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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?

#211

Post by nicooo »

conductr wrote: post #201
pc86 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a grift in the negative sense but this is absolutely a marketing comment. They're doing exactly what they say to do in the comment. They're on HN where at least some of their target market is. They have a product that is relevant (right down to the headline/CTA). They didn't just post the link but put it at the end of an informational comment. 10/10 meta-promotion IMO

They also likely were involved in the the original question getting posted so they could provide that answer which is what makes it an entirely fabricated grift

I was not involved in the original comment and not planning to publicly talk about my service until it's live, but the opportunity was too perfect to miss.

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

#212

Post by mountainriver »

jakevoytko wrote: post #174

For my newsletter[0], I just reached 231 subscribers in 5 months. Getting to this point has involved posting to as many channels as possible (without wearing out my welcome in any of them) My first 40 subscribers came from direct friends and my LinkedIn network. I got about 150 subscribers from a single popular post on Hacker News, posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43461618 The remainder have come fro…

What is happening with the Reddit programming subs? They are totally insane

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

#213

Post by nicooo »

0xsnowcrash wrote: post #121
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?

I never pulled numbers but since I got most of my first 100 users through this without paying any money, the ROI is positive :) Time was an investment though, and that's why I hope my service will help here.

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

#214

Post by ednite »

jderick wrote: post #192
ednite wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not cold—more like soft outreach. It happened at a social event through mutual friends. Classic “So, what do you do?” convo. I said software dev. They said, “Ugh, we use this tool—it’s garbage.” I listened (an underrated superpower), realized I could actually fix the problem, and suggested a meetup. One Zoom meeting later, we had the foundation of a partnership. Honestly, it could’ve been any event. Just show up, be…

Was this in SV?

No, I’m not based in Silicon Valley. I’ve always believed location matters less these days—especially in software.

As for networking, I’ve always catered to businesses—and in my experience, most of them face similar challenges regardless of geography. Odds are, the problems a company faces in my neck of the woods are the same ones you’ll find in yours.

This is a bootstrapped, client-first effort—no buzz, no funding, just trying to solve one real problem at a time. It’s also my first time working directly with individual subscribers, unlike my other projects which were built for businesses and their internal teams or clients. I’m still learning as I go and looking forward to sharing more with the HN community.

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

#215

Post by trevinhofmann »

I'm also having a difficult time getting the first users for my AI software development service. I decided to start with a high-touch Early Access model to understand the users and their needs better, and I'm up to 8 users so far.

For Early Access, I started with a LinkedIn post, reaching out to close colleagues, commenting in relevant Slack groups/channels, and introducing it to some of my better freelance clients. I'll be signing up 2 more of the freelance clients shortly, with one key feature request from each first. It's important not to get stuck in the trap of developing one-off features to get each new user, but these are features that would be broadly beneficial.

Soon, I'm planning to add a super-simple demo at the top of the landing page to increase conversions, and then I'll start promoting it more. Likely also some relevant informational content marketing on a blog.

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

#216

Post by grepfru_it »

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #187
jnovek wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Mate that was a big jump to a conclusion..

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

#217

Post by grepfru_it »

arewethereyeta wrote: post #182
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.

Sigh. This is yCombinator’s startup school or whatever it’s called where they teach you to launch a product and solicit engagement and feedback. This template is boilerplate for the last 3 or 4 I’ve seen. Then it gets posted to hacker news to solicit feedback from “real users”. Without fail the creators happen to haha stumble in and happily take your feedback. Absolutely nothing changes and you will return to the same product page as an old bookmark 2 years from now and realize nothing on the page has changed.

Instead, notice when this happens and then take away your own experience and use it to build your own product. Good luck!

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

#218

Post by hluska »

CrulesAll wrote: post #39
999900000999 wrote: post #8

Find 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.

Many successful companies that we’ve all heard of have free tiers. They offer free tiers because it works. They’re certainly not in the ad business.

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

#219

Post by piker »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #191
piker wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s neat but I’m wondering why the immediate mode gui for a word processor?

It's a great question and primarily for the snappiness, but in the end there isn't much difference since the heavy stuff (shaping, layout, rasterizing, etc.) is cached anyway. It's inspired by Zed which also has an obsessive (disciplining) focus on FPS.

Technically, using immediate mode avoids a ton of callbacks/listeners or something else which allows for hundreds of docs to be held in memory usefully without hogging resources. That's an actual use case for this.

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

#220

Post by nocommandline »

Since my App is targeted at developers building on Google Cloud, I focused on

1) Answering questions on Stackoverflow.

    - A few users clicked on the profile and went to our home page

    - A few of my responses involved a link to post on our blog (only did this where it was absolutely necessary)
2) Answering questions on Google Cloud reddit channel and Google Cloud Community (forum)
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