annekate

You could do an ambassador program of some kind (check out The Skimm, they have a great one). But I wouldn't expect people to eagerly spread the word about solutions. For B2B you should be investing in content marketing and SEO above all else. Other clever ideas are like what Slack did; make it friendly enough for a consumer to use, and then that consumer ends up advocating for the product to their organization.

Thanks for being on team Winnie and for all your support since launch!

go to local Mac/iOS dev meetups and ask around. they also show up at conferences and of course at WWDC.

Childcare data in 50 states is coming early in 2018.

It’s not a lottery. I’ve done it several times over many years with different products and companies. The advice I laid out is basically how I did that.

Of course you can’t control if you are featured or not just like you can’t control if you get a writeup in a big publication. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give yourself the best chance of getting it.

If you have the choice, yes. You'll regret React for many reasons but you are so, so much less likely to be featured with a React app, even a great one. Suck it up and learn Swift/Kotlin (not that hard) and if you can get your app featured that's a cool 10-20k installs for free.

Or you can write a native app and get 10-20k installs for free from a feature on the app store. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

^ This is good advice.

I was an early employee of Quora and can vouch for it being a good place to do content marketing! I really love that site.

The idea that you should have a small scope and narrow focus is the one very common piece of startup advice I struggle with. In my experience at Winnie, whenever we "thought small" growth would stall out. I think if your product is just better with higher numbers of users, get as many people into it as you can.

It's in the article. Provide the supply yourself (content) while you build demand (users). Do things that don't scale.

One specific example is that we saw a lot of demand for information on child care, so we researched over 5000 local daycares & preschools and created very comprehensive pages for all of them. This sounds like a lot of work but it actually wasn't that bad. Once we had done that we were instantly the best place in the SF Bay Area to research daycares and find open spaces. Word spread like wildfire and we climbed the Google rankings quickly as well. Now, we no longer have to collect data manually, because the daycare providers come to us to reach their audience of customers. So it delivered growth on both sides of the network in a sustainable, ongoing fashion, and only required a one-time upfront investment in content creation.

You can't get from 0 to 100k without passing through 171 first. :) Congrats and good luck!

Depends on the product. Winnie's target demo is millennial parents who are mobile power users, so we knew the apps had to be best-in-class and we were prepared to invest in them.

Not all products need to invest in amazing apps or apps at all, but if you don't have a decent app than ASO and featuring are not going to be available to you. This may or may not be important to your business.

Games are the exception to this rule. Apple and Google have no problem featuring games built in Unity as long as they are performant and polished.

It entirely depends on the domain so there's no good answer for this.

Our growth has been remarkably steady, with minor seasonal factors. If the majority of your acquisition channels scale with the number of users (SEO, social, viral) then you should see a steady accumulation of momentum over time, even from a very small number — perhaps the low thousands.

We've had a strong word of mouth factor from the very beginning, but I attribute that mostly to the brand and the fact that this is an underserved market. Parents have traditionally been invisible to tech companies and they are delighted someone is finally building for them.