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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?

#81

Post by carlosjobim »

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)

I've found B2C much easier than B2B, and much more pleasant too.

SEO is extremely easy: Write in very clear prose what you are selling and give potential clients as much information as possible. This is all you need for SEO, apart from purely technical stuff like load times.

Turning your SEO efforts into real sales is also easy: State your price(s) very clearly on the website and then make it as easy as possible for customers to make a purchase. Get out of their fucking way when they have their wallet out.

If you insist on using paid ads and influencers, by God connect the campaigns to specific discount offers so that you know exactly how many sales origin from each channel you are paying to market in.

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

#83

Post by sebstefan »

MobileVet wrote: post #70
sebstefan wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you can tell immediately that an illustration is AI-made, for me it already qualifies as slop. It gives low quality, lack of effort, "Is this website legit or is this some guy running a scam from their bedroom in Malaysia" type vibe

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

#85

Post by quibono »

piker wrote: post #77
quibono wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not your intended audience but I've had a play with the web preview and I really like it! Is it using WASM for that?

Thanks a ton. Yes it's WASM. Check out the desktop build! :) It's free unless you want to use it in your practice. [NOTE: Windows build phones home for updates; others don't yet.]

Thank you, just downloaded the binary :) As a +1 data point it's performing really well on my machine (although I don't think the dark theme toggle works). Like I said, not the target audience but wishing you good luck with the product! Do you mind sharing the stack you used to build it?

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

#86

Post by PostOnce »

reverseblade2 wrote: post #75

I have built this 3d bin packer. https://3dpack.ing Despite my best attempts didn’t take off:(

What did you try? It might be worth talking about here to try to gain some insight.

B2B products, unless miraculous, do not generally "take off" without a lot of hard work, meetings, trade shows, client demos, etc, at least so far as I have seen.

To make any sales at all, it seems like you'd have to already know a lot of people in the industry, and it would have to outcompete not only other products, but just the old "we'll load all the shit we can into the truck/container based on human intuition".

In fact, ideally, you'd ask someone you know (or even better, they'll ask you) if this is a problem you can solve for them. If you can't sell it to people you already know, it'll be even harder to sell to people you don't, presumably.

Plus it will be very hard to articulate to an AI "you can't sit that on top of that!", but it's obvious when looking at it.

I'm in the midst of wading into B2B, alone, and low on capital, myself. My "success" so far is mostly due to dumb luck and being available to talk to.

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

#87

Post by helloplanets »

calmoo wrote: post #67
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…

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

Yes, just use a crisp screenshot related to the use case. Especially when it's a product aimed at developers.

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

#88

Post by piker »

quibono wrote: post #85
piker wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks a ton. Yes it's WASM. Check out the desktop build! :) It's free unless you want to use it in your practice. [NOTE: Windows build phones home for updates; others don't yet.]

Thank you, just downloaded the binary :) As a +1 data point it's performing really well on my machine (although I don't think the dark theme toggle works). Like I said, not the target audience but wishing you good luck with the product! Do you mind sharing the stack you used to build it?

Not at all. It's Rust using egui for the UI framework with custom text layout and shaping. It uses PDFium for rendering PDFs.

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

#90

Post by abhisek »

Not sure if it’s relevant because you specifically mentioned about B2C.

For cyber security product, we took the open source route. We build our core technology in public as open source project.

https://github.com/safedep/vet

The commercial SaaS is for scaling and management. Our entire funnel is based on OSS. Folks who have already found value and is looking to scale their deployment.

This model works for us especially at our current stage where we are 100% engineering led.

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