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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?

#171

Post by mobitar »

abetusk wrote: post #149
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?

Honestly the app being open source is the least of my worries. The source code isn't the hardest part of running this operation. It's really the persistence in keeping going every day, even though some weeks you may see so little results. That's a very hard thing to do, and I doubt someone else will have that same passion with something they didn't make themselves. Other than that, the brand is more important than the code. You can copy the app but you can't copy the message in an authentic way.

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

#172

Post by amorphid »

cylinder wrote: post #82
_d8fd wrote: post #25

tl;dr -- offer customers something they can't buy at a price their willing to pay. My personal, non-software example was to identify an untapped opportunity in my field, technical recruiting. My clients had 20 to 100 employees, no internal technical recruiter, had already recruited their core team, has run out of organically generated people to interview, and had raised a Series B or later in funding. In 2010, the on…

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?

I managed to develop a pipeline of mostly referral business. When people come to you, it's a different kind of sale.

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

#173

Post by amorphid »

amackera wrote: post #161
cylinder wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the idea behind hourly is to provide the best "bang for their buck". If your clients feel cheated, they will fire you. Evidently OP did a good job, and made them feel like they were getting high value.

And that was basically the pitch... "We aren't magic, we just do what you would do. If you have the tim to recruit yourself, do it. If not, give us a try, and if it's not working, fire us."

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

#174

Post by minhajuddin »

tmat wrote: post #61
minhajuddin wrote: post #26

I have launched a few products. It is really difficult to get the discussion going on many places like reddit or other discourse forums as there are rules against promoting your products. However, I have had huge success with advertising my product ( a paid contact form endpoint service https://liveformhq.com/ ) on another free product ( https://getsimpleform.com/ ) that I built. If you can build a smaller version of…

I use your service and found it through Google searches :) liveform is great, would be nice if it had a pipedriver, salesforce, and other crm integrations

Thanks for the feedback. I'll take a look at integrations and see if they can be added. LiveForm has a webhook which can be integrated with any apps that are supported by Zapier, so that should support a lot of use cases.

Do you have any other feedback on improving LiveForm or SimpleForm? I'd love to hear if you've had any pain points.

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

#175

Post by anacleto »

siquick wrote: post #169
anacleto wrote: post #35

My go-to list: 1. Launch your product on BetaList 2. Create a blog and write a lot. Don't create trivial content. SEO is important but write because you have interesting things to talk about, not because you have to create "content". 3. Share as much as you can on twitter/Slack/FB groups. But never be spammy. 4. Being actively engaged on Twitter (yes!) by regularily searching for your main 1-3 keywords. 5. Start soon…

>>Don't start with Ads prematurely. No matter what the platform is. The don't pay initially and will cost you a lot. If you're still in the validation stage and want to identify if you do have an idea that people want and can iterate fast, then ads are a surefire way to get people to your site (as long as you're targeting the right people).

Yes, you can but they can cost you a lot (~2.5$/click on avg on Adwords, and $7/click on Linkedin) and you might want to find other ways to achieve the same result.

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

#176

Post by Tharkun »

lefstathiou wrote: post #153
Tharkun wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. We haven't had much luck with SAAS in financial institutions. In our experience they want everything on site and running on their own hardware and software. How did you manage to convince them? Or are you limiting yourself to smaller players where it's less of an issue?

Answer here depends on what you're hosting and doing for the bank but generally...assuming you do not require complex integrations into BBG or proprietary tools you should be able to host off-prem. We fought hard for it and eventually got through and our clients greatly appreciate it (we can update very quickly). The key here is selling through the front office instead of the back-office. The golden rule of selling s…

Thanks for that!

Oh and for the sake of completeness: I'm not in any way affiliated with SpiderOak, though I suppose some of my post history mentions SO quite often as I'm a rather heavy user of their services.

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

#177

Post by starikovs »

titel wrote: post #162
starikovs wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have an amazing product you can start from http://www.appsumo.com :-)

Do you have more information on that? Did you do a deal with Appsumo before? What are usually the terms for such a deal?

As I know they have about ~1M users. Once your product is verified almost all of them receive a newsletter about your product. Your product is sold by the fixed price forever. But they take a big % (40%+) for that deal. I heard from some projects which have been used AppSumo and that the impact is really great. Thousands of new users and sales.

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

#178

Post by ew »

I replied to every single thread in the Dropbox forums pushing my new app that would help solve their problems. Seemed to work well enough!

I then also left comments on every blog I could find talking about the problem. A lot of manual leg work that definitely paid off.

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

#179

Post by vanderreeah »

karthiksk2012 wrote: post #37

Really great feedback. The reason I asked this question is I just launched my app https://pipecourse.com/ and its been few days. I tried cold emailing people but getting almost no response. Any particular feedback for this will be appreciated.

I don't know how constructive this is, since I may not be the target audience, but my one piece of feedback would be that, after looking at the site for 10-15 seconds, I had literally no idea what service you are offering. Like I said, could just be me though.

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

#180

Post by kevinye93 »

Beta websites are amazing. when we entered our closed beta for Tack; http://tack.tech (We combine task management and chat in one platform to make it easier to collaborate, think slack + asana + trello.) We submitted our platform to Betalist and Betapage. We were able to get over 100 teams signed up for our platform within a week and had a few users sign up every week after the "beta launch" (which is pretty good considering we're b2b). The best part is, both betalist and beta page are completely free of charge.

Take advantage of every free promotion/producthunt like service you can (although I would not suggest going on product hunt for your beta).

Other than that cold e-mailing, cold calling, and guest blogs also work really well in the beginning.

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