Below, you’ll find first-hand accounts of how essentially every major consumer app acquired their earliest users, including lessons from Tinder, Uber, Superhuman, TikTok, Product Hunt, Netflix, and many more. Enjoy!

My biggest takeaways from this research:

1. Just seven strategies account for every consumer apps’ early growth.
2. Most startups found their early users from just a single strategy. A few like Product Hunt and Pinterest found success using a handful. No one found success from more than three.
3. The most popular strategies involve going to your user directly — online, offline, and through friends. Doing things that don’t scale.
4. To execute on any of these strategies, it’s important to first narrowly define your target user. Andy Johns recently shared some great advice about this.
5. The tactics that you use to get your first 1,000 users are very different from your next 10,000. A topic for a different post.

In summary, top seven strategies to acquire your first 1,000 users

1. Go where your target users are, offline
2. Go where your target users are, online
3. Invite your friends
4. Create FOMO in order to drive word-of-mouth
5. Leverage influencers
6. Get press
7. Build a community pre-launch

Watch the path of a raindrop from anywhere in the contiguous United States.

Today, Data Studio users can access over 300 data sets in just a couple clicks. From Google Ads to BigQuery to your CRM data, you can spend more time finding and sharing insights and less time configuring data sources.

With two brand new data connectors you can access even more data through Data Studio to help you analyze your marketing investments and make decisions. You can now access your market research data with our new Google Surveys connector and connect to the next generation of Google Analytics with support for Google Analytics 4 properties.

Accessing the data you need to make better decisions is only the first step. Finding insights from the data and determining the best way to communicate the insights to stakeholders can be challenging and time consuming.

We’re making it easier to get started with new marketing templates across common data sets like Google Ads, Search Ads 360 and more. You can find over 30 solutions to help you get started in the Data Studio gallery.

Launched in 2009, the Shopify App Store enables developers to build applications for Shopify’s merchants. It’s become a vital differentiator for Shopify with 85% of Shopify Merchants now relying on apps built by developers to power their stores.

As of 16th May 2021, the Shopify App store has 5,918 apps across 12 primary categories created by 3,578 developers.

Find out insights like:

• The median price for each plan across all categories
• The average rating per category
• The median number of reviews per category
• Split between free, freemium and paid apps.
• And tons more!

The growth of the Shopify App store since its launch in 2009 has been staggering. We estimate it has grown at 25.8% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2009 to 2020.

Another way to think of this is there’s been on average, 6 apps added to the Shopify app store each day in 2021 🤯

Google announced a new addition to the performance report in Search Console, specific for the practice problems rich results. You can now track your performance for your practice problem rich results.

If you are in the education online content business, you may want to leverage these new structured data types to get more exposure in the Google Search results. These may help increase your click-through rates on some of your snippets in the search results and it may help you gain more traffic to your site.

Rising priorities like site speed and multi-platform distribution are driving enterprises to explore headless and hybrid content management systems, being the "single source of truth" for content marketers and it incorporates an application programming interface (API) that allows the CMS to deliver content to any channel.

The progress WordPress has made since its inception is undeniably admirable — it has nearly singlehandedly democratized web publishing and has remained incredibly versatile, in part because of a developer ecosystem responsible for nearly 60,000 plug-ins. Wordpress gains incredibly 64.6% of CMS market share in 2021, while Shopify takes second place with merely 5.4% market share.

A new report from SlashData highlights the huge growth (14%) in the global developer community over the past six months.

JavaScript continues to attract new developers and is the largest developer community at around 13.8 million.

Even in software sectors where JavaScript is not among developers' top choices, like data science or embedded development, about a fourth of developers use it in their projects.

Python takes second place in community size with 10.1 million. The language’s developer community is growing the fastest of the established programming languages at a rate of 20 percent.

Top 5 of programming language communities in Q1 2021

• Javascript
• Python
• Java
• C/C++
• C#