Picture this.

You’ve just launched a new business and, through sheer force of will, have managed to attract your first 100 paying users.

Congrats, right?

Pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

You’ve not only made a few bucks for yourself, but you’ve validated the idea and proven there is a market out there.

Now though, now comes the hard part.

Scaling the user base from 100 users, to 1000, and then 10,000.

Knowing how to do this is anything but easy.

but today, I’m gonna give a quick overview of what I’ve seen work and how you can implement it to take a validated idea and turn it into a revenue generating offer.

Do what doesn’t scale

Here’s the problem with a lot of online business advice.

It’s written by outsourced freelancers who have read about the topic, but haven’t actually built something themselves.

The result is one of a few things.

1. Advice that’s too high level to be of any practical use
2. Advice that’s kinda right, but not for the stage you’re at
3. Advice that’s just plain wrong

Here’s the thing the articles you’ll have read on this won’t have mentioned.

Attracting 100 users hasn’t yet put you in an easily scalable position.

All the talk about automation etc is waaayyy too early at this stage.

What you need to do here is roll your sleeves back up and hit the work… hard.

You can’t really automate things until you have more users and a better idea of how to help them.

So, if you’re at the 100 user stage, here’s what I recommend you do.

In short, it’s get your brand in front of as many people as possible.

To do that, you’re gonna need problem-solving content and a well-oiled promotion machine.

I like to operate under the rules of 20% creation, 80% promotion.

Here are the basic steps I’d recommend.

Produce content that’s better than 90% of the competition’s 

Find the overlap between the problems your users are having and the benefit your offer provides.

That overlap is your messaging for now.

Produce content that offers answers to specific questions within that overlap.

Use things like…

• The skyscraper technique
• Providing more actionable advice
• Getting granular with what you help with (small immediate fixes rather than big picture ideas)
• Step-by-step guides

In short, produce useful content that helps your ideal customer solve a problem they’re already having.

Then…

Create relevant content upgrades

Lead magnets, “newsletter subscribes”, and all that BS doesn’t work anywhere near as well as it used to.

Content upgrades are where it’s at.

Create short upgrades like…

• Checklists
• Cheat sheets
• PDFs if you produced a long article
• Fill-in-the-blank templates
• “Next step” content

And add them to your piece.

Here’s an example from our breakdown of Noom’s marketing.

If your audience wants access to the next step content that will make actioning your solution easier, they need to hand over their email address.

Promote like mad

Most people don’t understand how to promote content.

They think throwing out a Tweet or two is enough.

Nope.

You have to continually promote content to get the most out of it.

A few actions you’ll want to take to promote your content.

1. Share it in relevant Facebook groups (take a value-first approach and forego the link back if it’s not allowed – otherwise you’re getting banned)
2. Share within relevant SubReddits
3. Use it to answer questions on Quora
4. Schedule multiple tweets
5. Write a Twitter thread
6. Share on LinkedIn
7. Pull quotes, images, and ideas to share in “bitesize” chinks on various social platforms
8. If you have the cash, a paid advertising campaign can help maintain steady traffic
9. Spin the article into something “original” and republish on other sites
10. Get influencers in the space you know to share with their audience

Keep the promo machine going no matter what.

To sum up getting beyond 100 users, it’s about hard work.

There’s no silver bullet when you’re this early in your biz.

You have to commit to doing quality work and continue to promote it to the right people.

Once your content upgrades are generating subscribers, you’re gonna need to figure out how to turn…

• Free subscribers into trial users.
• And then those trial users into paying customers.

There are a thousand ways to make money through your email sequences, so I’ll save that for another day (or just link you to my step-by-step process for email sequences that print money).

By doing the work, you’ll eventually hit a critical mass of users.

When that point hits (different for every business), you can start to leverage your audience to attract other people.

Here’s how I did this in the past to help a brand grow to $200,000+ MRR within 18 months.

Implementing a smart referral strategy

Referral loops are a great way to have current users invite other people that would benefit from your offer.

In short, you want to incentivise people to ask their friends to join.

When breaking down Clubhouse’s growth strategy, we used the comparison of doubling a penny’s value every day.

If you have a penny and you double it’s value every single day, within 30 days you’ll have over $5,000,000.

Same thing with users.

If you can get one user to invite two friends, and each of them to invite 2 friends and so on, you’ll eventually see your user base skyrocket.

The question is, how can you do this?

Well, in my experience there are 3 ways to get current users to invite their friends.

1. Low-cost action could be simply asking them if they know anyone else.
2. Mid-cost approach could be running some form of giveaway (a free year/product for the person who refers the most paying users)
3. High-cost strategy could be to offer referral commissions (affiliates) or discounts for successful referrals.

The way I did it in the past which helped grow MRR to over $200,000 within 17 months was to extend the free trial.

Every user signed up to a 7-day free trial.

However, they could extend that to as long as 28 days by taking one of several different actions.

Here’s how they broke down.

• Successfully refer a friend to a free trial + 7days
• Promote in pre-selected communities + 7days
• Leave a review on the site that referred most of our traffic + 7days (be careful with this. Nowadays this sort of review incentivisation is frowned upon)

Once we had people on the free trial, we had one task.

Make sure that within that trial they made more money than the paid version would cost (the base tier was $29).

Do that, and the likelihood of them churning was massively reduced (that’s a short story for another day).

In conclusion

Here’s the TL;DR.

100 users isn’t yet enough for you to automate your processes for “exponential scale”.

At that stage, you’ve still gotta do the hard work.

Once that hard work is starting to create evergreen results, look at setting up a simple referral loop to potentially turn each new user into an advocate and sales person for your brand.