How Payout got its first 100 users
Connor's primary acquisition lever from day one was influencer/creator partnerships. He identified a content creator already operating in the class action / personal finance niche and paid them to promote Payout to their existing audience. That single creator's videos drove "thousands of downloads" in the early days, effectively bootstrapping the initial user base without any paid ad spend. He also structured his onboarding specifically to maximize conversion from the first user onward — a long, emotion-invoking onboarding sequence with social proof, personalization questions, charts/graphs for credibility, and a hard paywall before the core feature. This meant even cold traffic from influencer videos was funneling through a conversion-optimized flow from launch, so the first users who landed were also the first paying subscribers.