dumb luck and a good product
Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
31–40 of 374 posts
Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
yeah, this is much slower growth... danger must be it is so slow it must be non-existent. but I am with you on same boat, there are too many AI ads for crappy apps
but I guess it speaks to flood of crap-ware, and flood bad content in social networks
^not meaning about you, of course (those folks must not be even on HN)
Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
#33Bot farm in India, VC's didn't notice.
Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
#34Try to launch in ProductHunt and Appsumo , Good sites
Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
#35Grown 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…
Cool product! How much time would you say you spend on support per week? I've always heard that it's harder to scale when you're reliant on income via support.
Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
#36The 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.
Education marketing is the trench warfare of marketing. Unless you are a big conglomerate, this is a terrible strategy. "Finding people who are searching for a solution" is maneuver warfare. It's the best strategy, and the only one that should be employed by SMEs. OP is looking for 100 people when in reality they should be looking for 5 people who already know they want the solution you are offering. If the product/service works, these five people will become sales reps for you. NB. The trick is not selling the product to these five people. It is finding these five people.
Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
#37I 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…
Ok now we move goal posts how to build first 100 community members
Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
#38Managed to scale my legal tech B2B product Tritium (https://tritium.legal) through an existing professional network. It's technically B2B but B2C in the sense that it's marketed directly to the end-user, not the enterprise. Probably not yet at a hundred users, but it's heading there. I'm using these initial users to flesh out the frequently asked questions and produce the introduction artifacts to hopefully transition to something more product-led.
Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
#39Find a way to make it free to start. This is how Firebase, Supabase and friends work. Getting 100 people to sign up for a free service is still work, but significantly less.
Making it 100X harder to get them to pay for it subsequently. "If you’re good at something, never do it for free" - Joseph Joker MBA JD.
If not, then you are in the ad business.
Re: Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
#40I 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…
Ok now we move goal posts how to build first 100 community members
When I was starting my community, I joined other similar communities and tried to be helpful there. No ads or links, just answering questions and supporting. People that were genuinely interested to learn more about the topic - opened my profile and followed the links there.
This and interesting content was enough to grow community organically to 14k subscribers over 2 years.
Another approach to speed up the growth - organise some fun event that benefits the entire community, highlights and showcases the participants.
E.g. when I organised last Enterprise RAG challenge, we got 350 submissions from the teams around the world. Plus IBM joined as a sponsor. People were mostly participating not for the prises, but because of the approachable challenge and ability to push state of the art. Plus some were hired away because of the good leaderboard scores.
Article of the winner (just google "Ilya Rice: How I Won the Enterprise RAG Challenge") is considered by some companies as one of the best resources on building document-based AI systems. And the entire community sees it as the result of their work together - further reinforcing the spirit of the collaboration.
People tend to share and spread fruits of their labor and love.