The First 100: Friends, Family, and Faith
Every startup begins with a crucial question: who will use this? In the early days of Glasp, the answer was simple: we would. We built it first for ourselves, creating a tool to save and organize the content we were consuming online.
But product development isn't just about code. It's about people. I still remember sending those first hesitant messages in August and September 2020: "I've built something I think could be useful. Would you mind trying it out?"
Those first users weren't strangers. They were friends, former colleagues, and people in our immediate network. We called this "founder-friend" distribution: personally reaching out to people we knew and asking them to try our product.
The initial growth was painstakingly slow. One by one, user by user, we grew to our first 100 users through direct messages and personal connections. But these weren't just any users. They were people willing to get on a video call with us, to share their screens, and to give us unfiltered feedback about what worked and what didn't.
One-on-One Onboarding: The 800-Call Marathon
Looking back, the numbers seem staggering. By the time we reached 1,000 users, we had personally conducted over 750 onboarding calls. Each call lasted 15 to 20 minutes, with my co-founder Kei and I splitting them between mornings and evenings.
These weren't sales pitches. Each call started with our story: why we created Glasp, our vision for an open knowledge platform, and how we hoped to make a difference. We shared personal experiences, sometimes including how I nearly died and how that shaped our mission to make knowledge live beyond individuals.
The most valuable part came next. We asked users to share their screens and show us how they currently saved information online. We watched as they navigated through Notion pages, browser bookmarks, and note-taking apps. We observed where they hesitated in our sign-up flow, where they got confused, and what excited them.
"Can you click there?" we'd ask, using Zoom's annotation features to guide them. "What were you expecting to happen when you clicked that button?"
These calls were exhausting but invaluable. They gave us:
- Real-time user feedback on our interface and functionality
- Insight into user workflows before they even touched our product
- Emotional investment from users who now had a personal connection to our team
- Clarity on our target audience as patterns emerged across different user types
Even when users didn't become active on the platform, they remembered our story. Months or years later, some would reach out: "I remember what you're building. My colleague needs exactly this!" Others became unofficial advisors, like the SEO consultant who regularly sent us reports without being asked.
The lesson was clear: in the earliest stages, depth of connection matters more than breadth of reach. Those calls created a foundation of users who didn't just try our product. They understood why it existed.
Finding Our Target Audience
One of the most challenging aspects of building Glasp was identifying exactly who it was for. Initially, we noticed many of our saved articles related to product management, so we hypothesized that product managers might be our target audience.
This led to our first focused outreach efforts. We joined product management communities on LinkedIn and Slack, some with 150,000 members. We carefully identified active members and sent personalized messages about how Glasp could help them compile reading lists of product management articles.
The response was encouraging but revealed an important insight: product managers would sign up and bookmark articles, but they weren't highlighting or taking notes as often as we'd hoped. More importantly, they rarely shared their collections with others.
This led to our first pivot. If we wanted Glasp to spread through word of mouth, we needed users who not only consumed content but also had an incentive to share it. Writers, particularly content writers and SEO specialists, emerged as a promising audience.
"Writers need to research, compile sources, and then create content from those sources," we reasoned. "What if Glasp could bridge that gap?"
We shifted our outreach to writing communities, and soon found users who were using Glasp in their workflow with editors. They would research articles, highlight key passages, and then share their Glasp profile with editors during review sessions.
This was a crucial early lesson: your initial hypothesis about who will use your product is often wrong. The users who get the most value from your product might be in an adjacent space you hadn't considered. By conducting hundreds of personal conversations, we could spot these patterns and adjust quickly.
Each audience pivot wasn't a failure. It was a refinement of our understanding. Every conversation brought us closer to finding the people who would not only use Glasp but champion it to others.
The Power of Screen Sharing: Learning by Watching
One of the most valuable aspects of our onboarding calls wasn't what users told us. It was what they showed us. By asking users to share their screens, we gained insights that no survey or analytics dashboard could provide.
We saw how people actually organized information in their digital lives. Some had meticulously organized Notion databases. Others had browser bookmarks stretching back years. Many were using screenshots or copy-pasting text into notes as makeshift ways to save important passages.
This direct observation revealed pain points that users themselves couldn't articulate. When someone says "I want a better way to save articles," they might not mention that they also need those articles to be easily searchable six months later, or that they'd benefit from seeing highlights from other readers.
Screen sharing also exposed usability issues immediately. We'd watch as new users hesitated over buttons, misunderstood features, or searched for functions in the wrong places. Rather than wondering why our activation metrics weren't improving, we could literally see the friction points.
"I notice you're looking for the highlight button on the top menu," we'd say. "We actually put it in the right-click menu. Does that make sense for your workflow?"
These observations directly informed product improvements. We made the onboarding flow more intuitive, clarified confusing terminology, and prioritized features based on the workarounds we saw users creating for themselves.
Don't just listen to users. Watch them. The gap between what people say they do and what they actually do is often where the most valuable product insights hide.
Cost-Conscious Growth: Why We Avoided Paid Channels
In the early days of Glasp, we made a deliberate choice that shaped our entire growth strategy: we would focus exclusively on channels with near-zero customer acquisition costs.
This wasn't just about being frugal. As a consumer product without a clear monetization strategy, we knew that paying to acquire users would be unsustainable. If our customer acquisition cost (CAC) couldn't be recouped, growth would eventually hit a wall.
"If we're not going to make money from users right away, we can't spend money to get them," we reasoned. This constraint became a creative advantage.
We identified two primary channels that aligned with this zero-CAC approach:
- SEO: Creating content that would continue to drive traffic for years without ongoing costs
- Word of mouth: Building features valuable enough that users would naturally share them
This focus on organic growth meant progress was slower at first. While other startups were celebrating rapid user growth through paid ads, we were meticulously crafting content, building backlinks, and refining our product based on direct user feedback.
We wrote tutorials on Medium, created guest posts for other blogs, and produced content addressing specific use cases like "How to export highlights from Kindle" or "Top Chrome extensions for researchers." Each piece of content was designed to rank for valuable keywords while demonstrating Glasp's utility.
We were particularly strategic about backlinks, recognizing their outsized importance for SEO. We reached out to educational institutions (including my alma mater) and even government sites like the Japanese Ministry of Education to secure high-authority links. These efforts required persistence, and many emails went unanswered, but the links we gained provided enduring SEO value.
This disciplined approach meant that our user acquisition wasn't dependent on continuing to spend. Once a piece of content ranked well or a community of users formed, it continued to drive sign-ups without additional investment.
The slow-but-sustainable approach paid off. By the time we reached our first 50,000 users, our blended CAC was mere cents per user, a foundation that allowed us to scale to millions without raising significant funding.
The Multiplier Effect: Translating Content into Multiple Languages
Early on, we discovered a powerful growth lever that exemplified our efficient approach: content translation. After being featured in a publication called Ness Labs, we asked users who spoke other languages if they'd be willing to translate the article.
The response was overwhelming. Our users translated that single article into nearly 10 languages, including German, Italian, Spanish, and Tagalog. Each translation opened Glasp to new language markets without requiring us to create new content from scratch.
This multiplier effect became a recurring strategy. When we created valuable content in English, we could extend its reach by having it translated by community members. Instead of writing ten different articles, we could write one great article and have it reach ten different markets.
The translations did more than increase our reach. They made users feel like contributors to our mission. The people who helped translate weren't just users; they became part of building Glasp's global community.
This experience taught us that constraints often lead to creativity. Without a budget for professional translation or international marketing, we found a solution that was not only cost-effective but actually strengthened our community bonds.
Case Study: Our First 1,000 Users
By the time we reached 1,000 users, we had developed a repeatable (if labor-intensive) process:
- Identify a community of potential users (initially product managers, then writers)
- Join their groups and communities (primarily on LinkedIn and Twitter)
- Send personalized messages introducing Glasp (hundreds per day)
- Conduct one-on-one onboarding calls with interested users
- Gather feedback and continuously improve the product
- Create content targeting their specific use cases
- Encourage satisfied users to share with colleagues
The journey to 1,000 users took approximately three months of consistent effort. While not rapid growth by venture capital standards, these were high-quality users who understood our product deeply. Many of these early adopters remain active users years later and have become our most vocal advocates.
What's remarkable is how different this approach is from conventional growth tactics. We didn't use giveaways, viral loops, or aggressive marketing. Instead, we built genuine relationships with real users and let our product's utility speak for itself.
This foundation of authentic growth would serve us well as we began to scale beyond our initial user base. The next challenge was finding ways to reach tens and then hundreds of thousands of users without losing the personal touch that had defined our early growth.