User Acquisition Workshop

Saturday, January 12th from 1:00 - 5:15pm

Julie Zhou, Chrissie Brodigan & Diane Loviglio 

You have a great product...but now how do you get people to use it?

Urban myth says that the most successful startups go viral – but any experienced entrepreneur knows there’s method to the myth, and that the company on the fast track to acquiring users is the surer bet. Your product might be just what the world wants, but without customers there’s no guarantee of success.

This workshop will cover tangiable strategies on how to get users, manage their behavior, then find out more about who those users are.

Student Takeaways:

• Define your product and build your distribution channels
• Determine the best (and leanest) user acquisition strategy to drive users to your product
• Learn best practices for engaging and retaining users on your site
• Best practices and tools to interview and understand your users - or potential users, and what marketing messages will resonate with them most.

About the Instructors

Julie Zhou has managed user acquisition for very small and very big companies. She is currently the Growthmaster at Hipmunk, a travel site taking the agony out of hotel and flight search that Forbes named as The World's Best Travel Site and one of the 50 Best iPhone Apps of 2012 by Time Inc. Before Hipmunk, Julie worked at Google, marketing products like AdWords, Google Maps and Android. In her free time, she enjoys rock climbing, CrossFit and finding her next exotic travel destination. Follow her on Twitter at @jyzhou.

Chrissie Brodigan has been designing for user acquisition for over 10 years. As an independent designer, Chrissie helps startups solve for user growth. She works on site optimization, mobile and desktop conversion channels, user segmentation, content strategy, and A/B tests everything except her coffee. Previously, she led information architecture and experience design for Mozilla and Firefox websites. Find her on Twitter as @tenaciouscb.

Diane Loviglio is the CEO & Co-Founder of Share Some Style. She is also a Resident Mentor at 500 Startups. She was the first qualitative User Experience Researcher at Mozilla and prior to Mozilla, she co-founded the first conference to focus on tech failures, FailCon, and co-founded a clean tech startup, Wattbot. She also freelanced as a user researcher for technology, consumer web and healthcare startups such as Authentic8, Bombfell, Bump, Cisco, Dividely, Foodspotting, Giftly, Sanofi-Aventis, Splunk, The Freelancers Union and VMware. She received her Bachelor of Humanities and Arts in Architecture and Anthropology from Carnegie Mellon University.