These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the TecnoTribu team, formed by Nieves Martínez Martín @ and Pedro Sánchez Pernia @
Congratulations! Your idea is now a real product, at least a MVP, and you are ready to show it to the world and grab some real users, not the ones that used to test the development version.
You want users, but you want their feedback at this point, so be sure to have in place some analytics tools to understand their behavior, and a minimum feedback channel available. That could be just a box showing a single email account or a phone number, or some ticketing system. You may try then some tools like yorespondo (phone) , zendesk, uservoice…
First in line:
Hopefully you started some time ago creating awareness of your product, through a coming soon website, an email list, a related blog or a twitter account. So, start with who already showed some interest, that’s the easy part, but it’s a nice beginning.
Make your own early adopters.
Stay away of the “usual suspects”, you know, those people that creates an account on any of each social network or online service available in the world. Their motivation is mainly to spread their exact message or presence in every place. Don’t bet too much on their classic huge networks, and their potential virality. If you are doing well, they will probably come to you, without any effort from you, that’s just fine. You will easily identify real early adopters with a recurrent use of the platform, and cherish them as much as you can.
Trust unknown people, do not trust your friends. (Wait…What?)
Only their feedback, of course 
… Your mom, neither your friends or relatives are not your customer target, even if they could be by age or behavior. They are just been “infected” by you, and they are not suitable as “samples”. That’s why you may leverage your personal network to REACH new users and not as users by themselves. They may help you to spread the word, so make it an easy task for them writing some email template or giving them some printed flyers to distribute. You may even ask them to act on their behalf online. It’s hard to find the limit of kindly asking… and actually embarrassing them.
Make your own influencers.
You may be tempted to do a trip to mount Olympus and try to get in touch with some influent-blogger, twitt-star, hipster-trendsetter, what-ever… It is relatively easy to contact them (the ego thing), but they may ask you something in return, so they will be “infected” as well. Furthermore, it’s too risky to be tied to a big partnership, or some big influencers. Keep the emotional ownership of your customer base.
You will test your real power of traction, when someone you doesn’t know – at all – recommends your product to his friends. THAT’s such a tipping point.
Your customers are just regular people.
Fortunately you may “won the lottery” in some point and attract some celebrity (you can’t afford otherwise) in your customer base, and experiment the “Justin Bieber effect“. But that will be just a consequence that you are doing fine, and because those guys want to get in touch with their audience, your users. That’s why you will probably try, by now, regular acquisition stuff (SEO, SEM, emailing…).
Once you start your database with the above techniques or with some other acquisition strategy, be an honest stalker and identify recurrent users. Figure out, HOW they came to you and WHY they are using your product. You will then get the best clues about HOW to reach other people like them.
–
Post-Data: By the way, if I do not know you, you are lucky! Because you are not “infected”, and you are welcome to be “first in line” and sign up to our coming soon TecnoTribu website
