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Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
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Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#2Nice question. I am just wondering if anyone will disclose their current killer acquisition hacks. Moreover, the question heavily depends on your business, so is it B2B, B2C, online, app, bot, etc.?
However, a good read on this which tackles all ways of user acquisition/Marketing is 'Traction' from the DuckDuckGo founder. It's not an exciting book but gives an ok overview.
You could also just start with the channel which seems most obvious, set up analytics from day one and iterate over and over. With this approach you should get a good feeling if your acquisition strategy works and if yes you should optimize. Otherwise move on to the next channel.
Edit: When you search for Traction on Amazon.com there's also another one on #1 (good Amazon search hack from another other author btw) which is not the mentioned book (the one I mean is blue-ish)
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#3I've launched a couple of startups, and usually the combinations of these yield the best results -> word of mouth, reddit comments/posts, quora answers, hackernews posts/comments, comments on top SERPs, twitter posts + following leads, get listed on comparison/review sites or blog posts.
Of course comment when relevant, offer something useful and contribute to the discussion. Don't just spam link to your startup.
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#4I was a frequent visiter to a forum where there was a problem I was able to fix. 1 post in that forum was enough to start to get traction.
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#5Facebook ads are always really effective for me to build some initial traction.
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#6Nice question. I am just wondering if anyone will disclose their current killer acquisition hacks. Moreover, the question heavily depends on your business, so is it B2B, B2C, online, app, bot, etc.? However, a good read on this which tackles all ways of user acquisition/Marketing is 'Traction' from the DuckDuckGo founder. It's not an exciting book but gives an ok overview. You could also just start with the channel w…
Thanks, Traction sounds helpful; I see now that 'boring' practices and advice (etc.) are quite necessarily better for business/software/technology development audiences like us.
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#7These got Readlang's first 100 users:
1. This post to a language learning forum: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T...
2. This post to r/LanguageLearning: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1b08ly/re...
If there's a subreddit where your potential audience hangs out that's a good bet. Try to be honest, humble, and non-spammy.
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#8I wrote a passionate blog post made the front page of a major subreddit. The story was then syndicated across a few other large blogs in my niche. This resulted in 3,000 sign-ups in a few days-- much more than I had expected!
I've also found reddit ads to be quite useful if you take the time to craft relevant ads and quickly nix ones that do not perform.
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#9Facebook ads are always really effective for me to build some initial traction.
Clever Facebook ads are definitely effective. Approach it like 99% of FB advertisers, however, and you'll undoubtedly lose money.
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#10Getting the first hundred users in itself is not hard, post to forums where your users hang out and you'll be at 100 users fairly quickly. The hard part is getting users to keep coming back to your site aka engagement.
The best advice I have come across to get your initial users : do things that don't scale [0]. Yeah, everyone read that post by PG but a surprisingly small number of people actually apply it to their own projects/startups. Practical example : I am building a community for programmers [1], so to get some initial feedback I posted to a Python subreddit and got the first 50 users. I got a lot of valuable feedback, but users hardly came back to my site after a couple of days. So I decided to follow up individually with users who had signed up and started a conversation about my site. I explained to each user what the site is about, how to use it and asked for feedback. I also asked them what their first impressions of the site were and how it can be improved. I learnt that people did not even understand what my site was about, and I knew that I need to focus on conveying the essence of the site to new users. (Still working on it) You gain a lot of insight about users by having conversations with individual users. I managed to help 3 people with their Python related problems so far, in the chat room https://www.metalmanac.com/topics/python/chat/
Once you get a small number of users who are passionate about your project, continue talking to individual users and ask them to share it with their friends and offer to guide each user individually, it works very well. This is obviously not scalable beyond a few hundred users, but getting those passionate users initially is critical. I am currently at this stage.
Once you have a group of 100 or so passionate users, you can share it with a wider community of users (eg- PH, HN for tech projects) and continue focusing on having conversations with individual users.