What are some of your favorite ways to increase product usage early on?

Have a solid onboarding plan for new customers right out of the gate. One of the best examples I've seen is Superhuman.com. Consistent, and largely automated, onboarding can help new users become power users more quickly and creates stickiness with the product.

Hey Alexandra, here are few things we have tried 1. Looking at tons of user videos to understand what they are doing on the platform/app (use any of the session recording tools) 2. Connect with a few early users to get their feedback (not scalable, but helps) 3. Try to have a few power users who can constantly give feedback 4. Form a few hypothesis of what will work 5. A/B test as much as possible. There is no right answer and it's very difficult to predict user behaviour 6. Product videos inside the product 7. Short product tours 8. Short and sweet email onboarding series Hope these help :). Would be happy to discuss further.

Well, I haven't done any product launch yet but would be doing around Dec-Jan very soon, so my take on your questions are: 1. Segmenting your product's target audience into some particular categories. 2. Collect the database (email, contact no.) of folks there and contact them prior one week or like update them before hand so that a fuse gets created into their mind about you that you are going to do something big next week. 3. When you launched the product, contact people via cold email as well as more personalized way would be calling, discussing about features, pain points your product is solving and open to feedback. In other words, while promoting you are creating empathy with user. 4. Now to boost the speed of usage, you have to discuss about the product, it includes whether via social media, fellow product hunters talking about your product, and especially if your product is for students , can go for colleges/events to increase usage on mass scale. In simple words, Choose out audience fit for your product Before, while & after selling your product, empathy & open-to-feedback nature would be key to increase usage early on. Always answer/highlight why your product is good for them (make them feel that they need this to solve their pain point), show realistic & senseful numbers/achievements, testimonials (Early on it can be from friends, relatives etc) to cater wider audience. Be open-to-feedback.