Reach out to [early adopters] with manual, personal outreach. We should also be ready with some light processes to keep track of our early adopters and provide a high quality experience to them.

It’s critical to start with the right set of early customers to kick off all the self-reinforcing growth cycles we’ve discussed above. You have to start by knowing who your best early customers will be — for productivity/collaboration companies that’s often knowledge workers on remote and distributed teams, and often engineers.

Social proof in the form of company logos and/or customer stories tells similar companies and individuals that it’s a tool for them, because people like them use it already. The “cooler” the companies or people you use for product testimonials, the better. People want to feel cool and want to be affiliated with coolness.

Positioning uses what people know, to help them understand what they don’t.

Freemium business models gate features and/or usage while allowing people to experience the basic toolset for free, forever. These products do best when they gate access to information.

The single-player onboarding experience has to be great, and it should be very easy for people to send invites or share the tool. It’s easier to get a customer who is already willing to send one invite to send five invites than it is to get someone who’s ambivalent to send any at all.

Lack of performance (slowness, data loss) destroys the feeling of mastery. The resulting emotional state, I should be in control but I’m not! makes people feel angry.

Follow-up emails and social push notifications should deliver actions that create customer value instead of trying to “educate” your customer on the product. Show don’t tell.

Products that give people a feeling of mastery the first time they use it make people feel especially in control. People love to feel as if they are in control.