Here's how my co-founder and I acquired our first 1,000 users without spending any money...

My co-founder and I launched our MVP in 2018. Back then, we were still studying in college while building our company.

Our MVP is not even a marketplace yet. It was just a doodle-like tool that made it easy for users to create a poll and invite their friends to vote to come up with a date for gatherings: https://reubird.hk/vote

(5 years later I still found it useful...)

At that time, we had no knowledge about marketing and growth. No idea how to promote our MVP in the market. We didn’t know how to do SEO, SEM or social media ads etc (yes, you can start your business without all these at the beginning).

In our heart of hearts, we just want to build something meaningful that helps solve people’s problems.

Since college students were one of our target users, we went to HALF of the universities in Hong Kong to stick our posters on free posting areas.

It looked stupid but it worked very well. The first 1000 users came to our website because of seeing our posters. They tried our tool, found it useful and shared to their friends who then shared to their friends as well.

There are 3 key personal learnings from it:
1. The way to launch your product does not need to be fancy. It just needs to work. Be creative and agile.

2. When feeling uncertain if a tactic would work, start small so you can fail fast. Iterate quickly. It will help increase your chance of success.

3. If possible, focus on a small group of audience at the beginning, particularly for those who have limited resources. In most cases, it is easier and more cost effective to market to them (v.s. targeting many groups of people).

Thank you for taking the time to read till the end. Hope you enjoy it!