This document discusses how a small Thai startup called Eidos attracted hundreds of beta users for their agile project management tool from a global market. It outlines four waves of strategies they used, beginning with reaching out to local contacts and agile community groups. They then turned to more widespread community spamming on sites like LinkedIn and Meetup. However, their most successful strategy was engaging on Quora by providing thoughtful answers to questions about agile tools and pain points. The document provides tips for other startups, such as collecting user needs in signups, sharing responses, focusing on quality answers over spam, and investing in design.

1. The Hunt for
The Early Adopters
How a tiny Thai niche B2B startup
attracts hundreds of beta users in global market?
Kulawat Wongsaroj
CEO & Agile Coach Barcamp Bangkok 5
proteus-agility.com 20-Oct-2012

2. Eidos - Agile Tool that Doesn't Suck!

3. Eidos Team

4. Who are Eidos customers?
Early
Adopters
customers
Agile
Tech
Lead
Agile
Practitioners
Global IT Professional

5. Early Adopters, where are they?
I had no idea!

7. Wave 1 : Friends and Local Fan
Agile66
Fans

9. Spam but don't make it to spammy

10. Wave 2&3 : Community Spamming
LinkedIn
Agile66 Groups Meetup.com
Fans Spam Groups
Spam

11. Quora, the secret source!

12. Wave 4 : Quora
LinkedIn
Agile66 Groups Meetup.com
Fans Spam Groups
Spam
Quora

13. Source Groups

14. proteus-agility.com
4 months
75 countries
2,517 Unique Visitors
376 Beta Signup
15% Conversion

15. Tip #1
Don't collect just email in your beta signup
page.
What is your pain points?
Pivotal Tracker (increasingly popular among small to medium teams)
● Epics and story hierarchy are almost non-existent.
● x-project visibility
● Notifications and searching
● Distributed team, would like better estimate tool and projections
based trends...
● summary view point.
● Pivotal Tracker is great for developers and product managers, but
pretty much kills my ability to manage the design department.
GreenHopper (the most popular one from Eidos beta registrants)
● It doesn't yet have What If analysis or Evidence Based Scheduling.
● Difficult to implement flows. My team members can't get it to a user
friendly flow
● Feels like the tool hinders more than it helps;
● Hour burndown doesn't update the initial value if tasks are added
after the sprint has started.
● Poor hierarchy in the planning: after the sprint components are
created, the hierarchy cannot be edited;
● No possibility to filter out time tracking if the subtasks are part of
several "sprint" placeholders;

16. Tip #2:
Share signup responses with your whole team
● Google Form can script to send email out

17. Tip #3
Spamming fades away, Q&A doesn't
LinkedIn
Agile66 Groups Meetup.com
Fans Spam Groups
Spam
Quora

18. Tip #4 : Infomercial
● Blog
● DZone
○ send traffic
● InfoQ
○ thumbup/thumbdown review
○ personal editor
○ several revisions
○ establish credibility

19. Tip #5
Invest in a decent designer

20. Thank You

21. Sources