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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?

#121

Post by 0xsnowcrash »

nicooo wrote: post #115

I’ve had success twice using targeted social media outreach — specifically by joining relevant subreddit discussions and commenting on YouTube videos where my target audience was already active. Instead of simply promoting your service right away (it often feels spammy), I recommend genuinely engaging in conversations until the right opportunity comes up. I ended up turning that process into its own product: https://…

Do you have numbers?

i.e. what the "success" was like in each of the outreaches?

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

#122

Post by gardnr »

conductr wrote: post #117
nicooo wrote: post #115

I’ve had success twice using targeted social media outreach — specifically by joining relevant subreddit discussions and commenting on YouTube videos where my target audience was already active. Instead of simply promoting your service right away (it often feels spammy), I recommend genuinely engaging in conversations until the right opportunity comes up. I ended up turning that process into its own product: https://…

This is inception level promotion, I’m not even mad at ya lol

Is this comment part of the grift?

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

#123

Post by fidotron »

carlosjobim wrote: post #81
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…

> Get out of their fucking way when they have their wallet out.

Cannot be emphasised enough.

I have seen enough B2C funnel optimization work to be able to say that at every minor obstacle you create 90% of the people will fall off.

You need to get people invested in your solution and make it super easy for them to throw money at you.

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

#124

Post by vanschelven »

meander_water wrote: post #35
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 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.

As it stands I'm on the other side of the scalability issues wrt support-based growth: although I do have paying customers, I'd rather have more

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

#125

Post by sebstefan »

theshrike79 wrote: post #109
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

Still a tiny bit better than the "massive limbs bendy people" corporate style.

It's called Corporate Memphis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis)

Might be soulless and ugly too, but at least it doesn't make your customer think "Hold on is this a scam?"

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

#126

Post by vanschelven »

helloplanets wrote: post #87
calmoo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This comment is a bit puzzling to me given that this is literally the very top thing at the homepage.

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

#127

Post by bitmasher9 »

Instead of an affiliate program I would offer my ten biggest customers a steep discount in exchange for an interview. You really need to understand what consumer is spending $50/mo on AI. The better you understand them, the easier finding 490 people like them will be.

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

#129

Post by conductr »

sebstefan wrote: post #65
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…

> 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

I also think those images are not super aesthetically pleasing but I also don’t care about the sink metaphor they’re using so I instantly ignore them and just focus on the text

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

#130

Post by nikolayasdf123 »

janosch_123 wrote: post #98
nikolayasdf123 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so much media content and only 100 user… damn thats tough

I am quite happy with this to be honest - I am hoping for a viral post of course, but I do get noise out of it and (previously) strangers are looking at what I do. Like, how else should it work? There is of course always Google Ads but that strikes me as more short-sighted than building a backlog of content to refer back to.

I wish I knew always-working answer and wish it was easier.. it is tough!
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