There’s a lot of literature on marketing + winning customers. Stripe has a good piece on B2B customer acquisition, and Lenny Rachitsky has written about how the biggest consumer companies got their first 1000 users. However, reaching a certain metric—customer count, MRR, WAU growth, etc.—is often a process that most founders learn is unique to their company. That is, no two situations are the same, and you may find yourself using one of the methods listed above, one you develop through discussion with your team, or as is the case with most startups, a combination of the two. While the methods startups employ are differentiated, there are a few underlying principles that are always present—principles which i’ll try to address below.

When I was at Simplify, we faced a dilemma—we were building a product for college students. Anyone who has built consumer software in the past knows that it’s amongst the hardest things you can choose to do as a company since consumers are almost, well, moving targets.

A note: Building for B2B customers is tough, but most of your customers will understand that the success of their business is governed by several core functions/processes, and anything you build (well) with those as your source of truth will, more likely than not, sell.

Profiles in the consumer space are almost always dynamic—real people usually make emotional decisions + rationalize them with logic. This is interesting on many different levels, but for the sake of concision we’ll think about it through the lens of product marketing. In the consumer space, your ultimate goal (and the foundation of any successful growth strategy), is making your users feel like winners. That is, when you think about acquiring customers with a consumer product, it should be your mission to build against the end user’s psychology as well as their pain point.

We were building something super cool at Simplify—a universal job assistant that supported students throughout the entire job search process, from finding the right role, to filling out (almost) any application on the internet in one click. We knew the product was great—we’d built it on a large waitlist, and raised money from some incredible investors. However, the growth we saw left much to be desired. Why? We’ll get to that.

Our team, like most early growth/product teams, was optimizing for virality—usually measured by K-factor, a metric used to describe the growth rate of websites, apps, or a customer base.

k = i * c, where:
i = number of invites sent by each user (if you, the reader, send 5 invites, then i = 5)
c = percent converstion of invites (if 1 out of the 5 users you referred convert to being a new user, then c = 1/5 or 0.2)

the higher the k-factor, the better.

With most consumer products, you need to jumpstart virality to get the k-factor going. That is, you should aim to accrue a critical mass of users (who truly resonate with your value proposition) that will then share it with their network.

I might cover this in a separate piece, but I suggest you read this piece on network effects.

There’s highly visible examples of folks who did this well—take Tinder for example. Tinder operated on college campuses, providing students with a sense of exclusivity through Tinder-only parties, and almost crafted a new social experience (knowing when someone was interested in you). Lenny Rachitsky actually covers this in the piece I linked above. Here it is for easy reference, though.

Whitney Wolfe and Justin Mateen would basically run around USC pitching Tinder to sororities and fraternities. The hook of seeing other single people on campus for the first time (and knowing if they’re interested in you) went viral.

— Jeff Morris Jr.

In fact it’s an interesting thought experiment to try to think back to some brands/products you’ve become familiar with in the last few years, and try to identify ways they made their users feel like winners. I’ll give you an obvious hint: affiliate marketing.

During my sophomore year at the University of North Carolina, for example, GoPuff took campus by storm. They armed sororities by the dozens with bright blue bags, bottles of middle-shelf vodka, and their own personalized discount/referral codes. This made their “ambassadors” feel like influencers—a feeling pretty darn close to winning.

Now the value add doesn’t always have to be social—in fact with most consumer software products, it rarely is. To illustrate this point, I’ll roll back to Simplify for a final time. Here we were, stuck with a great product, but a seemingly apathetic user base. In true “practice what you preach” fashion, we did exactly what I mentioned in the introduction to this piece—employed a combination of strategies. We launched a Campus Ambassador program, rewarding our hand-selected students with exclusive access to speakers, office hours, and even some custom Patagonias—all based on how many referrals they sent out (see K-factor!). We even revamped the landing page to include testimonials from users that successfully found jobs on the site. Spoiler: growth was good :)

If this stuff interests you, or you’re curious about how you can apply this to your own startup, check out Pioneer. If you think I missed anything, or you want to hear about something in specific, drop me a note!

I’m joining Pioneer as an investor to help build a better home for day 0 founders. We’re building the most expansive support system for early founders—a mission that’s reflected in the terms of deals we offer: $20,000 for 2% ownership, or 1% to be flown out to sunny (really, foggy) San Francisco for a month to learn from the wonderful Daniel, Rishi, Andrew, and the rest of the Pioneer crew.

A thought on investing so early in founders: Pioneer is an experience built to find 1% founders that traditional VC firms might not—an engineer building part time in Bangladesh, or even a high school dropout in Florida. Part of generating success as a founder is being a winner, and oftentimes traditional institutions aren’t set up to breed them. This is what startups do well! In fact, it’s a common notion that a few months at an early stage startup will eventually outperform a traditional business school experience. The only issue is that when one becomes a founder for the first time, they tend to lack guidance and work with a low level of efficiency (at least until they start ramping up). Pioneer is built to address this issue by giving day 0 founders a support system that teaches them how to learn, and in the process, how to win.