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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?

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait... not having spelling errors is now a mark of AI? Am I the only person who proofreads emails anymore?

> Wait... not having spelling errors is now a mark of AI? When you output long blog articles more than daily, it is. Proofreading takes time, and someone who cares enough to proofread will probably care enough to put in more time on other things that an LLM wouldn't care about (like information density, as noted in another comment; or editing after the fact to improve the overall structure; or injecting idiosyncratic…

Please take no offense—I genuinely want to understand. I agree that my blog needs work, especially with less fluff and more value—i'm working on that.

I guess where I’m coming from is this: why is it assumed that using tools like AI or Grammarly takes away from the creative process? For me, they speed up the mechanical side of things—grammar, flow, even structure—so I can spend more time on ideas, storytelling, informing, or just getting unblocked.

I do get frustrated when ChatGPT changes my wording or shifts the meaning of what I’m trying to say. It can definitely throw a wrench into the overall story. But in those cases, I rephrase my prompt, asking it not to touch the narrative or my word choices, just to act like a word processor on steroids or an expert editor.

I’m not saying these tools replace a good human editor—far from it. If I ever get to the point where I can work with a real editor or proof reader and so on, I’d choose the human every time. But until then, these tools help me keep the momentum going—and I don’t see that as a lack of care.

On the contrary, it often takes me more time to get the output right—because I’m trying to make sure it still reflects exactly what I want to say and express.

Maybe it’s just a different kind of process?

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

#323
post #90

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 especial…

Kudos, this looks like a great product. I'm going to try it out today. Is there a reason why you only consume OSV and not CVE data?

We felt that OSV schema is designed with security tooling and automation as primary design goal. Specifically for our use-case, it captures the package name and versions using standardised schema. Also we saw adoption of OSV by package ecosystems like Python, Go etc.

While CVE is still the largest database of vulnerabilities, we felt OSV is good enough to identify most recent vulnerabilities

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

#324
post #90

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 especial…

What's your approach with getting users for your OSS product?

Build in public really. Just talk about what we are building, get feedback, bug reports etc. from users. When major security issues happen related to our domain e.g. xz or tj-actions/changed-files, we either write about how our tool can mitigate the risk or research on how to enhance our tool to handle the risk and then talk about it publicly.

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

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

B2B and SAAS are not mutually exclusive though, are they?

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

#327
post #285
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://…

> I ended up turning that process into its own product: https://sparkflow.ai/ That implies that the product is ready, which it does not seem to be? The product does seem interesting, what do you do to differentiate yourself from different offerings that do basically the same? E.g. you mention Discord on the website - are you finding all the relevant discord channels for me, or do I have to join them myself, and you j…

Hi. I should have phrased it differently as I'm not totally ready yet (as you rightly pointed out).

Yes, I find the discussions, let you engage with them trough the app, and monitor replies.

Do you mind sharing the competition you're referring to? I've not found any similar solution so far. Thanks

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

#328

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

This looks really interesting! Optimisation problems like this are so much fun to solve and seem like such a natural fit for the SaaS model. Could you give more of an idea about how much it "took off"? Based on earlier comments of yours, it seems that you have some paying customers. Has it grown very gradually? Do you have much churn? Also curious how you have been splitting your time between algorithm development fo…

I guess i am around 150 MRR level or less perhaps. So it pays the costs and leaves me some money and I can run it forever given the condition satisfied.

I have spent countless months on the algorithm earlier. It improved from trash to something commercially reasonable gradually, it was more like getting stuck for a while then getting small break throughs.

My biggest mistake was changing my domain perhaps. Earlier it was bindrake.com Then I added 3d pack.ing and due to complexity of canonical pages google kicked me out.

Ironically recently I get contacted by a client and they said “you don’t exist on google but we found you from ChatGPT”

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

#329

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…

I had face to face meetings with some clients. Well to be fair 3d packing is also relatively competed area there are few popular products. Is my product better than them for some aspects yes. Hard to say what is wrong but perhaps me or the product isn’t seriously taken, yet it does add real value by solving a real problem by some means better than others.
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