Not post on HN or Reddit, that's for sure.
Thank you. Agreed.
Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
51–60 of 157 posts
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#52I got my first 50,000 users in a few days by posting to reddit. And literally doing nothing else.
If you're trying this hard to market then you're probably making a bad product.
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#53My 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?
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#54It really depends on the business. But ideally you want to find a place where your ideal user is and promote there.
Some Example:
- If you are doing something entertainment based try posting branded content on Tumblr and promoting it through social media.
- If you are building a SaaS application for developers, try to speak at a conference.
Be sure not to fall into the trap of using users/straight growth as a vanity metric. Any website can get decent growth with a spammy strategy. You want quality users that will help grow the product.
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#55I was after people who used iTunes to listen to their music for Beathound (http://beathound.com), so I created a survey asking them about their listening habits and offered a $100 iTunes gift card as a reward in the hopes that folks filling it out would self-select based on how much they cared about the gift card. I posted a link to the survey in a handful of survey-oriented subreddits (/r/SampleSize is good) as well as some specific ones (like /r/music and /r/itunes).
I had them leave their email if they wanted to be notified of the survey results, and then when Beathound was ready to go I sent them a nice email that said "Thanks for filling out my survey! You didn't win the gift card, but [here] are the results, and [here] is what I built using them."
I had a terrible time giving the gift card to the person who won it, because they were in Australia and I'm in Canada - if you're going to give something away for your survey, make sure that you can easily do it internationally.
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#56http://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.
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#57It can be a working strategy if you're building a lifestyle business and don't care about hockey-stick growth or making millions. I'm an armchair entrepreneur for now (just getting that out of the way), but the advice I've seen over and over again can be generalized as: "Go out and talk to peope". You'll want to avoid starting with a sales pitch. Instead, talk to them about their business (or life) and see if your pr…
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.
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were numerous WP consultants when he did this. They were his target customers. He interviewed them about their pain points and found that their pain was in line with what he had in mind for WPEngine (easy, fast, secure, no-friction hosting for WP) He asked them to write him a check at the end of the interview. BAM, customers. (I make this sound easier than it is..)
Oh, thank you both for your quick responses. So he really did a good job to solve the pains of his potential customers. Now the question becomes: how WP got so many consultants in the first place? But that's out of the scope of the parent posting, it still within the scope of the OP though, :) Based on my experience, it's very hard for people to accept something new in the first place, for example, when WP was introd…
Well, arguably there was no established customer base for WPEngine before the launch. You either were a hobbyist and hosted for free on wordpress.com. Or you were a multi-billion dollar enterprise and used Automattic's premium hosting service (serious $$$).
OK. Thinking about it, there might have been a market there all along, but how come no one served it before? I mean Jason is crazy brilliant (talk to him, it's an experience!), but surely others could have come up with the same idea - right? I guess we'll never know, but my guess is that not too many people went out and searched for a thing like WPEngine before WPEngine
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#59I haven't done any promotion for http://asoftmurmur.com besides posting to reddit and HN, and it now has 400-500 regular daily users. It depends entirely on what type of product or service you're offering. Another key thing is to understand the community. There is radical cultural diversity between subreddits which manifests in very different reactions to self-promotion. It's essential to engage appropriately and res…
This is so good! Big fan!
Re: Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
#60I haven't done any promotion for http://asoftmurmur.com besides posting to reddit and HN, and it now has 400-500 regular daily users. It depends entirely on what type of product or service you're offering. Another key thing is to understand the community. There is radical cultural diversity between subreddits which manifests in very different reactions to self-promotion. It's essential to engage appropriately and res…
Oh man, I love this. I've been using it since you've posted to HN. For the life of me, though, I haven't been able to remember the name the last couple time's I've wanted it (and my bookmarks are horrendously disorganized at the moment), and googling different iterations of "white noise generator sliders people birds rain" didn't yield success. I need to stash this away somewhere I won't lose it...
Hey, thanks!
I have actually wondered about the name thing. It is a little whimsical, and I guess it would be easy to mix up with lots of similar descriptions like "a quiet buzz" or "a gentle burble". From that perspective, it might have been better to choose something more memorable.
The site won't rank well in google for descriptive terms because it doesn't contain a lot of text. Even for terms it does contain, it doesn't do very well (e.g. it ranks at ~20 for "ambient noise" in google US). I haven't worried about that so far because the large majority of the traffic is direct, social or for the exact term "a soft murmur".