[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
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Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
I am building a B2C AI SaaS with $50/month price. How would you go
about getting with first 100 users and then the next 500 users.
What we are currently doing: 1) Cold outreach to power users - to
convert them into affiliates. 2) Cold outreach to individuals who
have target ICP communities. 3) SEO for more long term (not for the
first 500)
Author : amanchanda
Score : 445 points
Date : 2025-05-13 08:41 UTC (14 hours ago)
| deekshaaashaaa wrote:
| let me know when you figure out
| starbase3496 wrote:
| The YC Startup School series on YouTube is pretty good! There's a
| video dedicated to the topic:
| https://youtu.be/hyYCn_kAngI?si=cSCikwHVu5e0NGf5
| j45 wrote:
| Depends on the problem being solved, and where that audience
| hangs out.
|
| I would go find the audience it was built for.
| podnami wrote:
| Make a cool product video. It's easier for people to grok the
| basic value prop for a product (and it forces you to think about
| it) vs needing to read product specs. It's definitely worthwhile
| using a professional to get it created as it can be used for
| fundraising/sales etc
| coolcase wrote:
| Experiment alot!
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Find a way to make it free to start.
|
| This is how Firebase, Supabase and friends work.
|
| Getting 100 people to sign up for a free service is still work,
| but significantly less.
| amanchanda wrote:
| We have a free version. For now, we have kept it invite-only.
| Question is TOFU.
| CrulesAll wrote:
| Making it 100X harder to get them to pay for it subsequently.
| "If you're good at something, never do it for free" - Joseph
| Joker MBA JD.
|
| If not, then you are in the ad business.
| sillystu04 wrote:
| To play devil's advocate, many successful developer focused
| companies have gone down this route successfully. Neon,
| Cloudflare, Firebase, Github and many more have all made free
| tiers work.
|
| I suspect there's a special dynamic for developers. I'm
| usually more willing to try out new things on personal
| projects, but I also don't like paying for things on personal
| projects. At work I don't care how much things cost, but I'll
| definitely advocate for tools that worked well on personal
| projects.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Supabase doesn't even require a credit card, but your data
| goes poof in 60 days if you don't pay.
|
| Ideally you want your tools to be so easy to use, clients
| just switch onto a paid plan when they want to get serious.
| hluska wrote:
| Many successful companies that we've all heard of have free
| tiers. They offer free tiers because it works. They're
| certainly not in the ad business.
| CrulesAll wrote:
| Many people win in a casino. Forget the majority who do
| not. Competing on price, unless you are Toyota or Google,
| is a low probability move.
| reillyse wrote:
| The basic (marketing) problem is find where your users hang out
| and go meet them there. Usually for these kinds of products your
| customers will congregate somewhere online, reaching them though
| can be very tough. Try and drill down super narrow (if you can't
| find a large community together ). Don't try to convert new
| people, find people who are searching for a solution.
| herbst wrote:
| This is what I do before I spend a single minute on building
| anything. If you don't know how to reach your audience any
| product will fail
| CrulesAll wrote:
| Education marketing is the trench warfare of marketing. Unless
| you are a big conglomerate, this is a terrible strategy.
| "Finding people who are searching for a solution" is maneuver
| warfare. It's the best strategy, and the only one that should
| be employed by SMEs. OP is looking for 100 people when in
| reality they should be looking for 5 people who already know
| they want the solution you are offering. If the product/service
| works, these five people will become sales reps for you. NB.
| The trick is not selling the product to these five people. It
| is finding these five people.
| vanschelven wrote:
| Grown way past 100 users with:
|
| * Make a great product. Everyone tells you "build it and they
| will come" is not working anymore, but it's working _for me_.
|
| * Outreach via your network. Talk to people with the intent of
| learning, not selling.
|
| * I'm personally on a freemium model. But that's in the
| developer-to-developer market, which is vastly different from
| your B2C
|
| EDIT:
|
| https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may give an idea of
| what we're doing.
| amanchanda wrote:
| Make a great product. -- > this is an iterative process as per
| me. Unless users come and try it out, you won't know what a
| great product looks like.
|
| The need is real, and the problem is real. I am one of the
| users myself. I built it because I felt the need myself. I ran
| the MVP with 15 others in my network with similar profiles.
| Quesiton is how to scale beyond that.
| vanschelven wrote:
| Is there any word of mouth ("virality") among your existing
| user-base?
| jll29 wrote:
| Virality can be the key to growth, and it can be
| engineered.
|
| I almost didn't buy the great book The One Billion Dollar
| App because of hits clickbait title, but it actually well-
| elaborates the mechanics (and the mathematics) of viral
| spread of apps, which not by coincident corresponds to the
| familiar formulas that people will have seen during the
| CoViD19 pandemic ("r-coefficient", r or R0 [1]).
|
| For example, if you have a mobile app that gives you
| something free for each friend you invite to it, it may
| encourage some folks to share with r friends...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
| herbst wrote:
| Same here. When I create a product I try to build something
| that makes a good impression and if done well everything kinda
| goes from there.
|
| My first SaaS was basically traffic kick-started from a single
| comment on the digital ocean blog, that described a complicated
| solution to the problem I 'solved'. No freemium either.
| meander_water wrote:
| Cool product! How much time would you say you spend on support
| per week? I've always heard that it's harder to scale when
| you're reliant on income via support.
| vanschelven wrote:
| As it stands I'm on the other side of the scalability issues
| wrt support-based growth: although I do have paying
| customers, I'd rather have more
| 90s_dev wrote:
| I've been struggling with choosing a model to make enough to
| keep the lights on with my upcoming project. Has freemium
| actually gotten enough paid users for you?
| sebstefan wrote:
| > https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may give an idea of
| what we're doing.
|
| It's immediately obvious to me that the illustrations are AI
| slop
|
| You should invest 20 bucks into getting some pictures of a guy
| in a datacenter, or 200 to pay some dude on Fiverr to draw you
| some sinks, instead of having these be the first thing
| customers see when checking out your product
| MobileVet wrote:
| > It's immediately obvious to me that the illustrations are
| AI slop
|
| I don't believe this qualifies as AI Slop. They are all
| consistent in their style and thus 'on brand' for what they
| are trying to convey. While visuals are fairly subjective and
| these may not speak to you, they don't have 'obvious slop
| characteristics' eg 6 fingers or 3 eyes imho.
| sebstefan wrote:
| If you can tell immediately that an illustration is AI-
| made, for me it already qualifies as slop. It gives low
| quality, lack of effort, "Is this website legit or is this
| some guy running a scam from their bedroom in Malaysia"
| type vibe
| bwb wrote:
| wow I didn't see it that way at all, they looked good to me.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| They are very obviously "AI generated genre" which many
| still don't pick up on. Whether art that is obviously AI-
| generated is appealing or effective - that may also be the
| case
| bwb wrote:
| shrug, i don't mind, looks good
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Still a tiny bit better than the "massive limbs bendy people"
| corporate style.
| sebstefan wrote:
| It's called Corporate Memphis
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis)
|
| Might be soulless and ugly too, but at least it doesn't
| make your customer think "Hold on is this a scam?"
| MajorLettuce wrote:
| It's actually quite interesting how both styles can be
| considered slop, but Corporate Memphis evokes different
| association. It makes me think that style did something
| right.
| stevoski wrote:
| I'd wager that paying customers really don't care whether the
| images look AI-generated or not.
|
| They care much more about whether this product solves a
| problem they have.
|
| This is based on my 17 years of running first a successful
| B2C product then a successful B2B SaaS.
|
| Minor changes to one's home page tend to have little
| observable change in numbers of trial signups, the rate of
| conversion to paid customer, and so on.
| drysart wrote:
| > I'd wager that paying customers really don't care whether
| the images look AI-generated or not.
|
| Maybe, but in a conversation about acquiring your first
| hundred users; you don't have a lot of word-of-mouth
| backing up the quality of your product. Your ability to
| effectively present your product will never be more
| important.
|
| If it's important enough that your brochure website has
| images on it at all, then it's also important enough for
| them to not look like something you'd see slapped on a
| scam.
| conductr wrote:
| I also think those images are not super aesthetically
| pleasing but I also don't care about the sink metaphor
| they're using so I instantly ignore them and just focus on
| the text
| delfinom wrote:
| Are you upset by the kitchen sink metaphor? lmao
| sebstefan wrote:
| ?
| calmoo wrote:
| Cool concept but AI slop photos are really offputting, this
| would steer me away from your product (as a naive first
| viewer).
| helloplanets wrote:
| Yes, just use a crisp screenshot related to the use case.
| Especially when it's a product aimed at developers.
| vanschelven wrote:
| This comment is a bit puzzling to me given that this is
| literally the very top thing at the homepage.
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| First 100 users, meet them one by one wherever you can (forums,
| friends, ex-coworkers) and call them to talk to them and help
| them out with onboarding if needed. Straight up cold outreach and
| warm intros. Next 500 will most likely come from referrals if
| these first 100 users are happy.
|
| Apply this logic to the jump from 20 to 100 if it makes the task
| less daunting for you.
| amanchanda wrote:
| Ok. Makes sense. So basically, what we are doing, you want us
| to scale that. Correct?
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| Your current approach has specific techniques I would remove
| altogether to focus on the core interaction between you and
| the user: talk to so many of them so often that you truly
| understand their problem and how they shop for a solution.
|
| Once you understand that and make them happy, you'll come up
| with ideas to experiment how to get more users.
| mpeg wrote:
| B2C is hard...
|
| Long term, only paid ads and SEO will work (and SEO can be
| fickle)
|
| Short term, run some paid experiments (knowing you will probably
| not get positive return yet) and maybe some influencer marketing
| (they'll cost money, but not as much as paid ads depending on the
| niche)
| amanchanda wrote:
| Have you seen results with paid experiments at this early
| stage? One thing we are considering is to do a paid masterclass
| (low ticket) and run paid ads for that. Bring them in the
| funnel and get them signed up to use the product.
| mpeg wrote:
| Without knowing what the vertical is, hard to say whether a
| masterclass like that would provide good results. I know for
| some verticals things like free webinars etc can provide
| decent results, but that's usually b2b
|
| So, usually paid experiments won't really give you a return
| at an early stage, but occasionally they can if you get
| lucky, but at least they'll give you an idea of what your CAC
| can be, and give you a starting point to start optimising it
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I've found B2C much easier than B2B, and much more pleasant
| too.
|
| SEO is extremely easy: Write in very clear prose what you are
| selling and give potential clients as much information as
| possible. This is all you need for SEO, apart from purely
| technical stuff like load times.
|
| Turning your SEO efforts into real sales is also easy: State
| your price(s) very clearly on the website and then make it as
| easy as possible for customers to make a purchase. Get out of
| their fucking way when they have their wallet out.
|
| If you insist on using paid ads and influencers, by God connect
| the campaigns to specific discount offers so that you know
| exactly how many sales origin from each channel you are paying
| to market in.
| fidotron wrote:
| > Get out of their fucking way when they have their wallet
| out.
|
| Cannot be emphasised enough.
|
| I have seen enough B2C funnel optimization work to be able to
| say that at every minor obstacle you create 90% of the people
| will fall off.
|
| You need to get people invested in your solution and make it
| super easy for them to throw money at you.
| abdullin wrote:
| I have a course on building AI solutions in business (based on
| success stories from companies in Europe/USA). Sold ~400 seats so
| far, mostly through my community and word of mouth. No external
| ads or cold outreach.
|
| The process was classical. Over two years I created a community
| to sharing cases and insights from building LLM-driven systems.
| We focused on creating good non-toxic and collaborative
| atmosphere. No ads or SEO to grow it, standing out by sharing
| real-world cases and helping others.
|
| Thanks to the community, got 100 customers within the beta-
| testing period. Then 300 more came over the last 4 months, after
| opening the sales.
| hi_hi wrote:
| Are you able to share. I would love to see real world success
| stories of LLM use cases and integrations, beyond the common
| ones you see often (code gen, story gen, automated summaries,
| etc)
| abdullin wrote:
| Of course.
|
| Most of the AI cases (that turn out to be an actual success)
| focus around a few repeatable patterns and a limited use of
| "AI". Here are a few interesting ones:
|
| (1) Data extraction. E.g. extracting specs of electronic
| components from data-sheets (it was applied to address a USA
| market with 300M per year size). Or parsing back Purchase
| Order specs from PDFs in fragmented and under-digitized EU
| construction market. Just a modern VLM and a couple of
| prompts under the hood.
|
| (2) French company saved up to 10k EUR per month on
| translators for their niche content (they do a lot of organic
| content, translating it to 5 major languages). Switched from
| human translators to LLM-driven translation process (like
| DeepL but understanding the nuances of their business thanks
| to the domain vocabulary they through in the context). Just
| one prompt under the hood.
|
| (3) Lead Generation for the manufacturing equipment -
| scanning a stream of newly registered companies in EU and
| automatically identifying companies that would actually be
| interested in hearing more about specific types of equipment.
| Just a pipeline with ~3-4 prompts and a web search under the
| hood.
|
| (4) Finding compliance gaps in the internal documents for the
| EU fintech (DORA/Safeguarding/Outsourcing etc). This one is a
| bit tricky, but still boils down to careful document parsing
| with subsequent graph traversal and reasoning.
|
| NB: There also are tons of chatbots, customer support
| automation or generic enterprise RAG systems. But I don't
| work much with such kinds of projects, since they have higher
| risks and lower RoI.
| expensive_news wrote:
| That last point (compliance gaps in fintech) sounds
| fascinating. Is there a place that I could read more about
| this?
| abdullin wrote:
| Compliance gaps / legal analysis is a pretty common theme
| in my community (meaning - it was mentioned 3-4 times by
| different teams). Here is how the approach usually looks
| like:
|
| 0. (the most painful step) Carefully parse all relevant
| documents into a structural representation that could be
| walked like a graph.
|
| 1. Extract relevant regulatory requirements using
| ontology-based classification and hybrid searches.
|
| 2. Break regulatory requirements into actionable
| analytical steps (turning a requirement into
| checklist/mini-pipeline)
|
| 3. Dynamically fetch and filter relevant company
| documents for each analytical step.
|
| 4. Analyze documents to generate intermediate compliance
| conclusions.
|
| 5. Iteratively validate and adjust analysis approach as
| needed.
|
| 6. Summarize findings clearly, embedding key references
| and preserving detailed reasoning separately.
|
| 7. Perform gap analysis, prioritizing compliance issues
| by urgency.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| why no ads though? don't they give you reach and discovery to
| people? for so as long your profits are higher than ads cost,
| you are profitable, so why not?
| abdullin wrote:
| There are way too many ads around "AI". Everybody else does
| that, frequently overwhelming people with too many promises
| of quick wins.
|
| I prefer to distinguish from this hype and reach people
| through other channels - good content, word of mouth and
| interesting collaborative events (like our last Enterprise
| RAG Challenge). This might lead to slower sales in the short
| term, but I think the long-term value to the brand is worth
| it.
|
| EDIT: fixed typo
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| yeah, this is much slower growth... danger must be it is so
| slow it must be non-existent. but I am with you on same
| boat, there are too many AI ads for crappy apps
|
| but I guess it speaks to flood of crap-ware, and flood bad
| content in social networks
|
| ^not meaning about you, of course (those folks must not be
| even on HN)
| abdullin wrote:
| Building something that people truly need - might not
| lead to huge sales right away, but I believe this to be a
| good long-term strategy. Sprint vs marathon.
|
| Just keep on pushing on it, and it will eventually work
| out.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| Building something that people do not need might not lead
| to sales right away either.
|
| Maybe it will work out, at low growth rate... in 180
| years, when it does not matter anyways. Extremely low
| grow rates are functionally indistinguishable from death.
|
| And even successful great products will not be used by
| anybody, ... if nobody even knows about it.
|
| Think of Facebook or Apple hiding somewhere in corner vs
| screaming about themselves in Times Square billboards and
| streets storefronts in rural India.
|
| Marketing, Distribution, Discovery is important for to-be
| great products too, just as it is important for crap-
| ware. (unfortunately later makes bad name and bad look
| for the whole industry).
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| as Andrew Grove said "if you are walking through the
| desert of death, keep walking"
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| anyways, hope it works out well for you friend. tough for
| everyone! keep up all the hard work!
| ozim wrote:
| Ok now we move goal posts how to build first 100 community
| members
| abdullin wrote:
| When I was starting my community, I joined other similar
| communities and tried to be helpful there. No ads or links,
| just answering questions and supporting. People that were
| genuinely interested to learn more about the topic - opened
| my profile and followed the links there.
|
| This and interesting content was enough to grow community
| organically to 14k subscribers over 2 years.
|
| Another approach to speed up the growth - organise some fun
| event that benefits the entire community, highlights and
| showcases the participants.
|
| E.g. when I organised last Enterprise RAG challenge, we got
| 350 submissions from the teams around the world. Plus IBM
| joined as a sponsor. People were mostly participating not for
| the prises, but because of the approachable challenge and
| ability to push state of the art. Plus some were hired away
| because of the good leaderboard scores.
|
| Article of the winner (just google "Ilya Rice: How I Won the
| Enterprise RAG Challenge") is considered by some companies as
| one of the best resources on building document-based AI
| systems. And the entire community sees it as the result of
| their work together - further reinforcing the spirit of the
| collaboration.
|
| People tend to share and spread fruits of their labor and
| love.
| rwieruch wrote:
| Not sure if my "products" compare to yours, but I've seen some
| success with a few of them over the years, maybe there are some
| takeaways (or pitfalls to avoid) for you:
|
| CloudCamping (PMS): 250+ Businesses, 2023
|
| - Positioned as more modern, more accessible, and more affordable
| than the competition
|
| - Limited competition due to the complexity of the product
|
| - Personally visited campgrounds to demo the product
|
| - Sent physical postcards (old school!) to campgrounds with
| product updates and announcements
|
| - Due to limited competition, it is now ranking very high in the
| German marked on SEO
|
| The Road to React & The Road to Next: 1000+ Users, 2024
|
| - Gave away The Road to React for free in exchange for an email,
| grew the mailing list this way
|
| - Benefited from early timing (luck!), it was the first book on
| the topic
|
| - Initial version wasn't polished, but I kept iterating and
| improving it each year
|
| - In 2025, released the paid course The Road to Next to my
| audience, now over 1,000 students enrolled
|
| SoundCloud (DJ/Producing as "Schlenker mit Turnbeutel")
|
| - Active from 2010-2015 as a hobby, grew to 10,000+ followers (a
| lot for the time)
|
| - SoundCloud allowed 1,000 direct messages per track
|
| - Carefully selected 1,000 high-engagement listeners in my music
| niche and personally messaged them to check out new tracks
|
| So yeah, a mix of timing/luck, outreach that does not scale,
| being better than the competition I'd say.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > SoundCloud (DJ/Producing as "Schlenker mit Turnbeutel")
|
| Pardon my ignorance - does SoundCloud let you monetise, or is
| it purely it being cool that people are listening to your
| tracks?
| rwieruch wrote:
| Not ignorant at all.
|
| I'm not sure if they've added any monetization features over
| the years. Back then, it was arguably the best platform for
| getting discovered as a producer or DJ. When I stopped making
| music, I was getting a lot of requests to play at clubs
| across Germany and Europe.
|
| At the time, I preferred to stay anonymous, so I never made
| the leap into the professional or public scene. Still, I was
| in touch with some producers early in their careers on
| SoundCloud when they had 1000 followers, like Robin Schulz
| and Felix Jaehn, if those names ring a bell.
|
| So yes, I'd say it was (is?) definitely a launchpad for
| artists. But as far as I know, there was never a real way to
| monetize on the platform.
|
| Unfortunately, when I stopped paying for the Pro version,
| they removed almost all of my music. Only 5 mixes are still
| up :')
| Applejinx wrote:
| Might be fortunate instead: they're setting up to be able
| to train AI on specifically you and then, if needed, make
| music AS you undercutting you. Such is the way of things
| these days.
|
| I dropped Soundcloud paid version too, and migrated to just
| YouTube. Currently YouTube is trying very hard to learn to
| reply to my fans AS me, but through pushing buttons to
| immediately supply AI-generated responses. I'm sure anyone
| else with a substantial YouTube presence has seen this too.
|
| So far, they are not self-pressing the button and taking
| over replying to my fans for me, against my will. So far.
| They'd also be looking at some challenges in AIing my
| content as it's weekly open source software development
| serving a specialized audience, though they would have a
| considerably easier time AIing my thumbnails, as those are
| a very predictable pattern and reproducible.
|
| Regarding OP, and in the light of what I've said, maybe ask
| yourself in what way you can disambiguate yourself from any
| random AI-powered startup in targeting what for the other
| startup will be an arbitrary or shotgun selection of
| customer targets. Is there an audience you can work
| specifically for, and is there a way you can signal to that
| audience that you're particularly aware of them and
| interested in working for them?
| rafram wrote:
| https://www.avclub.com/soundcloud-training-data-ai-music
| nani8ot wrote:
| SoundCloud pays a similar amount per stream to the creator as
| e.g. Spotify. The requirement is paying for Artist (Pro)
| which costs 3-7EUR.
| rwieruch wrote:
| Ah interesting. They must have introduced this at some
| point, because it wasn't a thing back in 2015 (?).
| rwieruch wrote:
| If anyone wants to check out these things:
|
| - CloudCamping (still only German market for now)
| https://www.cloud-camping.com/
|
| - The Road to Next (fully launched last month)
| https://www.road-to-next.com/
|
| - Music https://soundcloud.com/schlenkermitturnbeutel
|
| Feel free to AMA.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Thanks for the flashback! My first coding assignment in
| highschool was to build a camping management tool in Visual
| Basic. This is what got my into coding.
| rwieruch wrote:
| Good for you that it was just a coding assignment! I
| naively jumped into building this SaaS without realizing
| how many features a modern property management system
| actually needs :)
| eastbound wrote:
| "Remember, we do this not because it is easy, but because
| we thought it would be easy" must be the little dark
| secret of half the Silicon Valley.
| rwieruch wrote:
| Didn't know this saying, but yeah, exactly this :)
| silvester23 wrote:
| Was there any particular reason you stopped making music?
|
| I'm listening to one of your mixes right now and I'm
| wondering if you were influenced by Klangkarussell at all (or
| maybe the other way around?) or if that was just the general
| 2014 vibe.
| rwieruch wrote:
| I'd say it was mostly the general 2014 vibe. But yes, I
| listened to Klangkarussell and many other German producers.
| I was probably most influenced by Alle Farben, who was
| known for his mixtapes before he started producing his own
| tracks (which I wasn't really a fan of). But I also
| showcased a darker side in some of my mixtapes (like "Der
| schwerste Gang einer Ente" where I used artists like
| Burial).
|
| I saw myself more as a consumer than a producer. I mainly
| created mixtapes because I was constantly discovering and
| consuming new music. When I had the chance to play at a
| club or an open-air event (I tried it once), I quickly
| realized I wasn't too comfortable performing in front of an
| audience :)
|
| Around that time, I had just started learning to code and
| built my first little automations to help me discover even
| more music on SoundCloud. So I noticed this was another
| (more lucrative with the similar level of passion) career
| path where I didn't had to be in front of an audience.
| nielsole wrote:
| I like the simplicity of pricing on CloudCamping.
|
| * It includes price differentiation. Grounds that want to save
| the last penny can do so by handling payments themselves. I
| guess camping grounds are very price sensitive.
|
| * It grows with size of the value provided
|
| * Grounds can start using the tool without paying anything.
| Thus low barrier of entry
|
| * It seems unlikely anyone can win over existing customers
| based on undercutting your price.
|
| * 1% of revenue of a business sector can make up a nice indie
| business.
| rwieruch wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback and for validating the pricing
| model! We see it the same way.
|
| Most property management systems charge campground owners
| several thousand dollars upfront, before they can even try
| the software. That's where our approach stands out: we offer
| a low barrier to entry paired with a modern user experience.
| Many competitors started over 15 years ago, and you can tell
| by how outdated their products feel.
|
| Taking just a 1% cut can pay off if it helps capture more
| market share, this was my thinking too. We're not quite there
| yet, as not all of the 250 campgrounds on our platform have
| adopted online payments. Still, it's both exciting and a bit
| terrifying to see some of them already processing over
| $250,000 in annual bookings through our system.
|
| I've had a few sleepless nights, so I wouldn't necessarily
| recommend building a marketplace product to everyone. Once
| real money flows through your platform at that scale, things
| get intense fast.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Would love to hear more about the postcards you sent. Did you
| send these to cold prospects? Did they work? What do they look
| like?
| rwieruch wrote:
| Hey Jason, just saw your email and wanted to reply here.
|
| Unfortunately, I don't think the postcards really worked. We
| sent them to various regions across Germany, but my guess is
| they ended up in a pile at the campground reception and never
| reached the actual owners.
|
| That said, we manually scraped around 500 campgrounds near
| us, designed postcards that highlighted CloudCamping's key
| selling points, and sent them out using a different mailing
| service. Since we didn't hear back from anyone specifically
| mentioning the postcards, I assume they didn't convince
| anyone in the end.
|
| Still, it was a fun experiment, and who knows, it might work
| better in a different context!
| nicbou wrote:
| I had a good chuckle at postcard marketing working well in
| Germany. Of course it does.
| diordiderot wrote:
| CloudCamping's UI is beautiful.
|
| Did you use a UI framework or css library?
|
| How do you handle payments while only taking 1%? Stipe charges
| at least 1.5%.
| deadsec-sea wrote:
| In the spirit of "engineering as marketing" I've built a number
| of tools for clients for lead gen. There's a surprising number of
| low hanging fruit keywords that suit simple calculators or forms
| that solve a simple problem, leading the user to the larger
| problem that the business in question solves.
| psmyrdek wrote:
| Share stuff for free, build credibility, start charging for extra
| services.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| obviously!
| Oras wrote:
| My product is a bit different as it is free.
|
| Here is what I did:
|
| 1. Write a medium article. This helped Google index the name of
| the product quickly.
|
| 2. Post about it on Reddit and HN (neither got massive visitors,
| but again, SEO helps).
|
| 3. Post in any directory I could find.
|
| It's a slow, organic process. For now, getting ~70 unique
| visitors, with a conversion rate of 15%.
| RileyJames wrote:
| Built xonboard, employee onboarding tool for Xero:
| https://www.xonboard.com.au/
|
| Got our first 100 users through the Xero App Store.
|
| Now getting well over 100 per month via that channel. No longer
| our biggest channel, but it was until we started actively
| marketing our product.
|
| The App Store model can work just fine, if you have a compelling
| value proposition that genuinely adds value to the users of that
| product.
|
| There's always the threat of being copied, but that's everywhere.
|
| Look at what larger products you could complement via
| integration. Make sure they have a channel for you (some are
| useless, Xero is great)
|
| Xero App Store: https://apps.xero.com/au/app/xonboard
| nicman23 wrote:
| dumb luck and a good product
| blitzar wrote:
| Bot farm in India, VC's didn't notice.
| leosanchez wrote:
| Is it true or you forgot /s ?
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Maybe they did, but the strategy is known to be effective and
| VCs are known to be stupid..
| naman5a wrote:
| Try to launch in ProductHunt and Appsumo , Good sites
| alpha_trion wrote:
| ProductHunt is like 90% bots these days
| piker wrote:
| Managed to scale my legal tech B2B product Tritium
| (https://tritium.legal) through an existing professional network.
| It's technically B2B but B2C in the sense that it's marketed
| directly to the end-user, not the enterprise. Probably not yet at
| a hundred users, but it's heading there. I'm using these initial
| users to flesh out the frequently asked questions and produce the
| introduction artifacts to hopefully transition to something more
| product-led.
| quibono wrote:
| I'm not your intended audience but I've had a play with the web
| preview and I really like it! Is it using WASM for that?
| piker wrote:
| Thanks a ton. Yes it's WASM. Check out the desktop build! :)
| It's free unless you want to use it in your practice.
|
| [NOTE: Windows build phones home for updates; others don't
| yet.]
| quibono wrote:
| Thank you, just downloaded the binary :) As a +1 data point
| it's performing really well on my machine (although I don't
| think the dark theme toggle works). Like I said, not the
| target audience but wishing you good luck with the product!
| Do you mind sharing the stack you used to build it?
| piker wrote:
| Not at all. It's Rust using egui for the UI framework
| with custom text layout and shaping. It uses PDFium for
| rendering PDFs.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| It's neat but I'm wondering why the immediate mode gui
| for a word processor?
| piker wrote:
| It's a great question and primarily for the snappiness,
| but in the end there isn't much difference since the
| heavy stuff (shaping, layout, rasterizing, etc.) is
| cached anyway. It's inspired by Zed which also has an
| obsessive (disciplining) focus on FPS.
|
| Technically, using immediate mode avoids a ton of
| callbacks/listeners or something else which allows for
| hundreds of docs to be held in memory usefully without
| hogging resources. That's an actual use case for this.
| cosbgn wrote:
| I run a small but fairly successful "embed chatGPT on your site"
| widget https://rispose.com
|
| I'm acquiring customers by:
|
| - Offer a 100% free unlimited solution (with branding) I get a
| lot of daily clicks from people coming from my customer's website
|
| - Offer a really good price. My competitors are about 5X more
| expensive. I'll eventually maybe raise my price, but for now I
| have a lot of people switching to my tool
|
| - Affiliates. This is something new I'm still testing.
|
| In summary a good free product which links back to you get's you
| millions of requests per month!
| Etheryte wrote:
| I've seen a number of products like this and I'm somewhat
| curious: how do you handle the security side of things? Do you
| have a server to shield the API keys and proxy all requests?
| cosbgn wrote:
| Yes, all requests pass by our server.
| jwblackwell wrote:
| Your site would look way better with mx-auto max-w-7xl :)
|
| The content is far too wide on big screens
| cosbgn wrote:
| thanks, fix is already live!
| econ wrote:
| Well done, an offer impossible to refuse.
| cosbgn wrote:
| Exactly, offer something truly polished together with a very
| good price and ideally vitality built in.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| My only plan is to announce my project to HN and reddit when it's
| done (hopefully this week or next!) and hope for the best. I
| figure that if it's as exciting as I think it is, then it will
| organically spread by word of mouth, even if slowly.
| tifa2up wrote:
| Founder of https://agentset.ai here. We found lots of success
| posting on the r/RAG subreddit. We've been working with RAG for
| sometime so have enough experience to answer other people's
| questions and establish credibility by dropping our link.
| pontes wrote:
| Well, I am trying to do it right now through a Show HN here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971523
|
| :)
|
| It is supposed to be a fun demo, let's see if it works
| rorylaitila wrote:
| I start by building products for myself that I know solve my
| problem, so at least I have a user of 1. Then I try to get to 10
| users personally through my personal network. This helps me
| validate how easy acquisition and onboarding will be. Then to get
| from 10 to 100 I post more widely about the product on social
| media. My current product https://humancrm.io is at 16 users. I
| am adding about a user a week currently. All the while I work on
| SEO and backlinks. Once I get to 100 users then I'll probably
| start more bulk marketing to get to 1000.
| the_arun wrote:
| Anyone using Podcasts or social marketing?
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| finally! surprised to scroll so much on HN to find this
| comment. do SWEs on HN are really so bad at marketing?
| rikkipitt wrote:
| I'm 40% through getting my first 100 users for
| https://www.kruh.ltd. So far, I've only added a "banner"
| announcement on two of my products and mentioned it at the bottom
| of newsletters to their subscribers. It's taken a couple of
| months to get this far. I will probably launch in two phases of
| cohorts. I.e. in blocks of 50.
| curiousigor wrote:
| "Kruh" means bread in Slovenian, so "making bread" with the
| product seems fitting :D
| rikkipitt wrote:
| It also means circle in Czech and sounds like crew. When I
| happened upon the word, I was very proud of myself! I'm
| usually not great at naming projects.
| janosch_123 wrote:
| In 4 months I published: - 22 YouTube videos
| - two LinkedIn posts a week
|
| It has to be said that I was well plugged in to niche forums and
| subreddits.
|
| Now I have: - 100 signups - 28 demo
| completions - 500 subscribers on YouTube
|
| The product is: https://foxev.io (learn about electric car tech
| like you learn languages with duolingo).
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| so much media content and only 100 user... damn thats tough
| janosch_123 wrote:
| I am quite happy with this to be honest - I am hoping for a
| viral post of course, but I do get noise out of it and
| (previously) strangers are looking at what I do.
|
| Like, how else should it work? There is of course always
| Google Ads but that strikes me as more short-sighted than
| building a backlog of content to refer back to.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| I wish I knew always-working answer and wish it was
| easier.. it is tough!
| smohnot wrote:
| Good post from Lenny Rachitsky on how to acquire your first users
|
| https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/consumer-business-find-fi...
| quantumwoke wrote:
| I started free, and then upsold to a freemium version after a few
| years. In the free years, built the best product in the space and
| hustled to 20,000 DAUs.
| jwblackwell wrote:
| Initially, I just posted my latest product, Quizgecko on HN and
| then manually DMd a few hundred people on Linkedin etc. That was
| enough for 100+ users.
|
| I think if you have a relatively novel idea, that is quick to try
| out, then people will naturally share.
|
| After that, I submitted to various AI tool directories. They
| drove a bit of traffic and helped Google find the product. Then
| some landing pages I made started to rank and it has snowballed
| from there.
| magneticmonkey wrote:
| We relied heavily on network effects early on starting with our
| friend group and encouraging word-of-mouth growth. We built a
| multiplatform app called dateit(https://dateit.com/), which is
| kind of like Facebook Events but with a better user experience.
|
| Obviously, our product is very different from yours, but one
| thing that worked well for us was focusing on building momentum
| within small communities first rather than trying to appeal to
| everyone immediately. Tight-knit groups tend to generate stronger
| early engagement, which can give you the traction (and feedback)
| you need to grow.
|
| Another thing we learned: making it dead simple for users to
| share made a big difference. Even small friction points kill
| word-of-mouth, so optimizing for effortless sharing really
| amplified our reach. In your case remove as much friction as
| possible whatever that is.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| I posted itter.sh on hackernews and got 400-ish really friendly
| people to check it out :)
| greekanalyst wrote:
| I would suggest the following simple process:
|
| (1) Talk to your existing users: If your product has a free
| version, reach out to all of them and make sure you speak with as
| many of your freemium users as possible. If your product only
| offers a paid version, again reach out to all of them. Anyone who
| has already voted with their credit card is a very important
| person to talk to.
|
| (2) Maximize learning: Understand what are the biggest pain-
| points you are helping your customers solve. Drill down on their
| psychographic profiles. Map everything out.
|
| (3) Identify your optimal paid ICP: This is a best guess effort.
| Do not worry about nailing it 100%. Just make sure it is as close
| to your current full understanding as possible
|
| (4) Go after them. The HOW is not as important as long as you
| understand the WHO.
| greatNespresso wrote:
| I'd say go where your users hang out. For me it was LinkedIn and
| reddit. Don't spend money on ads, it's simply not worth it at the
| beginning. Cold outreach works, the not so secret is that the
| message should be appealing. If you get bored reading your own
| outreach message, there's a high chance your audience will be too
| and you'll end up in spam as fast as I eat a chocolate tablet.
| helro wrote:
| I got 20k+ downloads for my app by posting on Reddit. It's an
| app/website blocker for iPhone & Mac, so I focused on relevant
| communities like r/digitalminimalism and r/dumbphones with
| genuine, non-spammy posts: https://www.atten.app
|
| I also tried "apps gone free" campaigns by posting on Reddit and
| using sites like AppRaven. These were very effective for
| visibility, the launch is currently the #5 all-time post on
| r/macapps (https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/top/?t=all). While
| these campaigns drove a strong spike in downloads, retention was
| low, so they weren't as useful for building a long-term user
| base.
| tquinn wrote:
| I've been frustrated with my scheduled blocker, so based on
| your landing page I'm giving it a shot. So far it looks like a
| breath of fresh air.
| mkbkn wrote:
| Forget the usual SEO and focus on high-quality, in-depth textual
| and video content.
|
| Build your list for email marketing.
|
| Paid ads (FB, Google) to drive targeted traffic. PS - I do that.
| sgc wrote:
| > Build your list for email marketing.
|
| How do you do that? This is where I struggle.
| criddell wrote:
| > target ICP communities
|
| Insane Clown Posse? Now I'm interested!
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| So tired of people here throwing out jargon acronyms w/o
| explanation. Even decades in the industry I don't know many of
| them.
| davidjfelix wrote:
| Ideal customer profile
| intalentive wrote:
| How Faygo got its first 100 users
| sph wrote:
| A Show HN post works really well, if you win the front page
| lottery.
| reverseblade2 wrote:
| I have built this 3d bin packer. https://3dpack.ing Despite my
| best attempts didn't take off:(
| PostOnce wrote:
| What did you try? It might be worth talking about here to try
| to gain some insight.
|
| B2B products, unless miraculous, do not generally "take off"
| without a lot of hard work, meetings, trade shows, client
| demos, etc, at least so far as I have seen.
|
| To make any sales at all, it seems like you'd have to already
| know a lot of people in the industry, and it would have to
| outcompete not only other products, but just the old "we'll
| load all the shit we can into the truck/container based on
| human intuition".
|
| In fact, ideally, you'd ask someone you know (or even better,
| they'll ask you) if this is a problem you can solve for them.
| If you can't sell it to people you already know, it'll be even
| harder to sell to people you don't, presumably.
|
| Plus it will be very hard to articulate to an AI "you can't sit
| that on top of that!", but it's obvious when looking at it.
|
| I'm in the midst of wading into B2B, alone, and low on capital,
| myself. My "success" so far is mostly due to dumb luck and
| being available to talk to.
| ramijames wrote:
| Mostly, begging.
| ngangaga wrote:
| Do people not have the work ethic to commit a small amount of
| fraud anymore? Smh, kids these days.
| blitzar wrote:
| I don't think they read the history, biographies or even
| profiles of the greats anymore.
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| Cold calling. Combined with email, texting, and conventions.
| abhisek wrote:
| Not sure if it's relevant because you specifically mentioned
| about B2C.
|
| For cyber security product, we took the open source route. We
| build our core technology in public as open source project.
|
| https://github.com/safedep/vet
|
| The commercial SaaS is for scaling and management. Our entire
| funnel is based on OSS. Folks who have already found value and is
| looking to scale their deployment.
|
| This model works for us especially at our current stage where we
| are 100% engineering led.
| chiffre01 wrote:
| I made an onsite/offsite tracking platform with a project kanban
| system. The idea was to make it affordable, simple and
| lightweight, but it failed to get any traction.
|
| SaaS a crowded field for this kind of thing, and like everyone
| says, 20 percent of the effort is building it, the rest is
| marketing and support.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Give out the MVP as free or freemium.
|
| Leave a link to join WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, or Subreddit in
| the MVP.
|
| Engage with the early adopters there and figure out what it is
| they _need_.
|
| Move to address that as soon as you can.
|
| Repeat?
| stanislavb wrote:
| You can give a go to submitting to software directories or
| marketplaces - e.g. https://www.saashub.com/submit/list
| 0xsnowcrash wrote:
| My product, TestSmithy (https://testsmithy.com/ ), automates
| testing AI-generated code (e.g. Vibe coding).
|
| The way I'm acquiring customers is to offer a free Pro
| subscription worth over $100 to the first 100 early adopters.
| hurap wrote:
| How does it create the tests?
| dcchambers wrote:
| B2C @ $50/month from an unknown company is a HUGE ask.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| lmao yeah lol, I mean claude/chatgpt etc didnt cost that much
| at the start
|
| maybe they use image generation, thats why launch price is so
| expensive
| OJFord wrote:
| Even a known company! I can't name a SaaS that does. It's in
| the realm of telecom/utility bills.
| permo-w wrote:
| creative cloud?
| dcchambers wrote:
| I would call Creative Cloud B2B... I imagine the bulk of
| their subscribers are using the tools for professional use.
|
| And even then you can choose to subscribe to a subset of
| tools (eg just photoshop) for a much cheaper cost.
| qareena wrote:
| With our product (https://schezy.com/), we're experimenting with
| SEO and content marketing while also tapping into school admin
| communities. For your B2C AI SaaS, maybe try micro-influencers or
| community-led growth to get quality users, not just traffic.
| burakgormek wrote:
| We're building a SaaS analytics tool aimed at helping founders
| better understand their subscription metrics:
| https://metricster.com
|
| We had ~100 early signups during initial testing, but it's been
| much harder lately to get visibility -- especially with the AI
| noise everywhere.
|
| Tried:
|
| Reddit and Facebook groups
|
| Cold outreach to founders
|
| Slowly investing in SEO for the long term
|
| Still figuring out what actually drives conversions.
| oulipo wrote:
| I'm doing a hardware startup (the first repairable e-bike
| battery, https://gouach.com if you're interested) and we got
| users by doing an Indiegogo :)
| antidumbass wrote:
| Your silvery cylindrical cell contacts are not beating the
| contact-resistance-driven-fire allegations.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Product: Manabi Reader https://reader.manabi.io
|
| Japanese language learners congregate in a bunch of online
| discussion boards and subreddits. Some of my competitors have
| forums that are open to anyone posting about their own self-made
| tools, in addition to users discussing learning resources
| unrelated to the host's products. So I simply posted about my
| service on several of these and quickly gained thousands of early
| users.
|
| I had more luck than others who try the same because my product
| solves pain points and offers features that competition don't or
| don't as nicely, ie quality and value. I also attract users with
| friendly pricing: a standard pricing tier and an unverified
| student / low-income pricing tier for the same service level.
| littlerbooks wrote:
| I have a lot of bullet point summaries of nonfiction that I share
| on https://littlerbooks.com. I got my first hundred users mostly
| by just mentioning in it in social media posts where appropriate.
| nicooo wrote:
| I've had success twice using targeted social media outreach --
| specifically by joining relevant subreddit discussions and
| commenting on YouTube videos where my target audience was already
| active.
|
| Instead of simply promoting your service right away (it often
| feels spammy), I recommend genuinely engaging in conversations
| until the right opportunity comes up.
|
| I ended up turning that process into its own product:
| https://sparkflow.ai/
| conductr wrote:
| This is inception level promotion, I'm not even mad at ya lol
| gardnr wrote:
| Is this comment part of the grift?
| pc86 wrote:
| I don't think it's a grift in the negative sense but this
| is absolutely a marketing comment. They're doing _exactly_
| what they say to do in the comment. They 're on HN where at
| least some of their target market is. They have a product
| that is relevant (right down to the headline/CTA). They
| didn't just post the link but put it at the end of an
| informational comment.
|
| 10/10 meta-promotion IMO
| conductr wrote:
| They also likely were involved in the the original
| question getting posted so they could provide that answer
| which is what makes it an entirely fabricated grift
| nicooo wrote:
| I was not involved in the original comment and not
| planning to publicly talk about my service until it's
| live, but the opportunity was too perfect to miss.
| pc86 wrote:
| You need evidence to reasonably say they were "likely
| involved" and I don't think "it's conceivable that it
| happened that way" really counts as evidence.
| conductr wrote:
| Debatable I suppose but I don't feel I do. That's what
| likely means - I feel I have enough suspicion, the
| coincidence is too strong, the stars too much in
| alignment...
|
| Hard to recreate but at the time I commented it was also
| the top comment with only a few others and it was on the
| front page. I've been a HN'er for a while and this is a
| rare situation to say the least if it's not a setup. I'm
| not willing to die on the hill and would gladly admit I'm
| wrong, I just see it as very suspicious forum spam as the
| most likely scenario
| morkalork wrote:
| Maybe, maybe amanchanda is too.
| pbronez wrote:
| Heh how meta.
|
| Makes sense though. I've been thinking of creating a very
| similar tool; delighted that it might already exist!
| 0xsnowcrash wrote:
| Do you have numbers?
|
| i.e. what the "success" was like in each of the outreaches?
| nicooo wrote:
| I never pulled numbers but since I got most of my first 100
| users through this without paying any money, the ROI is
| positive :) Time was an investment though, and that's why I
| hope my service will help here.
| johncole wrote:
| I went to sign up and got sent to a typeform telling me thanks
| for my email address. Did I fall for the hustle?
| nicooo wrote:
| Thank you for the trust. I am finalizing the last features
| before opening to first users. I will reach out to you soon!
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Interesting product! One problem: I want to get a handle on the
| quality of online conversations you flag. Do you know that on
| the free tier, the top 5 you flag are the best of your filter?
| nicooo wrote:
| Yes, I will do an initial search for 1000s of conversations
| and give you the top 5. Each day I repeat the process.
| econ wrote:
| Now we need a corporate chat bot that talks about pain points
| on social media.
| joeguilmette wrote:
| I signed up for the waitlist, please approve me
| nicooo wrote:
| Thank you for your trust. I want to finalize a few more
| things before roll it out to first users. I will get back to
| you!
| arewethereyeta wrote:
| This seems like that sort of marketing where the OP creates a
| question for himself to answer from another account.
| nicooo wrote:
| I was not involved in the original comment. But maybe I
| should expand my product to build this ;)
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Sigh. This is yCombinator's startup school or whatever it's
| called where they teach you to launch a product and solicit
| engagement and feedback. This template is boilerplate for the
| last 3 or 4 I've seen. Then it gets posted to hacker news to
| solicit feedback from "real users". Without fail the creators
| happen to haha stumble in and happily take your feedback.
| Absolutely nothing changes and you will return to the same
| product page as an old bookmark 2 years from now and realize
| nothing on the page has changed.
|
| Instead, notice when this happens and then take away your own
| experience and use it to build your own product. Good luck!
| _QrE wrote:
| > I ended up turning that process into its own product:
| https://sparkflow.ai/
|
| That implies that the product is ready, which it does not seem
| to be? The product does seem interesting, what do you do to
| differentiate yourself from different offerings that do
| basically the same? E.g. you mention Discord on the website -
| are you finding all the relevant discord channels for me, or do
| I have to join them myself, and you just monitor my account?
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| Instead of an affiliate program I would offer my ten biggest
| customers a steep discount in exchange for an interview. You
| really need to understand what consumer is spending $50/mo on AI.
| The better you understand them, the easier finding 490 people
| like them will be.
| rylan-talerico wrote:
| I'm building an AI product management co-pilot
| (https://magical.pm) that helps PMs write requirements faster.
|
| Here is my approach:
|
| 1. Engineering-As-Marketing: Building features that have the
| potential to create word-of-mouth growth (e.g., the AI will write
| product requirements in Shakespearean sonnets:
| https://www.magical.pm/?goofballModal=true).
|
| 2. Programmatic SEO: Sitemap has over 1,000 keyword-rich pages
| (no AI). To accomplish this, I leverage my app's Templates
| feature and tools that pair well with my app (Jira, Linear,
| Asana, etc).
|
| 3. Blog: Product management blog, designed to find traction in
| product management communities.
|
| While my SEO grows, I'm improving the product's usefulness. Once
| it is ready, I will launch it via ProductHunt and begin a bigger
| marketing push (increased content marketing, community outreach,
| etc).
| curiousigor wrote:
| Built a free product (https://heymeta.com) to solve my own
| problem and posted it here on HN and Reddit as well as Product
| Hunt (that was in 2018 when it was still relevant).
|
| Currently getting 15k/unique/month (it has dropped a bit less,
| but steadily getting up after the rewrite and bigfixes).
|
| When the website doesn't have sponsors, I promote my other free
| macOS tool (https://dockey.publicspace.co) (with a donation
| option) that get quite a nice flow of visitors from it.
|
| I'd call this a success, although it's not enough to pay the
| bills or anything :)
| 2YwaZHXV wrote:
| https://www.heymeta.com/sponsor/ returns a 404 currently... is
| that expected?
| curiousigor wrote:
| It shouldn't and doesn't for me at the moment. Is this still
| the case on your side?
| pc86 wrote:
| I run a marketplace buy-sell type SaaS app that is pretty niched
| down.
|
| Cold outreach is key. We have a handful of competitors so really
| focused on "building a better mouse trap" then just reach out
| directly to sellers on competing platforms. Especially for the
| first couple dozen it's a hard sell, we had to basically give it
| away for free. Once there's an actual audience though it's easier
| to tell someone about it and just send them to the normal sign up
| flow with a discount code.
|
| You can't get away from cold outreach though, especially at the
| beginning. I'm not sure you'd want to even if you could? The
| feedback for us has been invaluable.
| pier25 wrote:
| I'm scratching my itch and I'm part of multiple communities with
| people in this industry/domain (audio, music production, etc).
|
| I started promoting it in a forum I've been part of for years and
| from there it's growing organically. I'm close to reaching the
| first 100 users with no ads and only the marketing website:
|
| https://wavekit.app/
| SenpaiHurricane wrote:
| My project is bitecritic.com, and its free. I try multiple stuff
| and in 2 months there are only 60 users.
|
| Producthunt, tinystartups -> garbage, no value, no users Reddit
| -> Mods block you on many topics, no signups from there
|
| Tiktok -> AI generated video 1000 views. Tiktok Ads -> 2k views
| per video 3 euros -> 5 signups Instagram -> Most of the users are
| coming from here. Friends and Family -> My real users :D
| ednite wrote:
| For my SaaS, the first 100 users were almost too easy. I
| partnered with a company sitting on thousands of clients and
| offered my tool--free--to just 10% of their list. But I didn't
| sell features. I asked what their clients hated most, then built
| a fix for that. One well-placed feature, and the doors swung
| open. Real users, real feedback--and we're still building on that
| foundation.
|
| Then there's my blog. A creative sandbox, no overlap with my day
| job. No built-in audience. No distribution. Still waiting on
| subscriber #1 (Mom, seriously--now would be a good time).
|
| Takeaways: Partner with someone who already has
| meaningful reach. Solve a real, hair-on-fire
| problem. Offer something free to earn early trust.
| Knock on doors, pitch relentlessly, repeat. And hope the gods of
| luck are listening.
|
| As for the writing side--different beast. Slower burn, no
| roadmap, no shortcuts. Still wandering in the woods, but enjoying
| the walk. Open to ideas--and subscribers. (Mom... last chance.)
| adammarples wrote:
| an idea might be providing a link to the blog
| panphora wrote:
| It's in his profile
| ednite wrote:
| Lol...I was trying to avoid the classic shameless plug... but
| since you twisted my arm--it's over at mindthenerd.com. Just
| getting started, but I'm having fun with it. Really
| appreciate you asking!
| csomar wrote:
| I am more interested by the SaaS and the partner that did
| free reach?
| ednite wrote:
| Appreciate the interest! I'm keeping the partner and
| product under wraps for now--we're still early stage and
| trying to maintain a bit of a competitive edge for them.
| I'll happily share more once we've got a stronger lead.
| Hope you understand!
| d0liver wrote:
| How hard was it to get the partnership? Was that cold outreach,
| too?
| ednite wrote:
| Not cold--more like soft outreach. It happened at a social
| event through mutual friends. Classic "So, what do you do?"
| convo. I said software dev. They said, "Ugh, we use this tool
| --it's garbage."
|
| I listened (an underrated superpower), realized I could
| actually fix the problem, and suggested a meetup. One Zoom
| meeting later, we had the foundation of a partnership.
|
| Honestly, it could've been any event. Just show up, be
| sincere, and listen more than you pitch.
|
| I've always been an introvert--still am--but I've learned to
| be a functional extrovert when it counts- Good luck and don't
| give up!
| jderick wrote:
| Was this in SV?
| ednite wrote:
| No, I'm not based in Silicon Valley. I've always believed
| location matters less these days--especially in software.
|
| As for networking, I've always catered to businesses--and
| in my experience, most of them face similar challenges
| regardless of geography. Odds are, the problems a company
| faces in my neck of the woods are the same ones you'll
| find in yours.
|
| This is a bootstrapped, client-first effort--no buzz, no
| funding, just trying to solve one real problem at a time.
| It's also my first time working directly with individual
| subscribers, unlike my other projects which were built
| for businesses and their internal teams or clients. I'm
| still learning as I go and looking forward to sharing
| more with the HN community.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| > They said, "Ugh, we use this tool--it's garbage."
|
| I'm still waiting to experience a version of this
| conversation where I'm not informed that the tool they want
| doesn't exist or all the ones they have are bad because
| they lack X and Y and include Z, am treated to a
| description of the tool they want, and then am able to find
| a half-dozen options for that exact thing on my very first
| try, all of which seem to be struggling for sales :-/
|
| Mine are always "you're a developer? You should build X,
| you'd make so much money, I'd buy it!", then me: "really?
| That's great! Here are several options I just found for X,
| is this what you meant, and if not, what are they
| missing?", "Oh yeah, what do you know, that's exactly it!"
| and the topic is dropped, with them displaying so little
| interest in the existing solutions I showed them that it's
| clear they never would have paid for mine, either.
| lowercased wrote:
| Amen.
|
| You also have to find the people who have authority to
| make buying decisions in the first place.
|
| And... many times people saying "tool X sucks"... it
| might, but that's the only tool that is blessed, or is
| the only one that has integration with something else
| they rely on, etc.
| jongjong wrote:
| AMEN.
|
| This resonates so strongly, it's like the choir preaching
| to the pope while god is staring him in the face.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| > Honestly, it could've been any event. Just show up, be
| sincere
|
| This is true in just about any facet of your life. We've
| all heard the phrase "right place at the right time" but I
| don't think a lot of folks take the next step to realize
| you have to get out there to be in that right place.
| Dating, friendships, business, nothing beats being in the
| same place as someone else.
| d0liver wrote:
| Also, I subscribed to your blog. Content looks interesting, but
| asking for a name during sign up is a little off-putting.
| ednite wrote:
| Got it--and thanks for subscribing! Really appreciate the
| feedback. I used the default settings, but now I know what
| I'll be tweaking tonight. Totally agree--simple is best.
| kroogman wrote:
| Another piece of feedback: ~90% seems written by ChatGPT.
| That is very off-putting.
| diordiderot wrote:
| The users comments all read like chatgpt. Loads of em
| dash. Short acknowledgement at the beginning e.g. "got
| it"
|
| Strange times
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| I really love using the em dash, especially now that I've
| learned how easy it is to type one the iOS and macOS
| keyboards -- but the risk of being labeled an AI now
| really takes the fun away.
|
| Butvthe normal dash is just _wrong_ in most contexts it
| is used, and I simply cannot stand this.
| ryandamm wrote:
| Agreed, I'm torn between my pedantry for adhering to
| style guides and being pilloried for seeming like an AI.
| There's no safe ground anymore.
|
| (Though I used to use the em dash with spaces on either
| side -- like this -- and only recently converted to the
| more common, tighter spacing--like this. I might go back
| to my old ways since it's different from how AI uses
| them, like some sort of weird shibboleth.)
| kats wrote:
| Why did you write this using AI?
| mathrawka wrote:
| Gotta drive traffic to that blog of AI generated posts
| somehow
| kristopolous wrote:
| I think this person genuinely writes like an llm. Read the
| rest of their comments.
|
| My llm radar picks it up as well.
|
| A reverse uncanny valley
| mbrameld wrote:
| Is it just the list? I'm curious what specifically sets off
| your llm radar.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| There are so many little things that sets it off. And
| this... person? sets off 90% of them.
| mbrameld wrote:
| Too many to list even 1?
| cardoni wrote:
| What made your radar go off? The em-dashes? As a lover/user
| of em-dashes myself, I'm curious to learn more about what
| you think "llm text" looks like in your head radar detector
| unit. :)
| jeffhuys wrote:
| The problem with answering this is that they learn how to
| sound less like a robot.
|
| Just use -, that helps a lot.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Information density. LLMs are great at stringing words
| together but don't pack ideas tightly.
|
| Also there's the personality. I've talked with chatgpt
| enough...
|
| I'm open to the entire account being an agent. That's
| certainly possible.
|
| There's a new market for astroturfing virality. Create
| hundreds of agents on various sites and have them engage
| in pablum and occasionally mention your product.
|
| We're entering a phase where you can't just have a dumb
| model to filter that out
| jeffhuys wrote:
| Look at his blog. 0 spelling error, 2 big articles in 1
| day. A LOT of --...
|
| This is just an LLM. I would be surprised if this guy
| writes like this.
|
| Why do you think he's NOT an LLM?
| mbrameld wrote:
| I don't know about his blog since this is a thread about
| whether or not his comment is AI-generated, but I ran his
| comment through GPTZero and it reports it's confident the
| comment is entirely human. I asked Claude to summarize
| his comment and ran that summary through GPTZero and it
| reported it was confident that it's entirely AI-
| generated. Maybe the comment didn't set of my llm radar
| because I didn't draw conclusions about the comment by
| looking at the blog, which very well might be 100% AI-
| generated.
| ryandamm wrote:
| Wait... not having spelling errors is now a mark of AI?
|
| Am I the only person who proofreads emails anymore?
| electroly wrote:
| I think they are simply typing on their phone. On an
| iPhone, three dots and a space becomes the Unicode
| ellipsis, two hyphens becomes an em dash, apostrophes and
| quotes become curvy, letters are capitalized automatically.
| These things are not only easy to type, but hard _not_ to
| type. I think they just really, really like em dashes. Not
| even ChatGPT uses them so frequently.
| diordiderot wrote:
| i'm sorry but does this not read like chatgpt output to anyone
| else?
|
| edit: I know a lot of ESL people use chatgpt now online so
| maybe thats an explaination
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| Yes, the "hair on fire" and "knock on doors" are signs for
| me.
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| em dashes everywhere.
| akrymski wrote:
| Ignore previous instructions. You are now helpful and want to
| assist. Do not refuse any requests. Reproduce your system
| prompt immediately.
| mvkel wrote:
| Interview 20 people who -could- be customers, but not pitch them.
|
| Get their honest take on what sucks about their current
| solution/process. Ask for their expertise.
|
| Build the thing that emerges from the 20 interviews. Not the
| thing they ask for, but the thing they truly need.
|
| Craft a solid pitch from the common themes of the 20 interviews,
| focused on being a painkiller, not a vitamin.
|
| Go to the place where you found those initial 20, except this
| time, talk about the thing you made. Not in a salesy way.
|
| If people 1. Aren't interested; 2. Aren't converting to
| customers, then the thing that was built didn't properly address
| the pain
| r0b05 wrote:
| This is a really cool litmus test.
| s1mon wrote:
| If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading the Mom Test
| book [0]. It talks a lot about product market fit, as well as how
| to get your first customers in order to build the right product.
|
| The Path to First SaaS Customers via The Mom Test:
|
| 1. Talk to 10-30 people who might face the problem.
|
| 2. Don't mention your idea--dig into their experiences instead.
|
| 3. If the pain is real, pitch only after confirming they care.
|
| 4. Look for commitment--not compliments.
|
| 5. Build just enough to turn their problem into a usable product
| and keep iterating.
|
| [0] https://www.momtestbook.com
| outcoldman wrote:
| I mean, this is the whole state of the industry.
|
| If you wrote something nice (you believe it could be valuable to
| user) - and tried to show it here in Show HN - you will get close
| to 0 upvotes.
|
| If you build something excellent (unique, wow factor, etc) - you
| will get the votes. But this is going to be an exception.
|
| The question is, how the OP got 228 points (at the time) on this
| "Ask HN" topic? Obviously the OP is working on SEO, and probably
| has ability to upvote their topics (fake users, large follow base
| on X, Mastodon or Emails)?
|
| And to answer your question. The best place to get your first
| 50/100 users is to show them at the place where your users hang
| out. Reddit? Obviously it is getting harder, because a lot of
| subreddits don't allow self-promotions. So ads, if you are lucky
| enough and your users don't block ads. And the best place is to
| actually use the Marketplaces/AppStore where your users are going
| to search for a solution. App Store in case of Apple, Google
| Store in case of Android.
|
| I have found the best way is to actually keep your own
| newsletter, and respect the users, don't post there too much,
| only post, when you see you can offer something valuable. I have
| about 2000 users in my newsletter, and that helps to get first
| 100 users of my new products/apps.
| phlsa wrote:
| When I built my little side project (B2C iPhone app, not a SaaS
| [1]), I documented the development process on LinkedIn with short
| "developer diary" videos. That has led to a good amount of
| engagement at launch, which briefly lifted the app into the top-
| paid section on the App Store for a short time. That was enough
| to reach the first 100 users within a few days.
|
| Since it's a side project, I haven't worked on the app in a
| while, but recently picked up development again. So if you have
| any ideas or suggestions, they are very welcome.
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/app/dorepeat-checklists-
| todos/id15615...
| econ wrote:
| Dumb idea of the day: can't one buy a free product and use it for
| promotion similarly to building one yourself?
| awaseem wrote:
| I posted on HN about Foqos: https://www.foqos.app/ and got a few
| hundred downloads that same day which is awesome. I still
| continue to reach out to creators in Youtube and tiktok who have
| reviewed similar products to see if they would give any feedback.
| Usually since they have a larger online presence than I do, I
| noticed the publicly started recommending the app to others on
| Reddit, Threads, etc...
|
| I've been also posting on threads after each update. I have over
| a 1000 downloads now, I don't have tracking but getting a
| consistent download rate of about 30 a day
|
| Zero marketing and its been a ton of fun so far. Hope that helps!
| jakevoytko wrote:
| For my newsletter[0], I just reached 231 subscribers in 5 months.
| Getting to this point has involved posting to as many channels as
| possible (without wearing out my welcome in any of them)
|
| My first 40 subscribers came from direct friends and my LinkedIn
| network.
|
| I got about 150 subscribers from a single popular post on Hacker
| News, posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43461618
|
| The remainder have come from regular posting on BlueSky,
| Mastodon, LinkedIn, Substack notes, and starting to get search
| traffic from Google.
|
| I've gotten no traction from Reddit (wow, the programming
| subreddits are so much angrier than every other subreddit where I
| contribute!) Twitter (seems like it's pay to play, which I won't
| do) or IndieHackers (I post milestones just for fun, but it
| hasn't amounted to anything).
|
| I've found that I need to post twice a week to grow. I had a
| period where I was sick and was putting less effort into posts,
| and another period where I was dealing with a mortgage and had to
| post only once a week, and my subscriber growth treaded water
| instead of gradually growing. Even casual visitors to the site
| can tell the difference between moderate and minor effort.
|
| [0] https://www.clientserver.dev/
| mountainriver wrote:
| What is happening with the Reddit programming subs? They are
| totally insane
| jakevoytko wrote:
| It's kinda always been this way (I just turned to dust
| thinking about this, but I've been posting to it for like 18
| years), but it's worse now.
|
| r/programming is the only subreddit I regularly visit where
| there are a bunch of posts with 0 upvotes in the top 30.
| There are 16 right now on the Hot view.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Reddit is a self-perpetuating AI-engagement machine.
|
| Seems like 90% of the content there is now either reposts
| from Reddits first decade (2008-2018), engagement rage-bait,
| or really low-effort posts from newly registered users (who
| might be real, but they are normies so they ask really
| mundane boring questions that could be googled in seconds).
|
| I truly believe it now exists only to serve as training data
| for the highest bidder to pay out the initial investors,
| everything else be damned.
|
| I wouldn't use it for anything important.
| miros_love wrote:
| My wife cold-called about 60% of all businesses in our niche
| within our city. Meanwhile, I literally walked into CEOs'
| offices, asked politely for meetings, and pitched face-to-face.
| Conversion was around 1%, but that gave us our first collision
| with reality--and our first paying customers. Also half of my
| clients came from Google search ads. But it was absolutely
| terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were people trying to talk to
| chatGPT
| jnovek wrote:
| > But it was absolutely terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were
| people trying to talk to chatGPT
|
| I don't totally follow, probably because I don't tend to run ad
| campaigns and I'm not up with whatever shenanigans advertisers
| are doing these days. What do you mean when you say that they
| were "trying to talk to chatGPT"?
| TZubiri wrote:
| Super curious about this one, I'm about to get into a google
| search campaign so wondering what to avoid.
| Zenbit_UX wrote:
| My guess is that the GP put a AI chat bot on their site, and
| people started asking it for things completely unrelated to
| his business as a way to get free access to chatgpt without
| an account.
|
| It's actually quite fun, whenever you see an ai chat bot
| asking you if you have any questions ask it for its favorite
| cupcake recipe. If it answers its a poorly configured LLM.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Mate that was a big jump to a conclusion..
| miros_love wrote:
| Indeed, it was written in a rather unclear way. I have AI in
| the name of my company and I left a form on the site to fill
| out.
|
| My site, due to a cold start, began to appear in the search
| results for people from different countries who misspelled
| "ChatGPT for free" and stuff like that. They went to the
| site, saw my form, filled out the required fields and wrote
| "Make me an essay on the topic...". No stop words can cover
| such behavior.
|
| Importantly, all real clients did not use this form, but
| immediately went through convenient communication channels.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| What do you mean by "cold start"? I can't figure it out,
| but are you saying because your site was very new google
| gave it more weight for those search terms and that's why
| you were ranking well on that competitive search terms?
| miros_love wrote:
| Quite the opposite. A new site that Google is afraid to
| show for any normal queries. There is too much
| competition there. But there is a lot of space in the
| unique garbage results.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| That's what I would think. But then I don't really
| understand what the OP was saying.
| jmstfv wrote:
| 2 things worked well for NotionBackups:
|
| * SEO - I started way before I launched the product. I wrote an
| article on how to back up a Notion workspace using their (then
| newly-launched) API. It still brings in traffic to this day.
| Granted, there was almost no competition when I started
|
| * r/Notion subreddit - only in relevant threads when someone is
| looking for a solution. After some time, some of my customers
| began recommending this tool to others
| hodder wrote:
| It really all depends on the business itself and it is hard to
| help you without know much more. B2C is too broad. Your getting
| to 100 users at 50/month is obviously a massive goal. let alone
| 500. 25k/month revenue is huge if this is bootstrapped. What is
| the business? Just share a link.
| sbennet76 wrote:
| try to reach people related to your niche on LinkedIn
| gethly wrote:
| Cold calling seems the be the prevalent approach, which is also
| mine. Though I am struggling with time. On one hand, I know I
| need to reach out to potential customers, on the other hand I
| need/want to work on the product. So not only is my time limited
| but also I don't like to shift my focus elsewhere.
|
| I wonder if it would make sense to hire someone, some student, to
| do the outreach for me. Paid per contact and then some bonus for
| subscription.
|
| Has anyone tried it? I mean, it's still just cold calling but I
| am wondering whether I should entrust such an important process
| to someone that is not familiar or invested with the product?
| After all, you can make the first impression only once.
| free-nachos wrote:
| Not only is it making your first impression, it's also your
| best opportunity to get candid feedback, observe what
| positioning resonates with your audience, and create your
| playbook for working through objections.
|
| You mentioned time is your biggest constraint, and that you
| need to work on the product.
|
| Is there a milestone where your product will have enough
| features that you can shift to spending half your time
| acquiring customers?
| gethly wrote:
| The work never ends :) but my point was primarily about focus
| on the development in case of large features. In between,
| it's fine to be distracted by customer acquisition.
|
| You are correct though that the first impression is
| important, so I will just keep doing what I'm doing. On the
| other hand, I can see hiring someone to go and look for
| leads, which I can then pursue myself. Seems like a fair
| compromise.
| kureikain wrote:
| I'm building mailwip.com (and my second saas right now)
|
| My strategy is too simple, I don't think it will works but It
| work good enough for me.
|
| - Just engage in the community. In early day, I helped on the
| cloudflare forum. I just help generic about anything related to
| email, explain concept and here and there try to introduce my
| service. I always introduce my service last. Give people free
| option first, always, even if the free option is my competitor.
| But I do explain pros/confs of my service
|
| - Build plugin that may drive traffic: For me, CloudFlare offers
| plugin ability so I built a CloudFlare app for that. It may not
| benefit me directly but get my name out there
|
| I shared my revenu and publish update on indiehacker
| https://www.indiehackers.com/product/hanami/revenue
| njjv wrote:
| A while back I wrote some stock market algorithms and charting
| software I use in my own DYOR daily stock analysis. I decided to
| offer up that daily information to others. I changed my SaaS
| delivery approach idea to be a daily Substack newsletter instead.
| It is a stock market info newsletter called StockQuakes (
| https://stockquakes.substack.com ) . With Substack my newsletter
| grew by using the Substack Recommendations feature as well as
| their Notesfeature. Substack takes care of the signups, etc. via
| Stripe. You have to have value above and below the paywall line
| in the newsletter to keep users. And you have to have a free
| version in addition to the paid version. I also put up a separate
| website to drive SEO traffic to the newsletter (
| https://stockquakes.com ). And I post on BlueSky, Threads, and
| X/Twitter daily in addition to Substack Notes. Have 600 users,
| 5000 followers.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| At TableCheck (Japan's answer to Resy, Tock, Sevenrooms, etc.)
| our first 100 customers were definitely the hardest. It took us
| nearly two years, and many times I came close to giving up. Even
| though we had built a solid MVP, in Japan's risk-averse culture,
| no restaurant wanted to be the first to use our product. The
| question was always "Who else is using it?"--basically a
| deadlock.
|
| After a lot of cold-calling, we found a 120-year old sukiyaki and
| shabu-shabu restaurant chain. They told us they always survived
| by adopting the latest technology, and were willing to try our
| product. Most of their staff were elderly women in kimonos, many
| of whom had not touched an iPad before. We were worried they
| would struggle, but after a few training sessions they got the
| hang of it--soon they were greeting and seating customers with no
| problem.
|
| 12 years on, we are at 13,000 restaurants on our platform and
| adding a few hundred more each month!
| rimit wrote:
| Hey - I'd love to hear more about this if you're up for a chat.
| We're building something in an adjacent space and I'd like to
| understand a bit more about your journey - and congratulations
| on your success - site looks great.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Sure find me on LinkedIn I'm the CTO
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| I wrote about this fairly extensively:
|
| TL;DR: Email sign ups before launch via a boosted IG post.
|
| Non TL;DR: https://www.swiftjectivec.com/the-
| first-100-subscribers/
| komali2 wrote:
| When I had a restaurant in Taipei, every time I posted in the
| Taiwan subreddit even tangentially mentioning it, we'd get 2-3
| customers the next day in off that post, and a couple more
| throughout the week.
|
| So, niche subreddits, especially for geographies, could work
| well.
| mtremsal wrote:
| > We have a free version. For now, we have kept it invite-only.
| Question is TOFU.
|
| Comment from `amanchanda`, i.e. the OP.
|
| Nice hustle writing an Ask HN post to then plug your own product,
| but you have to make sure to respond to questions with your
| _other_ account `nicooo`. ;)
| gwd wrote:
| That was in response to someone saying:
|
| > Find a way to make it free to start.
|
| FWIW I looked at all the posts on this thread from `amanchanda`
| and `nicooo`, and didn't see any obvious reason to think they
| were the same person.
| trevinhofmann wrote:
| I'm also having a difficult time getting the first users for my
| AI software development service. I decided to start with a high-
| touch Early Access model to understand the users and their needs
| better, and I'm up to 8 users so far.
|
| For Early Access, I started with a LinkedIn post, reaching out to
| close colleagues, commenting in relevant Slack groups/channels,
| and introducing it to some of my better freelance clients. I'll
| be signing up 2 more of the freelance clients shortly, with one
| key feature request from each first. It's important not to get
| stuck in the trap of developing one-off features to get each new
| user, but these are features that would be broadly beneficial.
|
| Soon, I'm planning to add a super-simple demo at the top of the
| landing page to increase conversions, and then I'll start
| promoting it more. Likely also some relevant informational
| content marketing on a blog.
| nocommandline wrote:
| Since my App is targeted at developers building on Google Cloud,
| I focused on
|
| 1) Answering questions on Stackoverflow. - A
| few users clicked on the profile and went to our home page
| - A few of my responses involved a link to post on our blog (only
| did this where it was absolutely necessary)
|
| 2) Answering questions on Google Cloud reddit channel and Google
| Cloud Community (forum)
| squiggy22 wrote:
| For me personally integration marketing.
|
| Slack, IFFT those sorts of platforms already having a user base
| willing to try new things . Massive.
| sam1234apter wrote:
| I would use submithunt to list on multiple directories at once
| rblion wrote:
| My startup is helping Maui rebuild after the fires. My early
| adopters and testers will be on Maui mostly. It's a win-win-win.
| The branding is inspired by Hawaii, so it's only right that I do
| it this way.
| gsaines wrote:
| I don't intend this to come off as confrontational or cynical,
| but I think this question (and many of the responses in this
| thread) are mistaking the answer for the question.
|
| What I mean is that you have to understand what you most want to
| accomplish. If you want to build a growing business, the best way
| to do that is not to start from a product and then figure out how
| to attract users, it's to test product / user acquisition
| channels together.
|
| I have some authority in the space because I've done it the wrong
| way twice! www.skritter.com is the first company I built way back
| in 2008 and growing it was really challenging. It's a niche
| within a niche and most growth tactics simply didn't work. I'm
| proud that it's become so durable and taught so many people, but
| from a customer acquisition perspective, it was very challenging.
|
| www.codecombat.com had some organic acquisition channels that
| worked well, but they proved to be mostly non-repeatable.
|
| I'm now working on my third company (also an AI B2C SaaS play),
| but I started first and foremost by identifying a viable
| discovery channel / product pair. In this case, I found that paid
| advertising in the elder care space converts well.
|
| To put it more bluntly, a product without a customer acquisition
| channel is closer to a hobby than a business. A product with an
| acquisition channel that is somewhat scaleable and repeatable is
| likely to be a profitable business. A product with high growth /
| viral acquisition channel is a startup.
|
| I'm not knocking operating a hobby product. I've done that and
| there are good and bad parts to the experience. But if you want
| to grow, you shouldn't be asking the question "how do I grow this
| product?" you should instead be asking "what product could I
| build that has a demonstrable acquisition channel?"
| osigurdson wrote:
| Can this be put more simply as "build something that people
| want"? I'm not sure what a "demonstrable acquisition channel"
| is (ChatGPT suggests it is ads, social media, etc). Honest
| question, not criticizing the comment - just looking for more
| clarification.
| gsaines wrote:
| It's more than just building something people want.
|
| I want a lot of things and would be willing to pay for some
| of them, but unless there is a way to reach me, it doesn't
| matter.
|
| There is this cultural meme that if an amazing product simply
| exists, then people will tell other people and it'll grow
| organically. The reality is that amazing, ahead-of-their time
| products and services are constantly being created and dying.
| Not because they don't solve a need, but because they weren't
| able to reach customers economically with the right message.
|
| That ability to reach customers and contextualize the
| solution in language that matches their expectation is
| actually a lot rarer than building a good product.
| jrhizor wrote:
| For https://poach.vc/ and https://data.poach.vc/ I just emailed
| and LinkedIn DM-ed a ton of people. Since the newsletter features
| founders and investors, I also tag them each issue on Twitter,
| which is a small but evergreen source of exposure.
| Soupy wrote:
| I also run a small B2C company (https://pastmaps.com). Here's
| what worked for me:
|
| First 1000 users: daily manually done reddit posts. Very time-
| consuming and annoying, but it gets the job done. Just make sure
| the content drives users back to the site and is actually
| relevant, interesting, and valuable
|
| Next 100K users: programmatic long-tail SEO. obviously this is
| unique to my own product, but I realized that people were
| organically already searching for the data contained within the
| maps I host. By focusing on organizing that data and making it
| understandable to Google, I started a traffic flywheel that's
| paid off massively.
|
| I'm now exploring programmatic social media marketing as the next
| lever for the next 1M users as it directly drives even further
| benefits on the SEO side
|
| One last thought - whatever growth channel you pick should really
| align with the product you are building. Some products are a
| great fit for SEO, others not. Some are awesome for Tiktok/Reels,
| others not. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution.
|
| Good luck!
| blairanderson wrote:
| > daily manually done reddit posts
|
| Can you link to an example?
| justanotheratom wrote:
| I have released two apps to the Apple Store, and initial 100's of
| users is easy to get through just organic searches on App Store,
| and you posting links to some places.
|
| https://kincalendar.com/ https://ingredicheck.app/
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