Bootstrapped: Growth & Goals - From 100 to 1000

BitCash: A Startup's Journey - Week 1

6/2/16

And so begins the journal of our journey. I recently wrote about why we created a blog and provided some background on our company.

Customer Acquisition Ain't Easy
So it's been a year already? Wow. Time flies and where do we stand? It seems we should be much further along. Sometimes I feel more like 'BootsTrapped' than 'BootStrappin'. Not making things happen as fast as I should. It's tough as a startup to keep the focus because there's so much to do, but ever since we got our minimum-viable-product (MVP) up the first week of April, acquiring alpha testers is our main focus. It may be hard with limited resources, but I think more than anything it's psychological. It's easy to avoid doing the hard things, especially when I'm not a natural extrovert. Reaching out to real people. Facing rejection. It's funny that as entrepreneurs we're trying to change the world yet the simple fears of someone not caring about what we have to offer can weigh us down so heavily. I've made excuses to focus on other parts of the business many times before, but now I have to be more consistent with outreach efforts.

So far about 100 people have checked out the app since the first week of April. Not very good.

I've reached out to people in the Bitshares community, and roughly about 60 people have tried our alpha. Out of my personal circle about 30 have tried it. The rest of the 10 or so I'm not exactly sure. Of the top 20 or so people that I'm close to almost all have checked out the web app. After that the rate of those people that I've sent an email to who checked out our alpha has been pretty abysmal. Most haven't even responded. Rejection sucks. But got to keep persistent. I've already exhausted my initial outreach list over the last couple months, but need to go over the list again. Have to figure out a tactful way to reach out a second and third time.

Outreach Efforts
There are couple methods I'm using:

• Brute force: calling, emailing, contacting everyone I know or anyone who might listen.
• Group outreach: betalist.com, reddit and other online/offline communites to get groups to check us out.

Some recent outreach activities:

• Posted to /r/startups on Reddit. Created a June startup listing, but even on the first day of June there were probably 60+ startups that were listed before me. It was great to get one question from someone in response to our listing, but our listing is pretty much buried now.
• Posted here on Steemit. Many here are from Bitshares so I wasn't expecting too many signups.
  Overall I had one signup to the alpha and one to the email list. Not sure where those came from.

To do:

• Betalist.com – get early adopters and alpha/beta testers
  ($129 to get early review for listing. Will pay.)
• Betapage.co – similar to betalist.com. They contacted us via Facebook invite probably from our Reddit listing.
• Export my LinkedIn list for email campaign
• Export my entire personal email list for email outreach campaign
• Make phone calls instead of emailing
• Craft better email template

Our Goal:
1,000 alpha testers (100 alpha testers in target user demographic)
Deadline: July 31st.
Our goal is somewhat a vanity metric, but it will keep us focused on outreach and also demonstrate to potential investors that we can make progress on growth when we need to. Getting feedback from the general population will be useful, but the feedback from the 100 in our target market is far more important.

Anyways the goal is set. Let's do this!

#bitcash #bitshares #startups