How to get 50 highly-targeted sign-ups in 1 hour

Most new apps would find it difficult to get 50 signups in a day...

Let’s be honest. Unless you are already a very popular influencer in your field, and you’ve only just launched your product you’ll be lucky to get 50 random signups a day with about 5–10% of people that will actually be interested in your product or app.

Back in 2007 I’d give talks on intellectual property searching and analytics techniques. They’d be aimed at business owners, entrepreneurs and lawyers. Sometimes I’d get up to 50 people in the room and I’d say that 90% of them would sign up. The other 10% usually fell asleep or something (yet woke up a the end of the session and bombarded me with questions that I’d already talked about! — digression).

I’d offer these talks, for free, and by latching onto partners who always needed free speakers to boost up their events. They were usually held at places like, the national library, the chamber of commerce, colleges, universities (with relevant courses — masters courses or vocational courses work best since they are made up mostly of experienced working professionals).

These days there’s sites like meetup.com for finding groups of like minded people. Like minded = highly targeted.

Think about it when launching your next app or digital product. An advantage to this approach is that you get 50 sets of feedback that you can learn from and grow upon too.

Some might argue that this doesn’t scale. But if you’re only getting 10 sign ups a day, another 50 is a welcome boost. Also, since these people will be heavily targeted then the chances of them using the product and later going on to become product-evangelists will be much higher — and that’s when your scaling begins.