Here are the first growth steps that allowed Crazy Egg to gain their first 100,000 users:

1. They created a simple opt-in page with a screenshot of a beta of their product.

2. Their ideal customers were web-designers, so they invested $10K into ads on various CSS galleries.

Result: 20,000 emails gained from their simple opt-in page.

3. Once they launched the product, they notified the email subscribers.

4. They submitted their CSS design to CSS galleries.

Result: 23,294 new visitors for free.

5. They offered all the big and small tech blogs a free $99 Crazy Egg account and helped them to set it up.

Result: TechCrunch, Mashable and a ton of other more and less popular tech news blogs covered Crazy Egg.

6. By attending hosting conferences, they offered partnerships to hosting companies: a free account for every new user + 30% commission when they upgrade to the paid plan.

7. By networking at SEO events, they offered a free $99 Crazy Egg account to SEO agencies (if they like it, they will recommend it to their customers for free).

Result: over 4,000 signups.

8. They were speaking at conferences. But instead of getting a speaking fee + traveling expenses, they kindly asked them to
make Crazy Egg a sponsor of their event. It costs nothing for the organizers. They agreed.

9. They noticed that people love sharing their heatmaps so they made the process as easy as possible.

Result: referral traffic increased.

10. They analyzed the most popular search keywords on Google around their topic and created SEO pages for those keywords.

Cumulative result: 100,000 users.