How to get your early adopters

Zapier grew to 1.5 million users. How did they get their early adopters?

In 2012 Zapier had 0 users.
Now they have 1.5 million users.
And grow 50% year over year.

Usually, getting your first users is the hardest part.
Here’s how the founder of Zapier did it.

1. He visited user forums of Evernote, Salesforce, Dropbox…
And was looking for posts asking for integrations.
Something like:
“I love Evernote, it would be great if it worked nicely with Dropbox”…

2. He just commented in those forums and said:
“hey, here’s how you can do it…
here are the API docs to these two services, and if you know how to code, here’s how you can make it work.
OR,
I’m working on a project that will make an integration for this and if you want to find out more, go to this link and let me know.”

3. Those forum links converted into 5-10 users from each one.
+ Forum staff at big companies started asking him for partnerships.

4. He made people pay a one-time fee ($1-$100) to get into the beta…
Purpose – to gather only people who really thought this was important enough to pay for it.