You could do an ambassador program of some kind (check out The Skimm, they have a great one). But I wouldn't expect people to eagerly spread the word about solutions. For B2B you should be investing in content marketing and SEO above all else. Other clever ideas are like what Slack did; make it friendly enough for a consumer to use, and then that consumer ends up advocating for the product to their organization.
It’s not a lottery. I’ve done it several times over many years with different products and companies. The advice I laid out is basically how I did that.
Of course you can’t control if you are featured or not just like you can’t control if you get a writeup in a big publication. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give yourself the best chance of getting it.
If you have the choice, yes. You'll regret React for many reasons but you are so, so much less likely to be featured with a React app, even a great one. Suck it up and learn Swift/Kotlin (not that hard) and if you can get your app featured that's a cool 10-20k installs for free.
I was an early employee of Quora and can vouch for it being a good place to do content marketing! I really love that site.
The idea that you should have a small scope and narrow focus is the one very common piece of startup advice I struggle with. In my experience at Winnie, whenever we "thought small" growth would stall out. I think if your product is just better with higher numbers of users, get as many people into it as you can.
Yeah, it's a tough one. Like most startup advice, the right answer should be "it depends". For me, I try to gauge whether the product and customer acquisition can be generalized. If both can be, which seems to be true in your case (and hopefully mine!), I think going wide is the right choice.
It's in the article. Provide the supply yourself (content) while you build demand (users). Do things that don't scale.
One specific example is that we saw a lot of demand for information on child care, so we researched over 5000 local daycares & preschools and created very comprehensive pages for all of them. This sounds like a lot of work but it actually wasn't that bad. Once we had done that we were instantly the best place in the SF Bay Area to research daycares and find open spaces. Word spread like wildfire and we climbed the Google rankings quickly as well. Now, we no longer have to collect data manually, because the daycare providers come to us to reach their audience of customers. So it delivered growth on both sides of the network in a sustainable, ongoing fashion, and only required a one-time upfront investment in content creation.
Cool, when do you expect to gather daycare data outside the Bay Area? I see one total daycare listed in my ZIP code (in the Boston area) and the search results page doesn't say anything like "we know this is a tiny number of listings, sign up here to be notified when we reach your area" (at https://winnie.com/search?category=childcare&near=[zip] ).
Got it. So it was mostly manual investigation and content generation at first, and then users started to add their own content. Great, thanks for the answer.
Very true! :) Thank you, and likewise - pretty sure there's more than 100k information-hungry parents out there, so wouldn't be surprised to see the "100k to 500k"-post in the not too distant future!
Isn't this true for all apps? If an app is performant and polished, while also following UI/UX guidelines, it has just as good of a chance to be featured if is React vs Native? Is there anything that goes against this? Or is the idea its much harder to follow UI/UX guides while using a hybrid system?
I suspect that the reviewers see LOTS of low-quality apps written on portable frameworks every day. These are accessible and cheap options for doing quick development, and unfortunately that means that lots of junk gets churned out on them, and some of it even looks pretty decent since there are so many free UI frameworks. There are some platforms that are almost as easy and cheap to use as wordpress.
A company that does a respectable job of developing a nice-looking and performant native-application is going to stand very far apart from this crowd. The same company may have done just as well in terms of performance and UI conformity with React Native but will they stand out as well to tired and jaded reviewers? I think that is what the OP is getting at. No one can predict who will be featured, but true native is probably one thing that helps.
Funnily enough, we also sort of failed to capitalize on push. We didn't even ask for push permissions in the first version of our app! Eventually we found the right push product for our users, but it's still the case that a lot of people have them off by default or prefer to be contacted by email.
