Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

Lots of people come up with a good idea for a product, launch, then wonder where to get users. "Start with the market, instead," evolves their consciousness. I offer a different approach: start with the customer acquisition strategy and then build your product.

1) Build a landing page describing the problem and your solution, in terms of emotional value benefits

2) Drive paid traffic to the landing page. Get at least 20 signups. Boom, you're now at 20 users. Paid traffic = Pay Per Click ads. Try Facebook, Reddit, Quora, Google AdWords.

3) Build the thing. Write an email to your list describing the process of how you built the thing and how you found their names.

4) Cross post that very same narrative to discussion forums: Facebook, HN, Reddits, Indie Hackers[forum], wherever.

5) Search on google for one of those "web app directories" or "new startup directories". Block off two hours and painstakingly submit your app to every one.

6) Look for podcasts in your niche. Email all of them and invite yourself on as a guest

7) Look for influencers in your niche. Email all of them and ask them if they'd like a complimentary copy of your product (access to your webapp, etc) in exchange for a testimonial. If the influencers are all pay-to-play, find people who are active but on the verge of influencer status.

8) Send to your friends and family.

9) Post an ad for a usability test on Craigslist. You'll learn a ton and maybe get some quality users.

10) Post a Delighted.com or similar Net Promoter Score survey to your user base. You'll find the "holes" in your bucket that are causing you to leak users rather than compound them.

your landing page needs some work.. you're overflowing and the viewport isn't set correctly for mobile.

your buttons also need some left and right padding. my company would love to help put your best face forward..

My first customers came from emailing a discussion list for Photoshop plug-in developers (since I also make Photoshop plug-ins). I didn't get sales from that email, but one of those developers mentioned my product in their own email newsletter to 10,000+ subscribers, and that is where my first sales came from.

The beta testing strategy others have mentioned also worked for me. But instead of recruiting from beta directories, I asked people in my target market (so, asking for beta testers on Photoshop user forums). I put a long beta signup form/survey on my website, partly to learn about my potential customers, but also to weed out people who wouldn't give detailed feedback.

My best growth hack was giving those beta testers a discount code / link to share with their friends at launch. That encouraged them to talk about my software (and talk about the secret project they'd been helping with!) with their own communities. My beta testers also got a credit in the About box. I wish I could claim it was a carefully constructed marketing strategy, but I'd just thought it was a nice way to thank testers, and it turned out to also gain traction.

I wrote about my experiences running an early beta test, but it's from 2004 so it's highly embarrassing and from a pre-Facebook pre-Reddit era:

https://www.namesuppressed.com/syneryder/2004/betapostmortem...

> I am just wondering if anyone will disclose their current killer acquisition hacks.

I see this attitude all the time. Why are people so worried? The fear is this weird chain of reasoning: As soon as you say it tons of people will automatically conclude it is a good idea -> tons of them will be in a position to execute it -> people will flood to the strategy and somehow take away the returns because it is a zero-sum game.

But I find that for every person on HN who automatically concludes something is a good idea, there is another one who disagrees. Second, not everyone is in a position where someone's genius growth hack is even applicable. Third, some of these strategies would still work even if tons of people used them, such as "do things that don't scale." The point is that they are localized.

I guess you can't rule it out, but the chances seem smaller than the number of worriers suggests.

Until you've actually done that ;)