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Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

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Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

#21

Post by vanschelven »

amanchanda wrote: post #18
vanschelven wrote: post #10

Grown way past 100 users with: • Make a great product. Everyone tells you "build it and they will come" is not working anymore, but it's working _for me_. • Outreach via your network. Talk to people with the intent of learning, not selling. • I'm personally on a freemium model. But that's in the developer-to-developer market, which is vastly different from your B2C EDIT: https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may…

Make a great product. -- > this is an iterative process as per me. Unless users come and try it out, you won't know what a great product looks like. The need is real, and the problem is real. I am one of the users myself. I built it because I felt the need myself. I ran the MVP with 15 others in my network with similar profiles. Quesiton is how to scale beyond that.

Is there any word of mouth ("virality") among your existing user-base?

Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

#22

Post by herbst »

vanschelven wrote: post #10

Grown way past 100 users with: • Make a great product. Everyone tells you "build it and they will come" is not working anymore, but it's working _for me_. • Outreach via your network. Talk to people with the intent of learning, not selling. • I'm personally on a freemium model. But that's in the developer-to-developer market, which is vastly different from your B2C EDIT: https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may…

Same here. When I create a product I try to build something that makes a good impression and if done well everything kinda goes from there.

My first SaaS was basically traffic kick-started from a single comment on the digital ocean blog, that described a complicated solution to the problem I 'solved'. No freemium either.

Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

#24

Post by nikolayasdf123 »

abdullin wrote: post #13

I have a course on building AI solutions in business (based on success stories from companies in Europe/USA). Sold ~400 seats so far, mostly through my community and word of mouth. No external ads or cold outreach. The process was classical. Over two years I created a community to sharing cases and insights from building LLM-driven systems. We focused on creating good non-toxic and collaborative atmosphere. No ads or…

why no ads though? don't they give you reach and discovery to people? for so as long your profits are higher than ads cost, you are profitable, so why not?

Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

#25

Post by Oras »

My product is a bit different as it is free.

Here is what I did:

1. Write a medium article. This helped Google index the name of the product quickly.

2. Post about it on Reddit and HN (neither got massive visitors, but again, SEO helps).

3. Post in any directory I could find.

It's a slow, organic process. For now, getting ~70 unique visitors, with a conversion rate of 15%.

Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

#26

Post by herbst »

reillyse wrote: post #9

The basic (marketing) problem is find where your users hang out and go meet them there. Usually for these kinds of products your customers will congregate somewhere online, reaching them though can be very tough. Try and drill down super narrow (if you can’t find a large community together ). Don’t try to convert new people, find people who are searching for a solution.

This is what I do before I spend a single minute on building anything. If you don't know how to reach your audience any product will fail

Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

#27

Post by RileyJames »

Built xonboard, employee onboarding tool for Xero: https://www.xonboard.com.au/

Got our first 100 users through the Xero App Store.

Now getting well over 100 per month via that channel. No longer our biggest channel, but it was until we started actively marketing our product.

The App Store model can work just fine, if you have a compelling value proposition that genuinely adds value to the users of that product.

There’s always the threat of being copied, but that’s everywhere.

Look at what larger products you could complement via integration. Make sure they have a channel for you (some are useless, Xero is great)

Xero App Store: https://apps.xero.com/au/app/xonboard

Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

#28

Post by abdullin »

hi_hi wrote: post #14
abdullin wrote: post #13

I have a course on building AI solutions in business (based on success stories from companies in Europe/USA). Sold ~400 seats so far, mostly through my community and word of mouth. No external ads or cold outreach. The process was classical. Over two years I created a community to sharing cases and insights from building LLM-driven systems. We focused on creating good non-toxic and collaborative atmosphere. No ads or…

Are you able to share. I would love to see real world success stories of LLM use cases and integrations, beyond the common ones you see often (code gen, story gen, automated summaries, etc)

Of course.

Most of the AI cases (that turn out to be an actual success) focus around a few repeatable patterns and a limited use of "AI". Here are a few interesting ones:

(1) Data extraction. E.g. extracting specs of electronic components from data-sheets (it was applied to address a USA market with 300M per year size). Or parsing back Purchase Order specs from PDFs in fragmented and under-digitized EU construction market. Just a modern VLM and a couple of prompts under the hood.

(2) French company saved up to 10k EUR per month on translators for their niche content (they do a lot of organic content, translating it to 5 major languages). Switched from human translators to LLM-driven translation process (like DeepL but understanding the nuances of their business thanks to the domain vocabulary they through in the context). Just one prompt under the hood.

(3) Lead Generation for the manufacturing equipment - scanning a stream of newly registered companies in EU and automatically identifying companies that would actually be interested in hearing more about specific types of equipment. Just a pipeline with ~3-4 prompts and a web search under the hood.

(4) Finding compliance gaps in the internal documents for the EU fintech (DORA/Safeguarding/Outsourcing etc). This one is a bit tricky, but still boils down to careful document parsing with subsequent graph traversal and reasoning.

NB: There also are tons of chatbots, customer support automation or generic enterprise RAG systems. But I don't work much with such kinds of projects, since they have higher risks and lower RoI.

Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

#29

Post by abdullin »

nikolayasdf123 wrote: post #24
abdullin wrote: post #13

I have a course on building AI solutions in business (based on success stories from companies in Europe/USA). Sold ~400 seats so far, mostly through my community and word of mouth. No external ads or cold outreach. The process was classical. Over two years I created a community to sharing cases and insights from building LLM-driven systems. We focused on creating good non-toxic and collaborative atmosphere. No ads or…

why no ads though? don't they give you reach and discovery to people? for so as long your profits are higher than ads cost, you are profitable, so why not?

There are way too many ads around "AI". Everybody else does that, frequently overwhelming people with too many promises of quick wins.

I prefer to distinguish from this hype and reach people through other channels - good content, word of mouth and interesting collaborative events (like our last Enterprise RAG Challenge). This might lead to slower sales in the short term, but I think the long-term value to the brand is worth it.

EDIT: fixed typo

Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

#30

Post by mpeg »

amanchanda wrote: post #15
mpeg wrote: post #12

B2C is hard... Long term, only paid ads and SEO will work (and SEO can be fickle) Short term, run some paid experiments (knowing you will probably not get positive return yet) and maybe some influencer marketing (they'll cost money, but not as much as paid ads depending on the niche)

Have you seen results with paid experiments at this early stage? One thing we are considering is to do a paid masterclass (low ticket) and run paid ads for that. Bring them in the funnel and get them signed up to use the product.

Without knowing what the vertical is, hard to say whether a masterclass like that would provide good results. I know for some verticals things like free webinars etc can provide decent results, but that's usually b2b

So, usually paid experiments won't really give you a return at an early stage, but occasionally they can if you get lucky, but at least they'll give you an idea of what your CAC can be, and give you a starting point to start optimising it

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