(this post is a feed post from my comments on reddit)
r/Entrepreneur
before you focus more on growth – spend some time looking at your retention metrics… you dont want to be filling a leaky bucket.
I work at a VC focused on helping the companies post-investment, primarily helping them grow, and build a well functioning business.
your business generally looks like it will fit the profile of a social media site – i appreciate thats not your business, i’m simply bucketing them into a format of business model.
generally for this kind of business model, the value of the business (for investment purposes) comes from the user base, the activity of the user based and by extension of these two numbers, the capacity of the platform to generate revenue from ads.
you point out you have 2000 organic users – so thats a great start, not a small achievement so congrats. what you need to figure out is of this cohort –
1. how many registers but didn’t do any activity
2. how many were still active after 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 180 days
3. how many are still active now
4. what is the average number of ‘posts’ a user does in your app?
5. what is the average time in-app / day (or month)
if these numbers are low (arbitrarily lets say below 70%) then you have a leaky bucket. for comparable a B2C SaaS would expect a Monthly Churn of less than 5% ([See this](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-is-good-retention-issue-29), no affiliation)
you want to try your best to close off and address whats causing the churn before you spend too much on ads to get new users.
next, since you app is more social in natural, you want to see data that shows that existing users are driving more users to join the app – make sure you’re tracking this, and figure out how to trigger this behaviour in your users.
Finally, if you’re going to focus on acquiring new users, you need to first really think about WHO these users are, what is the specific niche profile that would be particularly attracted to your platform, try and capture niches and then go from niche to niche, since niches are self-contained networks, it’ll be easier than trying to capture a broad demographic.