Early Stage Tech Product Companies! Do you have ‘super users’?

And they all have one goal- grab users. Monetization is hardly on anyone’s mind first up. ‘Get hold of as many users as you can and money will follow’ is the mantra. But these users that a company tries to acquire also have categories. For all the early stage startups, they need to have ‘super users’. “It’s better to have 50 ‘super’ users than to have 50,000 users,” said Sidhant Jena, founder of Jana Care at the Mobile India conference recently.

So, what are these super users? Super users are those loyal set of users who’ll help you make your product better. They’ll use the product even if it is nowhere close to perfect, they’ll give feedback, they’ll help you fine-tune the product and play a pivotal role in your endeavor to make that perfect product and setting up the product roadmap. “Super users are ideally people you don’t know. And are also people who are from the demographic you’re targeting. S/he’s the embodiment of what your users would be,” Jena adds.

‘Users’ is just a number. There are multiple ways of increasing that number but what you’ll need are these super users. How to get them? It’s not an easy game. Before you startup, you need your own network. You can’t sit in your cocoon and one fine day, come out and expect everyone falling head over heels and going gaga over your product. The key is to be giving yourself. You need to expand your network and build a web of loyal founder friends, bloggers, internet savvy folks who can help you when you a lunch your product. And by loyal, we don’t mean it in a nice way, we mean the people who’ll ask you the right questions.

Forming relationships with a long term ‘receivable’ in mind might be termed as being a bit selfish but well, all is fair when it comes to sweating for your startup. And then, these are not one way relationships. Everyone needs everyone and in the long run, these relationships convert into strong friendships. So, go out there, have an eye open out there in the digital jungle even before you start working on your dream tech product company.

And if you're a consumer web company fighting this battle for survival, you should apply to become a Webspark!