On Exponential User Growth: Solo-scaling 0 to 1,000 Monthly Users.
Getting users to a product or website is one of the most difficult tasks any builder will encounter. A dream scenario for any new product or experience is exponential user growth. Exponential user growth refers to a situation where the number of users on a platform or service increases rapidly over time, not at a constant rate, but by a percentage of the existing user base, meaning the growth accelerates as the user base expands, similar to a compounding effect. After years of failed launches, a website I founded in 2020 was able to attract more users over time efficiently.
In 2020 I launched a website when I found out that the only available resource for a particular subject matter never updated their content and neglected the requests of their user base. Their site was stagnant and there was no alternative for users to find what they needed.
I started a new website to fix this, with 3 goals in mind:`
- Stay up to date
- Expand
- Acquire and enact user feedback
These are things that my main competitor should have cared to do. My goal was never to remove the competitor but to be a better resource for users. My journey began at 0 MAU, 5 MAU year two, 50 MAU year three, and snowballed into 1,000 MAU this past year.
MAU = Monthly Active Users
MAU can also be defined as the number of unique users who engaged with a website within the last calendar month. Users coming to my website in September/October looked like this:
So how did exponential MAU happen in just these couple of months? The answer is more complex than you think. I didn’t run paid ads or marketing. It was all organic search and social.
Discrete Comment-based Web Traffic on Socials
Using established accounts related to the content in the realm of my business we recruited Reddit and TikTok users with active accounts to discretely establish a user base through directly linking to our site in forum/comment sections. But it wasn’t as simple as spam, we had to be clever.
Never spam on social media or social forms.
Not only does this make your brand and product look desperate. It will get users shadow-banned, flagged, banned, or even IP banned.
It’s a marathon not a sprint.
The accounts we had access to needed to monitor and find relevant questions on Reddit. People search Reddit for answers from humans. Some people even add ‘Reddit’ to the end of a question on Google for better answers. Our concept was to find hyper-relevant questions where our product was the solution and sneak our link into the answer.
The issue with this strategy is traffic volume and recency. We had to be on top of forms relevant to our product and snipe out the most relevant posts so as not to be seen as spam commenters. If you see the same comment or links on a ton of posts it's quite obviously spam.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me
If all the content is different, there is an insightful answer included and the link just happens to be there you’re less likely to be seen as an ad. Not only did we link our product, however. We pulled the risky play.
We recommended our competitor first.
The safe name everyone knows raises no red flags with a consumer. They think, ‘I am familiar with that website but I’m looking for something else.’
An excerpt from one of our accounts might read:
“but if you’re looking for more relevant information I came across (Website link) which has more what I was looking for.”
Now this did not blow up our site with traffic, in-fact we can only link it to a couple hundred traffic clicks. But Google loves it when you crosslink from one site to another, so Google SEO began favoring our link more and more, and we built more traffic of users who would stay and use the site. Hyper-relevant and focused traffic does wonders for expanding discovery.
Boom. we did it.
We got upvotes and traffic to a link by being early, relevant, and sly with our marketing. We never got flagged for spam or taken down. Granted we were doing this for <10 posts per genuine account spread out between 2–12 months.
We were always in the long game. Expecting a site to blow up in months if not years is not realistic, time is your friend.
Turn Your Competitor into Legacy Status
Our competitors never shared information… We did. We were different, we updated our site monthly, and they did not, we had an FAQ, but they didn’t. We kept users because we had ten times the product they had. Differentiate yourself. Be bold and different, and it will work out in the end.
Not only metaphorically but literally we watched our competitor die out.
They burned through money trying to keep up, well we stuck to a very compact budget. Eventually, they shut down and transferred their website domain to a subdomain to cut costs, losing all the search advantages they had started with.
They shut down their services and we inturn acquired their whole user base for free.
Donations and tiered users keep us afloat, for now.
Patience
My website was live for about 3–4 years before noticeable growth. Then exponential growth started. Before we were just stagnant, experiencing little growth.
We had 1-3 daily active user for years.
It was slow and painful
It was 4 DAU to 8 DAU to 16 DAU to 40 DAU in just weeks.
Albeit, the long grueling story is 1 Daily Active User to 40+ Daily Active Users over 2.5 years. “Overnight success” is very rarely a true story.
I thought about quitting. A lot.
Every time my domain and hosting bill would be coming up for renewal I had to make a decision. Burn the money to help my small user base get the information they want or give up on the whole project and buy myself a nice dinner.
I believed in the product, I truly thought it was helpful and in 2023 I received a very nice note from a user who gave me $6 and thanked me for hosting the website, encouraging me to continue.
“I hope that the website can continue to update its data and become more comprehensive. Thank you again.”
Little did she know at the time, she probably saved the website as I was ready to give up after 3 years and got lazier with updating content.
I opened up forums to allow user feedback and submissions to hear what users wanted. This sparked many future ideas and allowed my user base to be part of the story instead of just “users.”
Stay With It
Hitting 1,000 monthly active users was always a goal, but never did I think it’d happen so quickly. Growth is many times exponential, even when you least expect it.
Believe in your product, build out a product you yourself would use, strategically promote the product, and let the users be your source of truth.
Exponential growth is always on the horizon for a good product or service.
Ross is an experience designer and strategist who has worked across healthcare, consulting, and startups. He owns and operates online businesses and has solo-scaled web products from 0 to 1,000 MAU. You can contact Ross here: https://www.rossdillon.me
