From Zero to Ten Million

The CommunityNext event last Saturday was great. I had a blast and met a ton of interesting people. It’s easy to moderate a panel when you have entrepreneurs who have such immense knowledge about what they are doing. Plus I got to meet Eric Nakagawa from icanhascheezburger. You should check out his wonderful site if you haven’t already.

Some takeaways from the conference and follow up meetings this week:

• User acquisition is engineered. Just the way great products are engineered, user acquisition is engineered. It is not left to change, it does not “just happen.” It takes a lot of work to create viral, organic growth.
• What is one key difference between true viral acquisition and seemingly viral acquisition? Not that it necessarily matters in terms of eventual business outcome, but true viral costs next to nothing for user acquisition . Seemingly viral costs something. You are paying to pick up users. One can argue it makes sense to get to some critical mass – say 1M users, if you have the capital to go do that. But true viral means your user/customer acquisition costs are about zero. The rest, after the operating costs of your people and servers, is all upside.
• It’s a tough hiring environment right now. One of the best strategies for finding developers is to contact the engineers behind your favorite widget/app/etc. and see if they want to come work with you full time.