Scaling a startup by manually recruiting early users and getting feedback
- May 6
- 3 min read
By Sydney Liu
Co-founder of CharacterHub and Mascot Branding
The hardest part about building a startup in the early days is getting people to care! When you're trying to build something, nobody knows who you are. Reaching out to people feels awkward, and convincing people to buy your product or try your thing can feel like an uphill battle. This is one of the hardest phases of the company, and people oftentimes compare this to pushing a boulder up a hill, and for good reason! It's extremely exhausting and can be very difficult.
Especially if you spent all this time building a really cool product and spent so much time making something that you are really passionate about! It's especially exasperating when nobody cares and you can't get anybody to use it.
Having built a number of online communities that scaled into large numbers of users, I found a repeatable pattern that helps get around this problem and sets a good foundation.
We’ve used this process for all of our products and will continue to do it for anything we build in the future. It helps get around this problem and sets a good foundation for the early days of product development.
I found that many people are genuinely willing to be helpful and want to give feedback! Nobody wants to be sold to, but everyone wants to share their opinion. You can leverage this to get early testers by reaching out to your target demographic and asking if they're willing to share feedback or tell you more about their problems! For CharacterHub, we reached out to character designers and we asked them to tell us about their issues. We had them play with the product and share all types of feedback.
This was awesome because this led to both getting new users to try the product and also a ton of feedback that helped us make the product better. Over the course of hundreds of these conversations, the product gets significantly better, and you'll also have hundreds of people who will have tried the product.
For CharacterHub, this was what also kicked off a beautiful flywheel where people who did really enjoy the product started telling each other about it. We kept doing this for a couple of years and this built a lot of momentum! The flywheel was as follows. We would reach out to somebody to get feedback. That feedback would make the product better.
The users would like the product more because they got a better product, and then they would tell other people about it to try it out, who would then share more feedback and make the product better! And of course, the more people who tried it, the easier it was to get people to give feedback because now we suddenly had a reputation and people had heard of us.
Especially in these early days, one of my favorite hacks is to let people know when we listen to their feedback and make an update based off of something they shared with us! It can be hard to do that when you have a ton of users or you're much later on in the process, but in the early days, it's really rewarding to show your users you actually listened to them!
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