We had a successful kickstarter campaign followed by having open sourced the project from the start helped a ton.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-phot...
Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?
11–20 of 73 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?
#12[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?
#13We had the benefit of building products for a market that was highly active on Twitter. That and two popular HN posts bootstrapped both of my current company's products. I owe a ton to HN, but even more to Twitter.
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?
#14For Rollbar (http://rollbar.com) it's been a fairly random mix: friends, twitter, reddit ads, sponsoring the Node Knockout, the occasional HN comment, and a surprising amount of word of mouth. More recently we've done a bit of PR but it hasn't been targeted at customers.
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?
#15I looked online for people who I wanted to be our early users, then emailed everyone with a personalized message. Surprisingly, when you are honest with people and ask them to join something that would benefit them, it's possible to get a lot of interest. Took some time though, a lot of time.
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?
#16We had the benefit of building products for a market that was highly active on Twitter. That and two popular HN posts bootstrapped both of my current company's products. I owe a ton to HN, but even more to Twitter.
This is really interesting. Some friends and I had trouble getting leads on who to "sell" our prototype to, and we had the thought that it may be an even more legitimate problem than the one we were previously trying to solve.
Can you comment more on the sell process to individual users with HN and Twitter: did you find and go after people that tweeted or posted about related topics to your products, or look for people that might want your products, or did you let them come to you through your posts or tweets?
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?
#17Three months before the MVP, I started a blog and established myself as 'somebody' for data analytics in the target domain. Started participating in online forums and commenting on other blog posts relevant to the target domain, specifically focusing on data analytics.
By the time, I launched MVP, influentials in the domain were aware of me. In a few months since launch, I gained several hundred registered users through these activities ... not a single penny spent on ads or to generate traffic.
Now I am working on figuring out how to generate revenue ...
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?
#18We had the benefit of building products for a market that was highly active on Twitter. That and two popular HN posts bootstrapped both of my current company's products. I owe a ton to HN, but even more to Twitter.
This is really interesting. Some friends and I had trouble getting leads on who to "sell" our prototype to, and we had the thought that it may be an even more legitimate problem than the one we were previously trying to solve. Can you comment more on the sell process to individual users with HN and Twitter: did you find and go after people that tweeted or posted about related topics to your products, or look for peop…
The residual activity on Twitter from a #1 HN post is where we focused our energy, mainly by retweeting, engaging, following, etc. I think these HN posts also helped build our SEO and especially as some bloggers wrote about their experiences with our products.
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?
#19I looked online for people who I wanted to be our early users, then emailed everyone with a personalized message. Surprisingly, when you are honest with people and ask them to join something that would benefit them, it's possible to get a lot of interest. Took some time though, a lot of time.
I think that with most products, there are at least some people for whom trying out the product would be a win-win. The issue is finding those people.
Your comment is really validating; thanks for your input!
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?
#20I tried a Show HN for one of my projects. It's now dead. For my latest, Fork the Cookbook ( http://forkthecookbook.com ) I actually approached bloggers and talked to them, one by one. It's a tedious task, but I absolutely refuse to buy ads except for quick tests.
I'm sorry, but reading "I tried a Show HN for one of my projects. It's now dead." made me laugh so hard I spit out my tea.
You owe me new boxers, sir. And some burn cream.