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Ask HN: I built it and nobody came. What got you your first users?
31–40 of 41 posts
Re: Ask HN: I built it and nobody came. What got you your first users?
#32I am also in a similar situation. This is something I try to learn. Those are some sources that has been useful to me: - How to get your 100 users. Sam Altman. Oct 3, 2024. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da7z-RcS6dM - 50 Founders Share How They Got Their First Customers. YCombinator. Aug 9, 2023. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZp5j5hvn9I - How to Get Your First 10 Customers. YCombinator. Jun 22, 2026. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FBi…
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Re: Ask HN: I built it and nobody came. What got you your first users?
#33Reddit has a magic quality to it. There are a ton of groups. Some of the groups I have used so far are Betatesters, Buildinpublic, Earlystageapps, Indiehackers, Sideproject, Startup Ideas, Y Combinator. There are also specific groups like Public Domain and Borges which I posted my app to. Some of the other social media Like LinkedIn and here have helped as well.
Thanks, saving this list. So it's a bit chicken-and-egg — need karma to post, need to post to get karma. Guessing the honest answer is to go comment like a normal person for a while first. -Chris
A lot of sites require you to wait a bit before doing anything. Metafilter makes you wait a week before posting for example. They want long term people.
Re: Ask HN: I built it and nobody came. What got you your first users?
#34[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: I built it and nobody came. What got you your first users?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, saving this list. So it's a bit chicken-and-egg — need karma to post, need to post to get karma. Guessing the honest answer is to go comment like a normal person for a while first. -Chris
A lot of sites require you to wait a bit before doing anything. Metafilter makes you wait a week before posting for example. They want long term people.
I switched to just commenting over the last few days instead of posting. Honestly, getting more out of it than the posts ever gave me.
-Chris
Re: Ask HN: I built it and nobody came. What got you your first users?
#36I once had this diff tool that blew up in popularity. It had features users wanted that did not exist before. Its popularity was all word of mouth spreading among developer tools. The real shock was when I joined Bank of America in 2017 and found a ton of people there using it either directly or embedded in some other tool.
Re: Ask HN: I built it and nobody came. What got you your first users?
#37If you built this for yourself, then you are your entire market. Either you like it and it is good, or you don't and it is not. But if you built this to sell to others, you skipped the most important step: Researching the market to know what people want. Your first users come from your research - you call the people who you talked to and say: "I built it." If you skipped that step, you are just throwing spaghetti aga…
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Re: Ask HN: I built it and nobody came. What got you your first users?
#38I am a Developer and I am building projects for 8 years already - they kinda all failed but every failure made me learn very important things. Currently I am again onto a new project and I got ~130 users now after 9 days - basically my biggest success I ever made so far.
What worked for me is the following:
1. Don't build everything before it is not really validated, you're wasting time. Maybe your idea sounds good in your head, but is it really solving any issues? You need to find out if there is actually really a demand for it.
2. I've launched my Idea as a closed beta first and I searched for high intend users, this means I searched online where my target audience actually complains about the problem I think my app solves. So a closed beta was my first approach to test if anyone would even have interest to join and I could test my apps core loop if it works.
3. The closed beta validated that the Idea could work but still the product is not validated, you have no Idea from a few closed beta users if they'd be ready to actually pay for it - so you either ask the few closed beta users in a google form poll or something equal if they would pay for any specific features and in general you ask for feedback there. I did it a bit different though, but it brought me to step 4
4. If you got that far, you should open your beta to get more users. For me a lot of my target audience is actually on reddit. I found many extremely relevant subreddits. It was still very difficult there, replies to pain signals converted extremely bad. I found some subreddits that allowed me to post about my project and just explain the idea - it wasn't really written like a pitch, I just asked people if they would use something I've built and I basically just explained the Idea - some posts alone brought me like 40+ users in 2 days - it is not much for some people who are extremely successful, but for me this was insanely much. I never managed this before with any project from the past.
5. You have to be dead honest with yourself and sometimes just shut down your own projects early, try not to be sad about it, you have to learn about every project you've tried what you did wrong and what you could do better next time. I am still unsure about my project as well, if it really pops off.
I wish you good luck though!
If you're curious, this is my current project https://valuepair.app
Re: Ask HN: I built it and nobody came. What got you your first users?
#39I am a Developer and I am building projects for 8 years already - they kinda all failed but every failure made me learn very important things. Currently I am again onto a new project and I got ~130 users now after 9 days - basically my biggest success I ever made so far. What worked for me is the following: 1. Don't build everything before it is not really validated, you're wasting time. Maybe your idea sounds good i…
Congrats on the 130, that's a real result. Point 2 is the one I skipped hardest. I never went looking for where people already complain about the problem, I just assumed my own itch and pain was everyone's.
-Chris
Re: Ask HN: I built it and nobody came. What got you your first users?
#40I once had this diff tool that blew up in popularity. It had features users wanted that did not exist before. Its popularity was all word of mouth spreading among developer tools. The real shock was when I joined Bank of America in 2017 and found a ton of people there using it either directly or embedded in some other tool.
Thats WILD! I can only hope to have half that level of success. But honestly, if not...This has been a fun and great learning experience for me.
-Chris