We had a idea for a group messenger tool to bridge teams and their customers (http://peer.im). Then we signed up an advisor to help us on sales and marketing. His is a sales director so he started used this tool in his team. Then we had a media press covered which brings us several dozen of real users who can give us feedback and iterate on features.
Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
141–150 of 157 posts
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#142What's your product and who is your target user? Where do they spend their time? LinkedIn, Reddit, and HN won't help if you're trying to reach, for example, teenage girls. I collected some thoughts on this that you might find helpful: http://lgilchrist.github.io/how_to_get_your_first_100_users/ TL:DR; - get a splash page up and start collecting emails - guest blog - particularly in places you know your would-be-users…
Great resource and some great ideas and reminders - I've bookmarked this for later!
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#143If you have a project associated with your startup, you can launch it on Kickstarter and get both users and money. That's what I did for Learneroo.com.
Hoe did you find the Kickstarter experience in terms of getting traction and interest with users? Did you promote the Kickstarter campaign elsewhere too?
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#144This is going to sound overly reductive, but I promise it's not: 1) What existing solution do you believe your product (or prospective product) is better than? 2) Where can you find a critical mass of people who use the existing solution? 3) Go there. Talk to them. Show them your product. Now, none of this is trivial. First, because assuming you're operating lean, you start with no real clue if you're "better" than a…
good advice. Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#145Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#146One cool technique I saw recently (which isn't always applicable) is from a talk by Jason Cohen: http://vimeo.com/74338272 (around minute 7) In a nutshell when he was building WPEngine he went to LinkedIn and found folks who were Wordpress consultants. He then sent them a follow email and said he's building a product for "folks like you and would love to talk to you about your pains, needs, etc" (customer development…
Thanks this is a great idea!
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#147Quick background on Collabo (www.letscollabo.com) for some context - we're a bootstrapped startup aimed at creating a safe environment for freelancers, solopreneurs, and work-from-homers to video chat about anything they want. No selling, just camaraderie. We're very much in the P/M fit stage and wanted to test our theories that we can build and sustain and engaged community of peers willing to share/learn/give/seek with each other. So, here's what we did to get our first 100:
1. When users sign up for our email drip campaign (which consists of drive-to's for our blog), they also receive an invite to a private Facebook Group. We manually approve every person in the Group, and use the Group to learn about our customers, connect them with each other, survey new ideas, and build a sense of community. The Group has been wildly key to our building process. We're seeing about 55-60% of our email sign-ups join the Group, with about 20% being active participants.
2. My co-founder and I put out an offer to all our customers/readers to meet us for a cup of coffee, on us. We're in Portland and NYC, so only for those folks.
3. Sent personal emails to our networks promoting Collabo and asking them for feedback.
4. I manually scraped the follower lists of our competitors and industry big dogs on Twitter and followed them, which yielded some really good results, mostly in terms of gaining targeted followers.
5. Lots of time spent offering advice and sharing stories/knowledge on communities like r/startups and r/freelance.
6. In the process of guest blogging on sites that serve our niche market.
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#148Similar to what others have said...when I setup my DJ mixes website for electronic dance music back in 2008 (http://www.house-mixes.com), I literally jumped on to like-minded forums asking if people would be willing to trial it out, there was only a handful of competitors at the time which helped I suppose, but today we have over 550,000 registered users and an extremely active site.
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
If appropriate, give the the elevator pitch and a 1min demo on your live product. I want to point out the the above snippet assumes/implies a fairly deep knowledge of your intended audience, the problem space you are working in and several other things, any one of which might be the real problem as to why the OP is not getting traction. Not a criticism. Just ...an elaboration, I guess.
I think if you want to be successful you need to have good knowledge about your audience. Maybe not when you are first starting out, but you should when you have a product to sell. You won't be a good golf club salesman if you know absolutely nothing about golf.
That's part of my point. We don't know where the OP is coming from though in terms of how well he/she knows the problem space, etc. If they don't know it well enough, perhaps pointing this out will help them.
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think what he's getting at is that a fairly large problem with starting a start-up is that you don't know if your product or service has a market in the first place. If you start with a fresh idea, then you have to test and discover if what you are offering is viable. By taking an existing product or service, and improving upon it, that entire first phase of discovery is done for you. That's why most new businesses…
sure - the resources, or the vision.
One of the biggest advantages some companies have, is having one or more people who can, kinda, SEE the future, without needing to focus group everything.
An ability to intuit what's right - what'll work - without needing to test and prove every hypothesis (expensive), or worse: launch a product that falls flat (crazy expensive). It's definitely something some people are better at than others. Jobs was obviously a total pro. Gates was alright. Ballmer sucks at it.
A lot of that is taste. Taste mixed with direction.