional services companies (law firms, consultants/MBAs, medical/dental) to gain a foothold in the market and then expand to other sectors. - Working through personal networks to gain traction with beta users - Connecting with startups in major tech hubs - Education/Awareness: seminars/workshops for employees on how to manage student loans - Online distribution to employers - White papers/case studies - Gaining traction in the press/media

Our first customers are tech companies from 3 to 200 users. 2 very simple ways of sourcing them is to target Slack's paying users as well as companies relying on remote teams.

Getting the banks on board hasn’t been an issue. We were immediately perceived by them as an opportunity to finally offer this type of loan online. We have already met with the 10 most important banks and we are currently integrating with the banks. Regarding the users, aside from word of mouth, we are experimenting online channels,such as Facebook, Google Adwords, Google Display Network and Google Sponsored Promotions, and a bit of geo targeting. Hits on the page have 80% of people inside our target.

We’re already getting users by word of mouth. We’re active in the local developer community, we’ll reach out to merchants directly, and we’ll signup merchants via integration with existing services (Shopify, eventbrite, woocommerce) Our banking partner has also asked that we onboard thousands of Merchants that are their customers.

Distribution: starting online/direct to consumer; we’ll also leverage existing relationships with online retail partners. Awareness: Earned: media & influencers — we’ve given samples to well-known women (media, bloggers, Instagram, founders) and we will run a hero campaign featuring them, and seek a celebrity endorsement; we’ll run an aggressive PR campaign for earned media Paid: traditional online advertising (social media, Google Adwords); content networks Owned: content & social — we’ll continue to write original content and contributed articles and share on social media Grassroots efforts are the most important part of customer adoption; 79% of women say they’ve made purchases based on the recommendation of a peer, and 82% of women say they share brands and products with friends (Ladies’ Home Journal). This includes campus ambassador programs (sororities, sports teams, clubs), and direct selling Samples and referrals: every new subscriber gets a free sample to give to a friend with discount code; we run frequent contests for online friend referrals

We currently get customers by reaching out to recently over-subscribed, crowd-funded projects on KickStarter & Indiegogo. We have found startups by partnering with TechStars, Northeastern IDEA, and Kairos Society. We are also working to become preferred vendors for KickStarter & Indiegogo. As our customer base grows, we will continue to optimize the process of fulfillment for even higher cost-savings thus increasing our ability to close more customers.

Currently we get users through word of mouth (amplified by twitter). During our time at YC we would like to grow our marketing, our continuous integration product GitLab CI and our SaaS (GitLab.com). GitLab.com currently has only 15k monthly active users but we see a lot of possibilities to grow and differentiate it.

Since Mimir Classroom is B2B SaaS we will be selling through direct sales. Although students make up the majority of our user base for our product, we will be selling to instructors and administrators since they make the decision to implement our software in their schools.

1) Our extended networks are revealing a large a number of people working in consultancies, banks and other corporates who want our service 2) From this, we are getting introductions to relevant decision makers in big consultancies and MDs at small consultancies to set up pilots which will convert to subscriptions 3) Our delighted clients will provide good references for our service which will help us to extend from our network. 4) From here we will grow further in two ways: 5.a) For large clients: Prove the value proposition at a company level and then sell into consultancies, banks and large corporates at a senior level. 5.b) For small clients: We will have a low friction sign up process and free trials to encourage smaller companies to sign up directly through our site.

There's already quite a bit of buzz around self‑driving cars, but nothing is on the market yet. This has created an enormous $100 billion shadow demand that we'll tap into once we launch.

Right now, retailers prompt users to download our app and 12% of those who walk into our retailers download our app. We are in the process of significantly upgrading our user app. The new app will embed ACH/Credit transactions. Our new, updated app will grow much faster because it embeds P2P transfers which give us both a network effect and a use case outside our retail locations. Users will now have a reason to download and use the app outside stores. We will target users outside stores using Facebook ads. Our initial testing suggests that we’ll be able to acquire users for about $1 per user. We have two channels of attracting retailers now. First, we pay for inbound leads. Second, we have sold our product to enterprise, multi-location retailers who make it mandatory for all their franchisees.

Working the network, undercutting others on price and (especially) ease, directly reaching out to every startup that needs banking services beyond payments that exists or is founded for traction. We've focused our user research on three customer segments: (a) Corporate treasury departments (a heretofore undisrupted part of most enterprises) (b) hedge, private equity, and venture funds (minus quants/HF) and their back offices (c) technically inclined SMEs and startups who aren't served well by big banks.

Based on user participation on the blog, we anticipate a few hundred users from the test site will immediately join Lollipuff -- they’re the ones who have been clamoring for a new, automated and expanded site (and currently endure a 2-month wait list). Fei has an impressive personal collection of luxury women’s clothing in our first three brands (roughly $35,000 MSRP). She has agreed to sell a large portion of her personal collection to seed the new site. We also have budding relationships with “power sellers” on Ebay who have expressed an interest in using our site upon launch. Existing relationships with fashion blogs, sites, and forums should also enhance our exposure.

The feedback from graduating students is tremendous, so we get a lot of new users through referral. Since learning to code is a hot topic, there's a lot of opportunity for content marketing, as well as speaking engagements. Finally, given the fairly high transaction value, we should be able to profitably run pay-per click advertising.

Our first customers are our friends’ startups. To target our next customers, we downloaded their apps and their competitors’ apps and are designing experiments for them. If they find the pre-designed experiments useful, they can easily start testing with those the instant they sign up. We’ll offer customer referral rewards such as temporary premium memberships. We also want to make it easy to see and implement case study results by suggesting experiments to potential users. For marketing, we will ask and answer stackoverflow and Quora questions regarding how people AB test on mobile. We could partner with companies in related fields like App Annie or Parse.

We use content as a lead gen to attract users: our content is currently syndicated out via Huffington Post, Forbes, Business Insider, and Inc, and we're working on closing a video deal with HuffPost that will drive additional thousands of users back to our site. One of our strategies that has been very successful has been having inspirational and influential women write original content for The Daily Muse. Arianna Huffington wrote the lead article for our launch in September, and she's been followed by women ranging from Cindy Gallop and Rachel Sklar to the head of the U.S. Geological Survey. Marissa Mayer from Google and Nicole Lapin from CNBC have agreed to write as well. We've also agreed to a partnership with Refinery29, a global fashion newsletter with 500,000 subscribers, to provide information & plugs for The Daily Muse to all of their subs in November in exchange for awesome tailored career content from us. If it goes well, we plan to extend it.

-Focus on generating success stories. -Heavily promote first games produced through our site. -Reach out to dozens of artists Manifold Studios has worked with, artist forums, and art students, pay them or give special perks to seed our site's community. -Reach out to friend network, Boston game developer community, contact solo developers of games on app store, pay them or give perks to seed our site's community. -Provide metrics drawn from apps we've published showing how publishing with us is really valuable. -Use existing games in Manifold Studios catalog to drive traffic to site. Similar to how Craigslist began, we will first manually play matchmaker for our network of developers and artists. Once we begin to grow we will automate the process through our website.

To get teams to sign up for websites, we will get players to have their profiles hosted on our site. In addition, we have a database of 600K teams we scraped from eTeamz and can use that to email current unhappy customers. To get players to host their profiles on our site, we will offer a superior product and implement viral mechanics/incentives similar to Kicksend. For instance, an athlete could pay for more video or just get one friend to sign up. We'll also have consistent email and blog tips about dealing with recruiters and marketing yourself as an athlete that will be availably only to teams/athletes with pages.

Distribution is also really important. I’m guessing a lot of applicants haven’t thought as much about this part of the app. That’s ok — I think distribution comes after finding product market fit (the whole thing about users) but it’s still a place where you can demonstrate you know your stuff.

You’ve thought about your biggest initial hurdle, getting people to know about you and pay you for your product. Be specific, don’t generalize with things like paid ads or strategic partnerships. We got our first 2500 pre-paid users with my connections to local repair shops. I used their existing infrastructure to sell the coupons and they will provide the services when requested from the app until I’ve built out the infrastructure ourselves. This partnership with local shops will continue until our own staff are able to compete.