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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?

#21

Post by metalmanac »

Jillboy wrote: post #17
metalmanac wrote: post #10

Getting 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 o…

Well, what IS the site about? I read your post and went to the website and spent a good 15 seconds trying to figure out what it's about. Easy fix is just take what's on the About page, strip it down to its bare essence and slap it on the landing page, on top of the search bar but in a way that it stands out (i.e. it should be the first thing users will read).

That's what I am currently working on. The home page will primarily focus on explaining what the site is about. I am thinking about using gif+text to explain how the site works.

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

#22

Post by lazyjones »

For a CSE (comparison shopping engine) for computer hardware it was simple:

- talked to friends on IRC about the website (1996-1997)

- e-mailed the scraped shops and asked for permission, some became users too

When it's obvious what the product does and how useful its benefits are, and the target audience is large, getting to 100 users is really easy.

It's also an advantage if there is a compelling and logical reason to visit the website frequently, so it stays fresh in memory and becomes a habit. In my case it had up-to-date prices collected from shops, so visiting often helped people find good deals and let them observe dropping prices until they could afford a purchase.

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

#24

Post by metalmanac »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #20
metalmanac wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the problem users are having. Since the purpose of the site and how it works is buried in the About page, people are clueless about what to do next. I am redoing the front page to only focus on explaining what the site is about. The idea is this : * provide a community reviewed wiki explaining what X is about and how to go about learning it. The aim is to answer the questions how to learn X programmin…

It's a decent idea. I think a problem will be that you are trying to compete too much with stackoverflow. * "provide a community reviewed wiki explaining what X is about": http://stackoverflow.com/tags/javascript/info * "provide a Stackoverflow like QA section": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/javascript * "provide an chatroom to replicate the IRC experience": http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/17/javascri…

My hypothesis is that 99% of the people who use Stackoverflow only visit the QA part of it and things like the community wiki and chatroom receive minimal traffic. From talking to a few dozens of users, most people don't even know that the chat room and wiki exist!

The current number of users in the Stackoverflow chat rooms

> with 100 users currently talking in 57 rooms.

The usage of the chat is shockingly low.

I think there's room to provide a better learning experience for developers and providing chat rooms for developers is a low hanging fruit IMO. People here on HN know about IRC and how to use it, but we represent a very small fraction of the population interested in programming, so the idea is to tend to the general population eventually.

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

#25

Post by _d8fd »

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 only options available to them were contingency recruiters, contract recruiters who wanted 6 to 12 month full time contracts, and inexperienced admin staff (aka not experienced technical recruiters).

After learning that it super competitive to sell traditional recruiting services to my clients, I decided to develop a workflow that allowed me to offer them part-time hourly recruiting with no long term commitment. Typically this started off as 10 to 30 hours a week with no commitment (aka fire me at any time). This model worked great, and in 2 years I scaled from just me billing 30 hours per week with one client to 15 people (part time & full time) billing several hundred hours per week.

Service business are not software businesses, but they do share at least one thing in common; selling a product or service customers need & can't buy in an industry you understand is a heck of a lot easier than trying to make something up from scratch.

Good luck!

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

#26

Post by minhajuddin »

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 your product which provides value to customers it can be a great source of leads :)
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