These two days, I am considering about how to acquire more users for my projects. It almost is the key to make my app successfully. Start from programming to thinking, it is a big jump actually. After reading the blog from Andrew Chen, I think there are something I have to write down, so that I can remember them once I need them.

A Few Ways To Scale User Growth

As I said, all these knowledge is from Andrew Chen’s blog, I just feel they are very important and it’s necessary to write down.

• Paid acquisition: Spend money to advertise your app. This is the directly way to get more users. But here is a formula to guide us how much we can invest in ads: maintain a 3:1 CLV:CAC ratio to keep the margins reasonable.
• Virality: This is also what I am working on currently. To make our product viral, we must make sure our users love our products. After that, we have to design a viral loop and make it more efficient by A/B tests.
• SEO: If you are building website or writing blog like me, you should know.
• Sales: I am not very sure about this method, even after I read several times about this method. It may focus on local SMBs or the enterprise.
• Others: Build partnership with Yahoo or Google.

All above methods take time to show the result. For example, to figure out if our CLV and CAC match up, we need to buy some users and wait 6 months to see how many users we can get and how much money we can earn from them. If we are designing a viral loop in our product, we need to build it and wait to see if it works. As Andrew Chen’s opinion, SEO is hard because it may take months or years before we can see the result. As my experience, it is true.

What Factors Affect User Acquisition?

In the original source, it covers the topic “What factors influence ad performance?”. Actually, the most important factors influence the user acquisition by all means.

• User requirements: This is very easy to understand. If someone refers an app to you, but the app requests you to install the Adobe Air. I guess it will significantly affect the acquisition.
• * Funnel design: Once our app get users’ attention, short registration procedure may save our users.
• Viral marketing: It will be the best way to acquire users with very low CPA, if it works properly.
• * A/B testing process: This is the necessary to test which way will work and which will not.

To acquire users more efficiently, Funnel design and A/B testing process are the key. It’s worth to invest to get it right. Here are some short form words in this article. I guess the following info may help.

What’s CLV?

Customer Lifetime Value

What’s CAC?

Customer Acquisition Costs

What’s CPA?

Cost Per Acquisition

What’s CPI

Cost Per Installation. I didn’t mention this word in the article. But I think it is necessary to write it down. We will eventually meet it one day.