I searched for people complaining on twitter about how bad Skype connections ruined their podcast recordings and let them know about my solution. Generally people were pretty happy to know of a better alternative and signed up as well as started sharing it via word of mouth.
Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
31–40 of 189 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#32For us it was through a Kickstarter ( https://medium.com/@alexobenauer/how-i-launched-my-company-w... ), and the majority of the first 100 backers (that I didn't already know) were from Hacker News.
What happened to mail pilot
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#33These 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.
Cool product. I noticed that in the reddit post you offered it to people for free. How did that pan out?
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#34These 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.
[Readlang] You are missing a sign up link on your home page... I can sign up after installing the chrome extension, but that's just strange.
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#35My 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 with link building. It's hard but eventually will pay.
6. Word of mouth. Encourage and make it easy for your customers to tell others about your product (no, not by including dumb social sharing buttons!)
What not to-do:
Don't start with Ads prematurely. No matter what the platform is. The don't pay initially and will cost you a lot.
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#36I’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…
> For every new customer they can sign up that converts, I credit their account with a few free months. It totally won’t scale [...]
I don't know the market/business, but why not? isn't that what Dropbox does at scale?
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#37Really 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.
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#38My 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…
I didn't know about betalist.Yes i am trying my hands in content creation and blogging. Thank you for the feedback.Very helpful
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#39I've found that Traction [0] covers and explains most of the ideas people will mention here on HN.
Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
#40I’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…
> For every new customer they can sign up that converts, I credit their account with a few free months. It totally won’t scale [...] I don't know the market/business, but why not? isn't that what Dropbox does at scale?
To scale it probably needs to provide $ incentives, since power affiliates would rack up thousands of free months which they could never use.