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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?

#141

Post by cylinder »

smaddox wrote: post #137
cylinder wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that is really interesting, how did you manage to sell them a paid (hourly) service when as you said they had firms knocking down their door doing it on contingency?

Not the OP, but commission-based recruiting seems to incentivise the wrong kind of recruiting, i.e. "find someone we can shove down their throat". I would personally rather pay an experienced recruiter by the hour, even if it meant fewer (hopefully higher quality) leads.

I agree, but the incentive for hourly is to wait as long as possible to introduce the candidate, right?

Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#142

Post by cmorelli »

tuddman wrote: post #124
cmorelli wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

offering to build (tiny! like, 5-minute one-offs!) features _just for them_ sort of blows their minds It seems worth noting that this can also be a dangerous strategy. It's really easy to fall into the trap of giving each customer exactly what they ask for, rather than learning what they actually need. If gone unchecked, this is the sort of product strategy that easily leads to disastrous results for product usabilit…

> It's really easy to fall into the trap of giving each customer exactly what they ask for ... this is the sort of product strategy that easily leads to disastrous results. do you know any product/company examples where this was/is the case?

See aianus response for some examples, I would also add:

- Windows Mobile (pre WP8): Customers may have asked for a mobile computer, but most did not actually want a weak version of their computer crammed onto a tiny screen. Apple and Google helpfully showed them what customers actually wanted with iOS and Android.

- Blockbuster: Customers may have asked for a large selection of movies for rent, but they didn't want a physical location they could drive to and browse through. Netflix gave people a new option (multiple new options)

- MySpace: "Customers" may have asked for customized/personalized profiles, but they didn't mean a dumping ground of random html and css that eliminates any sense of uniformity, brand, identity, etc. Facebook gave people the personal touch they actually wanted without compromising the experience.

Now, these are colossal failures, and we can endlessly debate whether you believe these failures were the deciding factor in their respective products. But I think we can probably agree that, at the very least, failure to cater to the actual customer need (instead of what they simply ask for) was a major flaw in all of these cases. And these are just a few examples.

Also, I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but you cut my quote at an interesting spot. I'm not trying to suggest that a business should not cater to its customers' requests. Rather, that it should not do so at the expense of trying to understand the need behind the request.

Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#143

Post by freehunter »

mobitar wrote: post #127

Getting the first 100 users has actually been the easiest part of the process. It's getting 100 daily new users that's really hard. For Standard Notes[0], here's what I did: 1. Comment on privacy related HN posts about a privacy-focused notes app. That would have gotten me 40-50 users. 2. Write articles[1] on encryption/privacy/webdev. Some of them made it to frontpage HN, some didn't. That might have gotten me to 50…

>It's getting 100 daily new users that's really hard.

I'm part of a local business networking group, and we have members with businesses of all shapes and sizes, from "just launched two months ago" to "I hit 20 employees seven years ago". We were chatting about picking up new followers on social media and I mentioned that you have to celebrate the little successes. One member chimed in "yeah, we got 1000 new follows in Instagram in the last week, which was neat" and I thought to myself "I said little successes". I recently hit 700 total, which was nice.

It does start to have a compounding effect, though. People start giving you word-of-mouth, or take you more seriously when they see how many others are using your product, etc.

Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#144

Post by devopsproject »

dkarl wrote: post #98
Doches wrote: post #19

I’ll second the PG advice: do things that don’t scale is by far the most effective tool I’ve found for finding _and keeping_ users. I’m building small-business tools for fringe retail [0] as a side-project, and those users are usually more than willing to at least investigate new apps if they even have a chance of solving some real problem their business faces. Emailing them personally with a pitch based on a few min…

offering to build (tiny! like, 5-minute one-offs!) features _just for them_ sort of blows their minds How did you manage to do that without making it impossible to add major new functionality to your app? Did you nail the basic functionality of the app from the starting gate and go straight into maintenance/feature-tweaking mode? meticulous hand-holding through the first few weeks usually convinces them to stick arou…

On adding features:

You have to be flexible with how you classify your product. If you are stuck in "maintenance\small tweaks only" mindset you will constantly find excuses to say "no".

New features will break your model. It is your job to try and figure out if it is worth the cost. I typically use the "common customer" argument. If this would be useful to the "common customer" it gets serious consideration.

On hand holding:

Most people will "get" your product and stop calling you. There will be some who call all the time. You can use these calls to help direct your work eg: "I'm getting 15 calls a week about username\password issues, it is time to rethink the login\password reset process."

Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#145

Post by PascLeRasc »

I published my Chrome extension on the Chrome Web Store and wrote up a little post on Github about how I made it, then posted that to a subreddit, I can't remember if it was /google or /chrome or /webdev. Unfortunately since then I can't seem to get past ~400 users but it was a pretty good kickstart.

Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#146

Post by slantaclaus »

lefstathiou wrote: post #123

We provide SAAS to financial institutions and their corporate clients (so the below may not be relevant to your market): 1) make sure your service is a pain killer not a vitamin. This industry does not believe in vitamins and we didn't have the resources for such a long closing cycle. Our tech can be deployed in minutes, is easily understood and requires very little to no backofdice Support 2) Cold call to get meetin…

What's your product/website?

Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#149

Post by abetusk »

mobitar wrote: post #127

Getting the first 100 users has actually been the easiest part of the process. It's getting 100 daily new users that's really hard. For Standard Notes[0], here's what I did: 1. Comment on privacy related HN posts about a privacy-focused notes app. That would have gotten me 40-50 users. 2. Write articles[1] on encryption/privacy/webdev. Some of them made it to frontpage HN, some didn't. That might have gotten me to 50…

This seems great. I'm a big fan of open source but I often hear criticisms from people who are deathly afraid that they can't make money if their source is libre.

Do you have anything to say about the difficulties of running an open source shop? Do you worry about competitors taking your code and standing up their own sites?

Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#150

Post by matt_lo »

ajuhasz wrote: post #122

We have SaaS aimed at developers[1] (platform for coding/hosting chatbots) and have tried 3 major prongs to getting our first 100 users (in order of usefulness) - Meetups - Content marketing - Adwords By far the best is our meetup group. We host a weekly meetup[2] series where we go through the platform and framework and help people write their first bots. It's nice because it also allows us to see how people are usi…

> Adwords is almost useless at this point, though neither of us has had any prior experience so it could just be us not using the tools to their full potential.

For our B2C company, AdWords turned out to be a stable revenue driver for us. I had little experience in it (I'm a software engineer) and it took about $3k burned over 60 days to really understand how to build a profitable acquisition model using AdWords. I bought a couple books and worked on a bunch of multi-variant testing. I eventually obtained a sustainable and predictable process of obtaining revenue.

Never use AdWords Express, spend about 160 hours minimum of learning how marketing and PPC works, and use only data to drive decisions. ROI comes 4 months later when first starting out. If you're an engineer, AdWords API is a really useful to combine CRM and user data to discover new keywords and personas.

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