We launched a very bare bones product a few months ago . It took us a few weeks to get our first 1,000 businesses on the service and they’re dotted around the globe.

Here’s a map showing what our user based looked like a while back (things have stuck to this pattern largely, although now it’s accelerating slightly in Europe):

 

The problem:

FlashIssue was launched to test the assumption that small business owners found it incredibly difficult to create email newsletters on 2 levels:

  1. It takes forever to get your own blog content into a newsletter
  2. Many small business owners have a “content deficiency”  ( aka “i dont know what to write about in my newsletter”)

Our solution was 2 pronged:

  1. Make it blindingly easy to get your content into a newsletter i.e. tell us your website and we’ll go grab your content for you.
  2. Make it super quick to discover / find new relevant content
 (our goal was to enable users to complete their newsletter in 5 minutes).

 

The 5 steps:

Here’s how we went about this. Initially goal was not to flood the early product with too many users, so we kicked it off with the following:

  1. Got very active on Twitter around “content curation”
  2. Hit the road and visited the MeetUps in Atlanta that drew bloggers – this created some good user generated product reviews.
  3. Created our own blog content around a mini list of keywords – mainly curation and content marketing.
  4. Started guest blogging on relevant markting websites
  5. Got super close to our user base through the actual product – intercom.io and olark.com 

Most of this is nuts and bolts online marketing but it got us off the ground without spending a penny. It should be relevant to most businesses. Obviously, now we’re looking to accelerate our customer acquisition we’re introducing a good number of new strategies that will bring scale.

The initial group of users provided the essential feedback we needed to move off our initial MVP and launch our production ready version. This was launched recently.

Watch the video below or take a more detailed  look here.

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