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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?

#62
post #41

I run a small but fairly successful "embed chatGPT on your site" widget https://rispose.com I'm acquiring customers by: - Offer a 100% free unlimited solution (with branding) I get a lot of daily clicks from people coming from my customer's website - Offer a really good price. My competitors are about 5X more expensive. I'll eventually maybe raise my price, but for now I have a lot of people switching to my tool - Af…

Your site would look way better with mx-auto max-w-7xl :) The content is far too wide on big screens

thanks, fix is already live!

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

#63
I would suggest the following simple process:

(1) Talk to your existing users: If your product has a free version, reach out to all of them and make sure you speak with as many of your freemium users as possible. If your product only offers a paid version, again reach out to all of them. Anyone who has already voted with their credit card is a very important person to talk to.

(2) Maximize learning: Understand what are the biggest pain-points you are helping your customers solve. Drill down on their psychographic profiles. Map everything out.

(3) Identify your optimal paid ICP: This is a best guess effort. Do not worry about nailing it 100%. Just make sure it is as close to your current full understanding as possible

(4) Go after them. The HOW is not as important as long as you understand the WHO.

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

#64
I'd say go where your users hang out. For me it was LinkedIn and reddit. Don't spend money on ads, it's simply not worth it at the beginning. Cold outreach works, the not so secret is that the message should be appealing. If you get bored reading your own outreach message, there's a high chance your audience will be too and you'll end up in spam as fast as I eat a chocolate tablet.

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

#65

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…

> https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may give an idea of what we're doing.

It's immediately obvious to me that the illustrations are AI slop

You should invest 20 bucks into getting some pictures of a guy in a datacenter, or 200 to pay some dude on Fiverr to draw you some sinks, instead of having these be the first thing customers see when checking out your product

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

#66

Not sure if my "products" compare to yours, but I’ve seen some success with a few of them over the years, maybe there are some takeaways (or pitfalls to avoid) for you: CloudCamping (PMS): 250+ Businesses, 2023 - Positioned as more modern, more accessible, and more affordable than the competition - Limited competition due to the complexity of the product - Personally visited campgrounds to demo the product - Sent phy…

> SoundCloud (DJ/Producing as “Schlenker mit Turnbeutel”) Pardon my ignorance - does SoundCloud let you monetise, or is it purely it being cool that people are listening to your tracks?

Not ignorant at all.

I'm not sure if they’ve added any monetization features over the years. Back then, it was arguably the best platform for getting discovered as a producer or DJ. When I stopped making music, I was getting a lot of requests to play at clubs across Germany and Europe.

At the time, I preferred to stay anonymous, so I never made the leap into the professional or public scene. Still, I was in touch with some producers early in their careers on SoundCloud when they had 1000 followers, like Robin Schulz and Felix Jaehn, if those names ring a bell.

So yes, I’d say it was (is?) definitely a launchpad for artists. But as far as I know, there was never a real way to monetize on the platform.

Unfortunately, when I stopped paying for the Pro version, they removed almost all of my music. Only 5 mixes are still up :')

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

#67

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…

Cool concept but AI slop photos are really offputting, this would steer me away from your product (as a naive first viewer).

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

#68
I got 20k+ downloads for my app by posting on Reddit. It's an app/website blocker for iPhone & Mac, so I focused on relevant communities like r/digitalminimalism and r/dumbphones with genuine, non-spammy posts: https://www.atten.app

I also tried "apps gone free" campaigns by posting on Reddit and using sites like AppRaven. These were very effective for visibility, the launch is currently the #5 all-time post on r/macapps (https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/top/?t=all). While these campaigns drove a strong spike in downloads, retention was low, so they weren’t as useful for building a long-term user base.

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

#70

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…

> https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may give an idea of what we're doing. It's immediately obvious to me that the illustrations are AI slop You should invest 20 bucks into getting some pictures of a guy in a datacenter, or 200 to pay some dude on Fiverr to draw you some sinks, instead of having these be the first thing customers see when checking out your product

> It's immediately obvious to me that the illustrations are AI slop

I don't believe this qualifies as AI Slop. They are all consistent in their style and thus 'on brand' for what they are trying to convey. While visuals are fairly subjective and these may not speak to you, they don't have 'obvious slop characteristics' eg 6 fingers or 3 eyes imho.

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