I’m truly amazed with how 30 million people can be drawn to Instagram or 50 million to Draw Something, not to mention 800+ million users on Facebook. It’s really interesting to see them grow, but what interests me more is how they can get their first million users. How did they do that? Of course the next obvious question is how you can implement their strategy to your own startup?

Rama wrote a great piece about this topic as well yesterday, he suggested that we go directly to phone manufacturers and telcos. If you’re in a content or mobile app business then this is totally true. But it may not work if you’re in e-commerce like me. I myself prefer a more simple and direct approach, so here are the top three ways that I learned from my research.

Continue reading [Simply Business] Getting Your Startup to its First Million Users

It bothers me that for the past 4 years or so, the number of Indonesian startups grows really fast producing hundreds of new consumer companies each year, but almost none of them reaches “the million-users” club. As big as the traction gets, it’s a couple hundreds of thousands users not not even in the millions. Why is this happening? Has no one crack the code?

Most startups I talked to always think that they have to focus on addressing real problems, building great products and make money out of it. What most people might have left out, is the fact that they need a user base for their products. How to get people to register to your site and become a member with full benefits. The problem is there’s not enough platform to grow into millions of users in Indonesia.

Let’s drill down.

Continue reading How to get Indonesian startups into the “Millions of Users” club