The 7th seminar in City University London's Bootstrap Business Seminar series. This week we are looking at how to gain your customer base with Sinead Mac Manus, co-founder of Fluency.io

1. Recruiting Followers / Users
CityStarters, 17th November 2015
@getfluency / @sineadmacmanus

2. Too many young people in the UK are still without work.
And many more are underemployed.
The problem: youth unemployment
@getfluency

3. Meet Emily
“I am so glad I found Fluency. I was feeling so lost after
graduating from university last year. I wasn't getting
anywhere with internships and I ended up going back to my
part time retail job to make ends meet, and I lost a lot of
confidence.
— Emily, Fluency graduate
@getfluency

4. Curate best learning content
@getfluency

5. Learn by doing
@getfluency

6. Connect learners to employers
@getfluency

7. Why startups fail?

8. “Most businesses actually get zero
distribution channels to work. Poor
distribution—not product—is the
number one cause of failure.”
Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal
Why startups fail?

9. “Many entrepreneurs who build great
products simply don’t have a good
distribution strategy. Even worse is when
they insist that they don’t need one, or call
no distribution strategy a ‘viral marketing
strategy’.
Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz
Why startups fail?

10. The Marketing Funnel

11. Quick exercise: How do Geckoboard get users?
https://www.geckoboard.com/

12. Not all users are created equally

13. CAC v LTV

14. “Early in a startup you need to
acquire your customers for free.
Later on, you can spend on
customer acquisition.”
Fred Wilson, Union Square
Ventures
Customer Acquisition Cost

15. What’s your startup idea?

16. Strategies … Recruit users manually

17. “One of the most common types of advice we give at
Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of
would-be founders believe that startups either take
off or don't.
Actually startups take off because the founders
make them take off. There may be a handful that
just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some
sort of push to get them going. The most common
unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is
to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to.
You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to
go out and get them.”
Paul Graham, Y Combinator
Do things that don’t scale

18. Do things that don’t scale

19. PressSpeaking at events

20. Develop partnerships

21. Strategies … Sharing

22. Network effects (virality)
A network effect is the effect
that one user of a good or
service has on the value of that
product to other people.
Examples?

23. Network effects

24. Referrals / Incentives

25. Incentives

26. Quick exercise: Can Flatclub incentivise users?
https://flat-club.com/

27. Strategies … Content

28. Importance of SEO

29. Long tail keywords

30. Long tail keywords

31. Long tail keywords

32. Quick exercise: Long tail keywords for WeJaunt
https://www.wejaunt.com/

33. Blogging
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-mint-grew/
“We focused on building out a unique personal
finance blog, very content-rich, that spoke to a
young professional crowd that we felt was
being neglected. Eventually the blog became
#1 in personal finance, and drove traffic to the
app. Our app didn’t have a high viral
coefficient but we had content that was.“

34. Guest blogging

35. PressPress and PR

36. Learning content #1

37. Learning content #2
For example, UnBounce:
http://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-
optimization/5-post-conversion-strategies-to-
increase-customer-lifetime-value/
Free ebook 101 Landing Page Optimization Tips
5,000 mailing list BEFORE launching

38. Social Influencers / OPNs

39. Create a community

40. Strategies … Product Innovation

41. Create a product

42. In app sharing

43. Product integrations

44. Strategies … Paid

45. Paid search /PPC

46. Paid search /PPC
Click-through rate (CTR) is the number of clicks
that your ad receives divided by the number of
times your ad is shown expressed as a
percentage.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA) is the amount it costs
to acquire a customer.
Test:
● Keywords especially long tail
● Ad copy
● Targeting of your ad
● Cost per click
● Landing pages

47. Social advertising

48. “[You] probably won’t have a bunch of equally good
distribution strategies. Engineers frequently fall
victim to this because they do not understand
distribution. Since they don’t know what works, and
haven’t thought about it, they try some sales, BD,
advertising, and viral marketing — everything but the
kitchen sink. That is a really bad idea. It is very likely
that one channel is optimal.”
Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal
What strategy to pick?

49. The Bullseye Framework
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=O3cnNkwdv6E

50. How to measure all this?

51. “Pirate” metrics by Dave McClure

52. Questions?

53. sinead@fluency.io
Follow me on Twitter:
@sineadmacmanus
Visit Fluency:
www.fluency.io
Contact me