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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#61

Post by mrborgen »

A few years ago I started a norwegian Fiverr.com clone, called Mikrojobb.no. We got our first 100 users by:

1. Telling all of our friends to create accounts and post some 'gigs', so the site didnt look like a ghost town.

2. Going to various forums for bloggers, web developers, part-time entrepreneurs etc and asking them for feedback. (In other word, finding communities that we thought would use the site and asking them for feedback.)

3. Pushing some press releases to local news sites.

Quite straightforward.

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

#62

Post by morisy »

30% from mailing lists where I was already an active member. 30% direct referrals from people I knew in field. 30% referrals from when I would find people not interested in product, and ask them if they knew anyone who was interested. 10% media coverage of product.

Super labor intensive.

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

#63

Post by gabemart »

basicallydan wrote: post #48
gabemart wrote: post #42

I 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, this is cool. There are lots of things like your app out there but this is the best implementation I've seen so far. Great work!

Thanks very much! It's still a big novelty and great pleasure for me to hear positive feedback. I really appreciate it.

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

#64

Post by shazow »

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 1,000 which will probably involve some "real press coverage" and some reviews on niche blogs or guest posts. This part has been the hardest for me and would love any advice/intros.

--

[0] Briefmetrics [https://briefmetrics.com/], email summaries of your Google Analytics.

[1] Show HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641385], which annoyingly got flagged pretty early on and never got any traction. Considering doing another Show HN, but kind of worried about annoying the HN hivemind.

[2] Show Lobsters [https://lobste.rs/s/ppcmud/show_lobsters_i_built_briefmetric...], some good feedback, this went as well as I could have hoped for the size of the audience. Been really enjoying the Lobsters community.

[3] Show Reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/analytics/comments/1uk9na/briefmetri...] Got a chunk of visitors, but all the comments were from people I knew so the feedback was a bit of an echochamber.

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

#65

Post by gedrap »

gabemart wrote: post #42

I 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…

>>> It depends entirely on what type of product or service you're offering.

And the luck/chance involved :) basically, the votes a new link gets in first 30mins largely decides whether it will make to front page or not. More specifically, the first upvote because then social proof kicks in (hey it must be good if someone liked it).

So while posting to HN/Reddit might help to kick in, I would take it more as 'good if it hits, fine if it doesn't'.

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

#66

Post by mgl »

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?

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

#67

Post by notastartup »

eli wrote: post #41

This is almost the exact same question as this front page post from an hour earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7248460 In essence: Go where your users hang out. With few exceptions, this is probably NOT the same place as where startup geeks hang out. One example: my startup has a website for the Energy & Utilities industry. We got a bunch of early users by forming a partnership with a trade organization fo…

how did you manage to form a partnership with the trade organization? step by step approach?

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

#68

Post by gabemart »

gedrap wrote: post #65
gabemart wrote: post #42

I 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…

>>> It depends entirely on what type of product or service you're offering. And the luck/chance involved :) basically, the votes a new link gets in first 30mins largely decides whether it will make to front page or not. More specifically, the first upvote because then social proof kicks in (hey it must be good if someone liked it). So while posting to HN/Reddit might help to kick in, I would take it more as 'good if…

Sure. I didn't mean to suggest that if your product is a good fit it will definitely get a lot of traffic. Just that, if your product isn't a good fit, it definitely won't get a lot of traffic.

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

#69

Post by 1757 »

gabemart wrote: post #42

I 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…

Your site is great!

To add similar services I've been using for quite a while:

http://www.noisli.com/ (very nice UI with changing background colour, a distration free editor and so on)

http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/ (quite professional)

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

#70

Post by gabemart »

_g2lm wrote: post #44
gabemart wrote: post #42

I 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…

I have to say, that's probably partly because you actually have a good product. Added to my bookmarks. I've been looking for something like this for years. Thanks for making it!

Thanks very much for using it! I built it because I wanted it to exist. I got tired of jury rigging three instances of VLC together on my laptop every time I wanted some background noise.
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