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Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?

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Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?

#71

Post by Jasber »

speakme wrote: post #53
Jasber wrote: post #38

My friend and I just started a site to help do this: http://leaklist.org/ It's super early, but we've already gotten 500 users who are looking to beta test software and we've already started sending out codes. Our goal is to make it the best platform for developers to get their first 100 users and the best place for users to get early & free access to awesome apps. If you're interested please sign up either as a user…

cool concept. Is it meant just for games and just mobile? Would your customers be interested in beta testing a web-based social network?

Right now just games and mobile but the focus is to open up other categories/platforms as we hit critical mass.

Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?

#72

Post by shazow »

mgl wrote: post #66
shazow wrote: post #64

For Briefmetrics[0], first 10 users were basically the people I was building the product for. About half of those immediately and enthusiastically converted to paying customers. The next 100 were friends, people who follow me on Twitter/Facebook, and Show HN[1]/Show Lobsters[2]/Show Reddit[3]. Got a few more paid customers from this segment but the conversion rate was not great at all. Now I'm working on the next 1,0…

How would you describe your actual paying client?

How do you mean? My target customer audience?

Right now it falls into two groups across two dimensions:

1a. Small-medium businesses

1b. Individuals with many web projects

2a. Already use the Google Analytics frontend regularly but feel that this recurring process is too cumbersome (often 20-40 clicks per property) and would rather have email reports to save time/effort.

2b. Have GA and like the idea of it, but never remember to check it regularly so they miss out on the value of analytics unless they get regular email reports.

Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?

#73

Post by mgl »

shazow wrote: post #72
mgl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you describe your actual paying client?

How do you mean? My target customer audience? Right now it falls into two groups across two dimensions: 1a. Small-medium businesses 1b. Individuals with many web projects 2a. Already use the Google Analytics frontend regularly but feel that this recurring process is too cumbersome (often 20-40 clicks per property) and would rather have email reports to save time/effort. 2b. Have GA and like the idea of it, but never…

You should find people with such problems on Digital Point, Flippa and obviously here.

Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?

#74

Post by shazow »

mgl wrote: post #73
shazow wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you mean? My target customer audience? Right now it falls into two groups across two dimensions: 1a. Small-medium businesses 1b. Individuals with many web projects 2a. Already use the Google Analytics frontend regularly but feel that this recurring process is too cumbersome (often 20-40 clicks per property) and would rather have email reports to save time/effort. 2b. Have GA and like the idea of it, but never…

You should find people with such problems on Digital Point, Flippa and obviously here.

Digital Point is a great lead, thanks!

Why do you think Flippa? I imagine people looking to get rid of their property for money are less likely to pay to monitor its analytics? Then again, it could be a good audience for people who own multiple properties.

Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?

#75

Post by cl8ton »

I tried many options to get to our first 100 users.

Tech Blogs (they thought we were to boring to cover)

HN (no interest)

Reddit (no interest)

Ad Words (I think I sucked at it)

So I shrugged and kept improving then one day out of the blue, a big Mommy blog covered us for ways to keep up to date on coupons.

This one coverage leads to our first 200 users, and then another blog (MakeUseOf) covered us, which then lead to other industry specific blogs to cover us. Now we are getting 70+ new accounts a day and have over 120k users.

My advice (if the OP is asking) would be to target industry specific blogs/sites that would find your product useful and covers news that relates to your websites offerings, that is what I do now.

Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?

#76

Post by muratmutlu »

speakme wrote: post #56
muratmutlu wrote: post #8

http://betali.st/ got us our first 300 users for http://www.marvelapp.com , it's free to submit, I recommend it, great way to get momentum. To get our first 1000 I used a combination of Twitter, LinkedIn Groups and my own blog and newsletter

How long was the turnaround between submitting to betali.st and getting featured? I've heard some people submit just a few days before going live, so by the time users get invites it's still fresh in their minds.

Actually for us it was pretty long (which I don't recommend). I think what you suggested is a much better strategy.

I think it was around 3 months so it wasn't as fresh but what I did was go through email addresses one by one, picked out the companies that sounded the most promising and opened up a dialogue to get those guys in early.

Then kept the other guys informed to try and keep them excited. Although if I would have done it just before launching I would have saved a lot of effort.

Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?

#77

Post by mgl »

shazow wrote: post #74
mgl wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should find people with such problems on Digital Point, Flippa and obviously here.

Digital Point is a great lead, thanks! Why do you think Flippa? I imagine people looking to get rid of their property for money are less likely to pay to monitor its analytics? Then again, it could be a good audience for people who own multiple properties.

Exactly, I guess a solid number of Flippa users own multiple websites for profit, so they should be interested in tight control of stats. You may also e.g. post a sell offer for your web app and a) a number of your target clients will see your pitch, b) you may end with a nice exit at an early stage, so only good things may happen! ;)

Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?

#78

Post by agilebyte »

itengelhardt wrote: post #50
agilebyte wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you write the articles, do you SEO on questions that people may ask in their searches or just write general articles not necessarily pushing your product?

I do both. Sometimes I look for long tail keywords (< 200 local exact match searches in Google's Keyword Planner tool). I then write mildly optimized posts for that. On other days I am like "that should be an interesting topic and I want to write about it". When I do this I don't even think about SEO.

Thank you Christoph and best of luck to you and your projects.
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