[andrewcross]

You don't even have to wait for the signup either - you can often get them on the phone after a well-written cold email. I run a marketplace for trips planned by locals (Tripzaar.com), and when we are recruiting locals, we try and get them on a call before they even sign up. Then once we get on a call, we'll actually listen to their problems, offer to help, then manually create their account for them. Not only does this get more people onto the site, but we get a considerably more loyal community as well. I've heard this "sign them up yourself" strategy work very well for quite a few other companies too.

It definitely won't scale, but we'd rather have a few people who really buy in than thousands who wouldn't feel comfortable dropping us a line with suggestions.