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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?

#181

Post by delfinom »

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

Are you upset by the kitchen sink metaphor? lmao

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

#182

Post by arewethereyeta »

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 seems like that sort of marketing where the OP creates a question for himself to answer from another account.

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

#183

Post by jmstfv »

2 things worked well for NotionBackups:

* SEO - I started way before I launched the product. I wrote an article on how to back up a Notion workspace using their (then newly-launched) API. It still brings in traffic to this day. Granted, there was almost no competition when I started

* r/Notion subreddit - only in relevant threads when someone is looking for a solution. After some time, some of my customers began recommending this tool to others

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

#184

Post by TZubiri »

jnovek wrote: post #180
miros_love wrote: post #176

My wife cold-called about 60% of all businesses in our niche within our city. Meanwhile, I literally walked into CEOs' offices, asked politely for meetings, and pitched face-to-face. Conversion was around 1%, but that gave us our first collision with reality—and our first paying customers. Also half of my clients came from Google search ads. But it was absolutely terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were people trying to…

> But it was absolutely terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were people trying to talk to chatGPT I don't totally follow, probably because I don't tend to run ad campaigns and I'm not up with whatever shenanigans advertisers are doing these days. What do you mean when you say that they were "trying to talk to chatGPT"?

Super curious about this one, I'm about to get into a google search campaign so wondering what to avoid.

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

#185

Post by hodder »

It really all depends on the business itself and it is hard to help you without know much more. B2C is too broad. Your getting to 100 users at 50/month is obviously a massive goal. let alone 500. 25k/month revenue is huge if this is bootstrapped. What is the business? Just share a link.

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

#187

Post by Zenbit_UX »

jnovek wrote: post #180
miros_love wrote: post #176

My wife cold-called about 60% of all businesses in our niche within our city. Meanwhile, I literally walked into CEOs' offices, asked politely for meetings, and pitched face-to-face. Conversion was around 1%, but that gave us our first collision with reality—and our first paying customers. Also half of my clients came from Google search ads. But it was absolutely terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were people trying to…

> But it was absolutely terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were people trying to talk to chatGPT I don't totally follow, probably because I don't tend to run ad campaigns and I'm not up with whatever shenanigans advertisers are doing these days. What do you mean when you say that they were "trying to talk to chatGPT"?

My guess is that the GP put a AI chat bot on their site, and people started asking it for things completely unrelated to his business as a way to get free access to chatgpt without an account.

It’s actually quite fun, whenever you see an ai chat bot asking you if you have any questions ask it for its favorite cupcake recipe. If it answers its a poorly configured LLM.

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

#188

Post by gethly »

Cold calling seems the be the prevalent approach, which is also mine. Though I am struggling with time. On one hand, I know I need to reach out to potential customers, on the other hand I need/want to work on the product. So not only is my time limited but also I don't like to shift my focus elsewhere.

I wonder if it would make sense to hire someone, some student, to do the outreach for me. Paid per contact and then some bonus for subscription.

Has anyone tried it? I mean, it's still just cold calling but I am wondering whether I should entrust such an important process to someone that is not familiar or invested with the product? After all, you can make the first impression only once.

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

#189

Post by miros_love »

jnovek wrote: post #180
miros_love wrote: post #176

My wife cold-called about 60% of all businesses in our niche within our city. Meanwhile, I literally walked into CEOs' offices, asked politely for meetings, and pitched face-to-face. Conversion was around 1%, but that gave us our first collision with reality—and our first paying customers. Also half of my clients came from Google search ads. But it was absolutely terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were people trying to…

> But it was absolutely terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were people trying to talk to chatGPT I don't totally follow, probably because I don't tend to run ad campaigns and I'm not up with whatever shenanigans advertisers are doing these days. What do you mean when you say that they were "trying to talk to chatGPT"?

Indeed, it was written in a rather unclear way. I have AI in the name of my company and I left a form on the site to fill out.

My site, due to a cold start, began to appear in the search results for people from different countries who misspelled "ChatGPT for free" and stuff like that. They went to the site, saw my form, filled out the required fields and wrote "Make me an essay on the topic...". No stop words can cover such behavior.

Importantly, all real clients did not use this form, but immediately went through convenient communication channels.

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

#190

Post by dcchambers »

permo-w wrote: post #128
OJFord wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even a known company! I can't name a SaaS that does. It's in the realm of telecom/utility bills.

creative cloud?

I would call Creative Cloud B2B... I imagine the bulk of their subscribers are using the tools for professional use.

And even then you can choose to subscribe to a subset of tools (eg just photoshop) for a much cheaper cost.

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