We started openredis in 2011, and we reached the 1k customers mark a year later. It's a Redis hosting service for EC2, also available as a Heroku add-on. Aside from the fact that the Heroku add-ons program could be considered some sort of marketing, we've never paid a single ad. For us, the key to getting customers was word of mouth. In 2014, at the three year anniversary, I wrote a blog post about how we got started: http://soveran.com/turning-three.html
Ask HN: Reached 1k+ paying or registered users without spending on ads?
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: Ask HN: Reached 1k+ paying or registered users without spending on ads?
#12It is certainly possible. I started charging last November and am just passing this threshold without spending any money on marketing at all. This might not work in all cases though. I have a bit of an advantage in that my users are podcasters and they tend to be good promoters with built-in audiences of their own. Also, my service is just naturally viral. The hosts have new guest on their shows all of the time so new people are getting exposed to the product regularly. When they see the ease of use, many of the guests sign up themselves. Not sure how you would recreate this in another domain but hope that helps.
Re: Ask HN: Reached 1k+ paying or registered users without spending on ads?
#13If you've not checked it out yet, there's lots to be learned from posts on https://www.indiehackers.com
I second this, the posts usually detail how each person acquired their customers.
Re: Ask HN: Reached 1k+ paying or registered users without spending on ads?
#14We started openredis in 2011, and we reached the 1k customers mark a year later. It's a Redis hosting service for EC2, also available as a Heroku add-on. Aside from the fact that the Heroku add-ons program could be considered some sort of marketing, we've never paid a single ad. For us, the key to getting customers was word of mouth. In 2014, at the three year anniversary, I wrote a blog post about how we got started…
what percentage of customers found you through heroku?
Re: Ask HN: Reached 1k+ paying or registered users without spending on ads?
#15I did the following for http://www.oppsdaily.com, and am currently doing something similar for https://www.oppslist.com
1. Posted landing page in a slack chat (first ~10 users)
2. Posted on the indiehackers forum (+30 users)
3. Got mentioned in the indiehackers weekly newsletter (+150)
4. Posted to hacker news (+?)
5. Posted to product hunt (did not go so great)(+?)
6. Started posting weekly metrics to HN - made the frontpage (+1500-2000)