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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?

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. Most of the AI cases (that turn out to be an actual success) focus around a few repeatable patterns and a limited use of "AI". Here are a few interesting ones: (1) Data extraction. E.g. extracting specs of electronic components from data-sheets (it was applied to address a USA market with 300M per year size). Or parsing back Purchase Order specs from PDFs in fragmented and under-digitized EU construction m…

That last point (compliance gaps in fintech) sounds fascinating. Is there a place that I could read more about this?

Compliance gaps / legal analysis is a pretty common theme in my community (meaning - it was mentioned 3-4 times by different teams). Here is how the approach usually looks like:

0. (the most painful step) Carefully parse all relevant documents into a structural representation that could be walked like a graph.

1. Extract relevant regulatory requirements using ontology-based classification and hybrid searches.

2. Break regulatory requirements into actionable analytical steps (turning a requirement into checklist/mini-pipeline)

3. Dynamically fetch and filter relevant company documents for each analytical step.

4. Analyze documents to generate intermediate compliance conclusions.

5. Iteratively validate and adjust analysis approach as needed.

6. Summarize findings clearly, embedding key references and preserving detailed reasoning separately.

7. Perform gap analysis, prioritizing compliance issues by urgency.

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

#222
post #175
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am more interested by the SaaS and the partner that did free reach?

Appreciate the interest! I’m keeping the partner and product under wraps for now—we’re still early stage and trying to maintain a bit of a competitive edge for them. I’ll happily share more once we’ve got a stronger lead. Hope you understand!

[deleted]

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

#224

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

It's kinda always been this way (I just turned to dust thinking about this, but I've been posting to it for like 18 years), but it's worse now.

r/programming is the only subreddit I regularly visit where there are a bunch of posts with 0 upvotes in the top 30. There are 16 right now on the Hot view.

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

#225

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

I'd wager that paying customers really don't care whether the images look AI-generated or not. They care much more about whether this product solves a problem they have. This is based on my 17 years of running first a successful B2C product then a successful B2B SaaS. Minor changes to one's home page tend to have little observable change in numbers of trial signups, the rate of conversion to paid customer, and so on.

> I'd wager that paying customers really don't care whether the images look AI-generated or not.

Maybe, but in a conversation about acquiring your first hundred users; you don't have a lot of word-of-mouth backing up the quality of your product. Your ability to effectively present your product will never be more important.

If it's important enough that your brochure website has images on it at all, then it's also important enough for them to not look like something you'd see slapped on a scam.

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the flashback! My first coding assignment in highschool was to build a camping management tool in Visual Basic. This is what got my into coding.

Good for you that it was just a coding assignment! I naively jumped into building this SaaS without realizing how many features a modern property management system actually needs :)

“Remember, we do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy” must be the little dark secret of half the Silicon Valley.

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

#229
post #149

For my SaaS, the first 100 users were almost too easy. I partnered with a company sitting on thousands of clients and offered my tool—free—to just 10% of their list. But I didn’t sell features. I asked what their clients hated most, then built a fix for that. One well-placed feature, and the doors swung open. Real users, real feedback—and we’re still building on that foundation. Then there’s my blog. A creative sandb…

Why did you write this using AI?

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

#230

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…

Would love to hear more about the postcards you sent. Did you send these to cold prospects? Did they work? What do they look like?
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