High Touch User Acquisition

So, just before our family sat down for dinner yesterday, the door bell rings. I answer and a young lady is out front. I’m expecting the usual sales pitch for something I am not interested in. Anyway, she proceeds to tell me about her band “Your Favourite Enemies“, she shows me their new CD which includes videos and other multimedia, and gives me her iPod to check out a track. She then tells me they don’t have a record deal and are promoting the album themselves and asks me if I’d like to buy one.

How could I say no? So, $10 later, I have the CD. Curious about the entrepreneurial spirit that has the band going door to door to sell their music I checked out their myspace page. Turns out they are using social media in a big way to market themselves. They have content on Youtube, flickr, they’re running contests online and of course are active on Twitter (however, they’re not following their followers back, which is not cool given what they do for a living).

Anyway, my point, other than the fact that you should check out their music, is that their very non-scalable approach reminded me very much of how startups should approach user acquisition out of the gate. Going door to door is not something that scales. You can’t be a mass market success unless you knock on a lot of doors! Still, this high touch approach is how you build your initial loyal base.

It reminded me of the early days at Tungle. Yes, we’re still in the early days, but we have come a long way from when we acquired our very 1st users. In the early days, we knew every single user. We still welcome every user personally when they sign up. And we engage them immediately when they have issues. We make ourselves available to them and encourage them to let us know if they have any issues, concerns or feedback.

Just like this band going door to door, our high touch approach at Tungle does not scale all the way. Since we want to be the default scheduling solution for all business professionals, we cannot offer this level of touch to millions of users.

Still, there is no downside to this approach as far we’re concerned. It has helped us better understand who our users are, what problems they have and has helped us build a better solution. So, we’ll keep doing it as long as we can. You should too. You can’t go door to door to acquire users, but you should engage as personally and openly as you can. There’s no downside.