The official blog for Numerous. Life's most important numbers available at a glance.
How Numerous Got Its First 10,000 Users
Charlie Wood
22 July 2014
Yesterday morning Numerous added its 10,000th user—w00t!
It’s only a small step on the path to our first major growth goal of 1 million users, but it’s a good point at which to pause and reflect on how we got here.
It all started with a LaunchRock page and a bunch of emails to people we know, about a hundred of whom signed up to receive updates about our new project.
When we had a beta ready, we emailed our list asking for beta testers. We added those who accepted to TestFlight so they could start using the app. That netted us our first 50 or so users.
Over the course of the beta, we posted to our blog and Twitter which attracted some additional interest. We added another 50 or so users, bringing out total near 100 (which is currently Apple’s limit). After 10 weeks in beta, it was time to release Numerous to the world.
With a zero-dollar marketing budget, we emailed a launch announcement to a handful of reporters and analysts we thought would be interested. This wasn’t a mass email, mind you, these were one-off emails to about a dozen individual people including:
- Stacey Higginbotham (who covers Internet of Things) at GigaOm
- Thorin Klosowski (who writes a lot about IFTTT) at LifeHacker
- Jason Cipriani (who covers mobile and connected devices) at CNET
In each email I was explicit about why I thought they and their readers would be interested.
On launch day we got some great coverage, including a GigaOm piece by Stacey, an article on CNET by Jason, and a story in the Austin Business Journal by Chris Calnan. We also got a mention from indie Mac and iOS developer Brent Simmons that brought in a surge of new users. By the end of the day we had added about 1,500 users, which is way better than zero.
A couple of days later we got another 1,000 from the announcement of our integrations with IFTTT and Zapier, both of which have rabid followings.
Then began the long, slow climb to 7,500 as about 100 new users each day found us on the App Store, heard about us from friends, saw numbers our users tweeted from the app, and otherwise organically came to discover Numerous.
Finally last Thursday John wrote a blog post showing our upcoming integration with the iOS 8 Today view. The next day the news got picked up by Zac Hall at 9to5Mac and by Monday morning we had added another 2,500 users pushing us past the 10,000 mark.
It’s now Tuesday afternoon and the number of Numerous users stands at 11,274—a 50% increase in the last 4 days. (Thanks, Zac!)
So how did we get our first 10,000 users? There was certainly no magic bullet; we just hammered away. Which is exactly how we plan to get our next 990,000—and beyond.
If you haven’t tried Numerous yet, please do! It’s on te App Store at http://appsto.re/us/ycXIV.
