Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users? - karthiksk2012
======
Doches
I’ll second the PG advice: do things that don’t scale is by far the most
effective tool I’ve found for finding _and keeping_ users. I’m building small-
business tools for fringe retail [0] as a side-project, and those users are
usually more than willing to at least investigate new apps if they even have a
chance of solving some real problem their business faces. Emailing them
personally with a pitch based on a few minute’s research into their business
reliably generates leads — and meticulous hand-holding through the first few
weeks usually convinces them to stick around.

People are used to paying for software from Intuit or Microsoft or whatever;
offering to build (tiny! like, 5-minute one-offs!) features _just for them_
sort of blows their minds. And those features almost always make the product
better, usually in a way that I would never have thought of.

I’ve also had pretty great success with an old-school hack: I use an affiliate
marketing scheme to turn our most enthusiastic users into mini sales reps. For
every new customer they can sign up that converts, I credit their account with
a few free months. It totally won’t scale, but it helps me grow into markets
where I can’t physically travel out and do sales in person.

[0] [https://quailhq.com](https://quailhq.com)

~~~
dkarl
_offering to build (tiny! like, 5-minute one-offs!) features _just for them_
sort of blows their minds_

How did you manage to do that without making it impossible to add major new
functionality to your app? Did you nail the basic functionality of the app
from the starting gate and go straight into maintenance/feature-tweaking mode?

 _meticulous hand-holding through the first few weeks usually convinces them
to stick around_

This must have created some awfully high expectations from users, which is a
double-edged sword. Were you able to keep up with expectations when you got
enough users to sustain the business?

~~~
cmorelli
_offering to build (tiny! like, 5-minute one-offs!) features _just for them_
sort of blows their minds_

It seems worth noting that this can also be a dangerous strategy. It's really
easy to fall into the trap of giving each customer exactly what they ask for,
rather than learning what they actually need. If gone unchecked, this is the
sort of product strategy that easily leads to disastrous results for product
usability and experience.

This isn't to say that as a business you're always (or ever) better at knowing
what your customers want than the customer is; but you are in a strategic
position to be able to understand what similar customers are asking for, and
distill that down to the core problem that needs to be solved.

I'm sure this isn't the extent that the original comment was aiming for, but
it felt worth expanding on this since the whole topic is about early products
getting users. A key component of that is ensuring you're building a product
that people want to use.

~~~
tuddman
> It's really easy to fall into the trap of giving each customer exactly what
> they ask for ... this is the sort of product strategy that easily leads to
> disastrous results.

do you know any product/company examples where this was/is the case?

~~~
cmorelli
See aianus response for some examples, I would also add:

\- Windows Mobile (pre WP8): Customers may have asked for a mobile computer,
but most did not actually want a weak version of their computer crammed onto a
tiny screen. Apple and Google helpfully showed them what customers actually
wanted with iOS and Android.

\- Blockbuster: Customers may have asked for a large selection of movies for
rent, but they didn't want a physical location they could drive to and browse
through. Netflix gave people a new option (multiple new options)

\- MySpace: "Customers" may have asked for customized/personalized profiles,
but they didn't mean a dumping ground of random html and css that eliminates
any sense of uniformity, brand, identity, etc. Facebook gave people the
personal touch they actually wanted without compromising the experience.

Now, these are colossal failures, and we can endlessly debate whether you
believe these failures were the deciding factor in their respective products.
But I think we can probably agree that, at the very least, failure to cater to
the actual customer need (instead of what they simply ask for) was a major
flaw in all of these cases. And these are just a few examples.

Also, I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but you cut my quote at an
interesting spot. I'm not trying to suggest that a business should not cater
to its customers' requests. Rather, that it should not do so at the expense of
trying to understand the need behind the request.

------
gargarplex
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.

~~~
Spivak
I would have to strongly recommend against number eight. It's almost
impossible to be done tactfully and it's even harder to avoid the appearance
of using your friends.

If I built something cool that I genuinely believed one of my friends would
find useful then I would wait for them to seek me out with their problem and
just give them perpetual free use with no strings attached and write it off as
marketing.

~~~
K0balt
Must depend on your relationship culture. My friends and family would be
insulted if I didn't try my product out on them first.

------
SyneRyder
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...](https://www.namesuppressed.com/syneryder/2004/betapostmortem.shtml)

------
welanes
1\. I scoured the reviews of similar apps and listed the main feature requests
that were being stonewalled and implemented them.

2\. I then set up keyword alerts for Reddit and Twitter and when somebody
mentioned [similar app] I popped in and suggested they try Lanes which, btw,
has _feature [similar app] has not implemented_.

3\. I got lucky^. Photos of Lanes began appearing on Tumblr blogs (the
#studyblr community) and readers began asking 'what's that website on your
laptop'. Queue, lotsa signups.

4\. The next 100: I listened to the first 100, intently.

^Of course that stroke of luck would never had transpired had step 1 not
helped me figure out how to add value.

The app is [https://lanes.io](https://lanes.io)

~~~
codingdave
As a side note to #2, I tend to monitor reddit for people who do that in
response to my stuff...I watch discussions on reddit, and when people pop on
just to pimp their own competitive products, I remind them via links to
reddiquette that such behavior is not appropriate. Reddit is a funny place in
that they'll stick with their own, and wait for you to implement a feature vs.
jump to someone they think is on reddit solely to market their own product.

Of course, I've also found reddit traffic to be fairly worthless. They show
up. They don't buy.

~~~
welanes
Yes, I should have stipulated you're not simply chasing every mention of a
competitor and shouting 'me too'. That's lame, and - as you mention - mostly
worthless.

Rather you're keeping an eye on the convo so that should somebody's point of
frustration intersect with your solution you can let them know and see if they
agree.

------
mobitar
Getting the first 100 users has actually been the easiest part of the process.
It's getting 100 daily new users that's really hard.

For Standard Notes[0], here's what I did:

1\. Comment on privacy related HN posts about a privacy-focused notes app.
That would have gotten me 40-50 users.

2\. Write articles[1] on encryption/privacy/webdev. Some of them made it to
frontpage HN, some didn't. That might have gotten me to 500 users.

3\. Repeat. Tirelessly. Painstakingly. Depressingly. Just keep going doing
small things every day. Eventually they start to compound.

[0]: [https://standardnotes.org](https://standardnotes.org)

[1]: [https://journal.standardnotes.org](https://journal.standardnotes.org)

~~~
abetusk
This seems great. I'm a big fan of open source but I often hear criticisms
from people who are deathly afraid that they can't make money if their source
is libre.

Do you have anything to say about the difficulties of running an open source
shop? Do you worry about competitors taking your code and standing up their
own sites?

~~~
mobitar
Honestly the app being open source is the least of my worries. The source code
isn't the hardest part of running this operation. It's really the persistence
in keeping going every day, even though some weeks you may see so little
results. That's a very hard thing to do, and I doubt someone else will have
that same passion with something they didn't make themselves. Other than that,
the brand is more important than the code. You can copy the app but you can't
copy the message in an authentic way.

------
lauriswtf
I've launched a couple of startups, and usually the combinations of these
yield the best results -> word of mouth, reddit comments/posts, quora answers,
hackernews posts/comments, comments on top SERPs, twitter posts + following
leads, get listed on comparison/review sites or blog posts.

Of course comment when relevant, offer something useful and contribute to the
discussion. Don't just spam link to your startup.

------
_d8fd
tl;dr -- offer customers something they can't buy at a price their willing to
pay.

My personal, non-software example was to identify an untapped opportunity in
my field, technical recruiting. My clients had 20 to 100 employees, no
internal technical recruiter, had already recruited their core team, has run
out of organically generated people to interview, and had raised a Series B or
later in funding. In 2010, the only options available to them were contingency
recruiters, contract recruiters who wanted 6 to 12 month full time contracts,
and inexperienced admin staff (aka not experienced technical recruiters).

After learning that it super competitive to sell traditional recruiting
services to my clients, I decided to develop a workflow that allowed me to
offer them part-time hourly recruiting with no long term commitment. Typically
this started off as 10 to 30 hours a week with no commitment (aka fire me at
any time). This model worked great, and in 2 years I scaled from just me
billing 30 hours per week with one client to 15 people (part time & full time)
billing several hundred hours per week.

Service business are not software businesses, but they do share at least one
thing in common; selling a product or service customers need & can't buy in an
industry you understand is a heck of a lot easier than trying to make
something up from scratch.

Good luck!

</rant>

~~~
cylinder
Wow that is really interesting, how did you manage to sell them a paid
(hourly) service when as you said they had firms knocking down their door
doing it on contingency?

~~~
smaddox
Not the OP, but commission-based recruiting seems to incentivise the wrong
kind of recruiting, i.e. "find someone we can shove down their throat". I
would personally rather pay an experienced recruiter by the hour, even if it
meant fewer (hopefully higher quality) leads.

~~~
cylinder
I agree, but the incentive for hourly is to wait as long as possible to
introduce the candidate, right?

~~~
amackera
I think the idea behind hourly is to provide the best "bang for their buck".
If your clients feel cheated, they will fire you.

Evidently OP did a good job, and made them feel like they were getting high
value.

~~~
amorphid
And that was basically the pitch... "We aren't magic, we just do what you
would do. If you have the tim to recruit yourself, do it. If not, give us a
try, and if it's not working, fire us."

------
steveridout
These got Readlang's first 100 users:

1\. This post to a language learning forum: [http://how-to-learn-any-
language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T...](http://how-to-learn-any-
language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=35462&PN=2)

2\. This post to r/LanguageLearning:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1b08ly/re...](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1b08ly/readlang_feedback_wanted_for_my_new_language/)

If there's a subreddit where your potential audience hangs out that's a good
bet. Try to be honest, humble, and non-spammy.

~~~
mdavid626
[Readlang] You are missing a sign up link on your home page... I can sign up
after installing the chrome extension, but that's just strange.

~~~
steveridout
Alongside the "Install Web Reader" link there's a "Start Learning" link which
will take you into the web-app and allow you to sign up. I figured "Start
Learning" would be more inviting than "Sign Up" but this is something it might
be worth AB testing.

~~~
mdavid626
I know, but almost every site has sign-in and sign-up link at the home page. I
am a developer, but was confused how to sign up. I thought it was some kind of
invitation model... I do not see any problem with putting a sign up link on
the homepage. The more ways for your to sign up, the better.

------
lefstathiou
We provide SAAS to financial institutions and their corporate clients (so the
below may not be relevant to your market):

1) make sure your service is a pain killer not a vitamin. This industry does
not believe in vitamins and we didn't have the resources for such a long
closing cycle. Our tech can be deployed in minutes, is easily understood and
requires very little to no backofdice Support 2) Cold call to get meetings. I
can't emphasize enough how powerful a cold call is. People on Wall Street get
hundreds of emails a day but they are trained to always answer their phone. Be
nice, be genuine, solve a painpoint 3) "ask for the order". Sales cycles can
drag on, at some point you have to draw line in the sand and ask for the
order. Do it humbly and respectfully and be prepared to hear no. The will
almost always say yes

Final thought: we never took VC funding. In the beginning friends and mentors
said we should as it would "add to your credibility", anecdotally I believe
the opposite has happened. I've sat across from many entrepreneur CEOs who
chose us not just because we were good at what we did but out of a desire to
pay it forward. It's the unwritten code among founders: you grinded to get
where you are and people who had no need to helped along the way, you do the
same when the time comes. Point of this story is find these people as early as
possible, they will become your champions.

~~~
Tharkun
Interesting. We haven't had much luck with SAAS in financial institutions. In
our experience they want everything on site and running on their own hardware
and software. How did you manage to convince them? Or are you limiting
yourself to smaller players where it's less of an issue?

~~~
lefstathiou
Answer here depends on what you're hosting and doing for the bank but
generally...assuming you do not require complex integrations into BBG or
proprietary tools you should be able to host off-prem. We fought hard for it
and eventually got through and our clients greatly appreciate it (we can
update very quickly). The key here is selling through the front office instead
of the back-office. The golden rule of selling software to a bank is that
clients value making a dollar more than they value saving a dollar so do your
best to position your solution around that and target the front office.
They'll ram it through the system if it indeed is true. PS: happy to chat
further "offline/hn". Email me (in profile)

EDIT: Assuming your service is SpiderOak, from my experience/perspective this
would be a very hard sell to a bank. They have (albeit inferior) solutions for
this and will not trust a third party to do it easily. I wouldnt even know how
to go about selling it given you would have to go through the COO and vendor
department. We offer a "similar" service in that we host virtual data rooms
that contain tons of proprietary / confidential data. The difference is we do
it in the context of a transaction (a front-office P&L event) which makes it a
much easier sell. It's also not permanent.

~~~
Tharkun
Thanks for that!

Oh and for the sake of completeness: I'm not in any way affiliated with
SpiderOak, though I suppose some of my post history mentions SO quite often as
I'm a rather heavy user of their services.

------
metalmanac
Getting the first hundred users in itself is not hard, post to forums where
your users hang out and you'll be at 100 users fairly quickly. The hard part
is getting users to keep coming back to your site aka engagement.

The best advice I have come across to get your initial users : do things that
don't scale [0]. Yeah, everyone read that post by PG but a surprisingly small
number of people actually apply it to their own projects/startups. Practical
example : I am building a community for programmers [1], so to get some
initial feedback I posted to a Python subreddit and got the first 50 users. I
got a lot of valuable feedback, but users hardly came back to my site after a
couple of days. So I decided to follow up individually with users who had
signed up and started a conversation about my site. I explained to each user
what the site is about, how to use it and asked for feedback. I also asked
them what their first impressions of the site were and how it can be improved.
I learnt that people did not even understand what my site was about, and I
knew that I need to focus on conveying the essence of the site to new users.
(Still working on it) You gain a lot of insight about users by having
conversations with individual users. I managed to help 3 people with their
Python related problems so far, in the chat room
[https://www.metalmanac.com/topics/python/chat/](https://www.metalmanac.com/topics/python/chat/)

Once you get a small number of users who are passionate about your project,
continue talking to individual users and ask them to share it with their
friends and offer to guide each user individually, it works very well. This is
obviously not scalable beyond a few hundred users, but getting those
passionate users initially is critical. I am currently at this stage.

Once you have a group of 100 or so passionate users, you can share it with a
wider community of users (eg- PH, HN for tech projects) and continue focusing
on having conversations with individual users.

[0] [http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

[1] [https://www.metalmanac.com/](https://www.metalmanac.com/)

~~~
_fizz_buzz_
Ok, I bite. I went to your site and then clicked to learn javascript. There is
a short description about javascript and then a couple of links to javascript
tutorials. What now?

~~~
metalmanac
This is exactly the problem users are having. Since the purpose of the site
and how it works is buried in the About page, people are clueless about what
to do next. I am redoing the front page to only focus on explaining what the
site is about.

The idea is this :

* provide a community reviewed wiki explaining what X is about and how to go about learning it. The aim is to answer the questions how to learn X programming language/framework/platform and what are the best resources to use.

* provide a Stackoverflow like QA section for users to ask and answer questions.

* provide a forum to submit and discuss learning resources (like HN)

* provide a chatroom to replicate the IRC experience

As you can see this I have completely failed to convey this. So that's what I
am working on now : to convey the purpose of the site and improve the UX and
UI. Reason for completely failing at this : I focus too much on the tech, the
backend, unnecessary optimizations and time wasters like load testing.

~~~
_fizz_buzz_
It's a decent idea. I think a problem will be that you are trying to compete
too much with stackoverflow.

* "provide a community reviewed wiki explaining what X is about": [http://stackoverflow.com/tags/javascript/info](http://stackoverflow.com/tags/javascript/info)

* "provide a Stackoverflow like QA section": [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/javascript](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/javascript)

* "provide an chatroom to replicate the IRC experience": [http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/17/javascript](http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/17/javascript)

~~~
metalmanac
My hypothesis is that 99% of the people who use Stackoverflow only visit the
QA part of it and things like the community wiki and chatroom receive minimal
traffic. From talking to a few dozens of users, most people don't even know
that the chat room and wiki exist!

The current number of users in the Stackoverflow chat rooms

> with 100 users currently talking in 57 rooms.

The usage of the chat is shockingly low.

I think there's room to provide a better learning experience for developers
and providing chat rooms for developers is a low hanging fruit IMO. People
here on HN know about IRC and how to use it, but we represent a very small
fraction of the population interested in programming, so the idea is to tend
to the general population eventually.

~~~
stuaxo
This is the first I've heard of a wiki or chatroom on S/O and I probably won't
visit them now I know they exist either.

------
r_singh
At my previous startup which was a home scrap pickup service in India, we
acquired our first few hundred users with word of mouth, offline event
participation (in an exhibition) and getting an article in a local newspaper.

The exact path to getting the users will differ based on what you're
attempting to do. In an awesome HN comment for business advice (a few days
ago) I came across this awesome book called Traction; which is like a cookbook
for user acquisition. I'm reading the book right now and it should give you a
lot of ideas!

------
peterhartree
Here's what I did for my Chrome extension [1]:

1\. Searched the Chrome Web Store, Twitter and Google for users who had said
lukewarm or negative things about another extension which addresses a similar
user problem in a different way.

2\. Searched the same places for people who were clearly interested in the
topic of focus and email productivity.

I spent a day or so manually emailing several hundred people in this way. This
initial push - and the events that it lead to (e.g. people I contacted
recommending the extension to others) - got me 100 WAU within a couple of
weeks (and lots of helpful feedback).

(I tried some other things which were much less effective. Listing sites, in
particular, were largely a waste of time, though my Product Hunt submission
came good when the extension was featured a few months later.)

[1] [https://inboxwhenready.org](https://inboxwhenready.org)

------
chrischen
Treat your business like a consulting service, and treat whatever technology
you have not as the end product but as a tool you use to provide whatever
service you are providing at higher quality or at lower costs.

Essentially the "do things that don't scale" advice is just this. It puts your
technology at the backseat.

~~~
jorgeleo
I am curious, what is your personal experience with this approach? can you
elaborate?

~~~
nickpsecurity
IBM moved much of their business to that where it's about services + their own
tech. Many firms used 4GL's or other productivity boosters to deliver more
deliverables to customers for same or reduced price. Sun had a neat language
for web apps called DASL that they didn't publish since they used it
internally for customers they delivered sites/apps to. Google and Facebook
develop a lot of software that could be products in themselves just to improve
their real stream of revenue from advertisers. Android is a prominent one
where they practically give it away to get the ad money from their built-in
apps. I developed a mental list of tools and tactics to knock out a large
swath of vulnerability in systems and networks that people would only get
consulting with me. And so on and so forth.

------
blurrywh
Nice question. I am just wondering if anyone will disclose their current
killer acquisition hacks. Moreover, the question heavily depends on your
business, so is it B2B, B2C, online, app, bot, etc.?

However, a good read on this which tackles all ways of user
acquisition/Marketing is 'Traction' from the DuckDuckGo founder. It's not an
exciting book but gives an ok overview.

You could also just start with the channel which seems most obvious, set up
analytics from day one and iterate over and over. With this approach you
should get a good feeling if your acquisition strategy works and if yes you
should optimize. Otherwise move on to the next channel.

Edit: When you search for Traction on Amazon.com there's also another one on
#1 (good Amazon search hack from another other author btw) which is not the
mentioned book (the one I mean is blue-ish)

~~~
jtraffic
> 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.

~~~
blurrywh
> I see this attitude all the time. Why are people so worried?

If you find the map straight to a goldmine, why should you share it?

Example: Last month you found a new way to target on FB ads (=> mix of ad
creatives, country and interest), with tons of traffic at ultra low CPC. The
space is quite popular and you are surprised yourself why no one else found
this way. Conversions are sky-high and it seems not to end.

Why should you share this? If you share you will destroy the low CPC within
days. If you had ever found a goldmine in the past you might understand. And
if yes, please share this goldmine.

You can make this example for every Marketing channel. People never share
current tactics, only old stuff which isn't working anymore.

Edit: Why the downvote? I try to explain opportunistic behaviour and I
understand and even agree that this behaviour isn't nice or something we would
expect. But downvoting seems to be easier than replying properly...

~~~
SyneRyder
I didn't downvote you, but your post seemed narrow-sighted, focused on a
single goldmine as if it's the only one that will ever exist. If obscurity is
your only defence, it isn't a strong competitive moat. Better to have a
technique for finding lots of goldmines.

> _If you had ever found a goldmine in the past you might understand. And if
> yes, please share this goldmine._

I did this once on HN, over a year ago. I shared an exact technique that made
me a 50%+ return during the year after I posted it. (Okay, maybe that's more
like a tiny mini treasure chest, but it was still a money maker.) I'm not sure
anyone even read it. Even if you give people a goldmine the majority won't be
in a position to take advantage of it. Or perhaps they have better
opportunities.

Sharing tactics can help you make contact with other interesting people, who
are open to collaboration or cross-promotion and who provide you with
opportunities in return. It's basically the Patio11 / Patrick McKenzie
strategy.

------
anacleto
My go-to list:

1\. Launch your product on BetaList

2\. Create a blog and write a lot. Don't create trivial content. SEO is
important but write because you have interesting things to talk about, not
because you have to create "content".

3\. Share as much as you can on twitter/Slack/FB groups. But never be spammy.

4\. Being actively engaged on Twitter (yes!) by regularily searching for your
main 1-3 keywords.

5\. Start soon with link building. It's hard but eventually will pay.

6\. Word of mouth. Encourage and make it easy for your customers to tell
others about your product (no, not by including dumb social sharing buttons!)

What _not_ to-do:

Don't start with Ads prematurely. No matter what the platform is. The don't
pay initially and will cost you a lot.

~~~
siquick
>>Don't start with Ads prematurely. No matter what the platform is. The don't
pay initially and will cost you a lot.

If you're still in the validation stage and want to identify if you do have an
idea that people want and can iterate fast, then ads are a surefire way to get
people to your site (as long as you're targeting the right people).

~~~
anacleto
Yes, you can but they can cost you a lot (~2.5$/click on avg on Adwords, and
$7/click on Linkedin) and you might want to find other ways to achieve the
same result.

------
kevinye93
Beta websites are amazing. when we entered our closed beta for Tack;
[http://tack.tech](http://tack.tech) (We combine task management and chat in
one platform to make it easier to collaborate, think slack + asana + trello.)
We submitted our platform to Betalist and Betapage. We were able to get over
100 teams signed up for our platform within a week and had a few users sign up
every week after the "beta launch" (which is pretty good considering we're
b2b). The best part is, both betalist and beta page are completely free of
charge.

Take advantage of every free promotion/producthunt like service you can
(although I would not suggest going on product hunt for your beta).

Other than that cold e-mailing, cold calling, and guest blogs also work really
well in the beginning.

------
joshontheweb
I searched for people complaining on twitter about how bad Skype connections
ruined their podcast recordings and let them know about my solution. Generally
people were pretty happy to know of a better alternative and signed up as well
as started sharing it via word of mouth.

------
lazyjones
For a CSE (comparison shopping engine) for computer hardware it was simple:

\- talked to friends on IRC about the website (1996-1997)

\- e-mailed the scraped shops and asked for permission, some became users too

When it's obvious what the product does and how useful its benefits are, and
the target audience is large, getting to 100 users is really easy.

It's also an advantage if there is a compelling and logical reason to visit
the website frequently, so it stays fresh in memory and becomes a habit. In my
case it had up-to-date prices collected from shops, so visiting often helped
people find good deals and let them observe dropping prices until they could
afford a purchase.

------
pawelwentpawel
If you are distributing an early-access of your product first, the first 100
users could be beta testers. I have gathered an initial community of people
using my app by posting to directories like betalist.com, betapage.co etc.

~~~
ronstethson
That is a great strategy. These beta users might be less critical if the app
does not work the way it is supposed to work too. So this takes a big pressure
off the shoulders of the developers.

As a follow up question: Can you share some sites/sources which you would
recommend.

------
cdiamand
I did the following for [http://www.oppsdaily.com](http://www.oppsdaily.com)

1\. Posted landing page in a slack chat (first ~10 users)

2\. Posted on the indiehackers forum (+30 users)

3\. Got mentioned in the indiehackers weekly newsletter (+150)

4\. Posted to hacker news (+?)

5\. Posted to product hunt (did not go so great)(+?)

6\. Started posting weekly metrics to HN - made the frontpage (+1500-2000)

------
MrGrillet
I don't have a SAAS app at the moment but I have had success with... Bots,
influencers and ads.

Lots of people seem to think ads don't work here but, I believe it is a matter
of targeting and your funnel.

I think the main issues people have when it comes to ads is they poorly
execute on...

Targeting - have no idea who will actually want the product and target too
broadly with a useless message or, in many cases no message at all.

When people here talk about "doing stuff that doesn't scale", what they are
often doing is selling the idea before someone see's the site or product for
example. Like a tweet to someone looking for a new notes app - you will
normally @ them with a feature or solution right, equally with a forum post -
once you know they have the problem. Do the same with your ad & targeting.

Poor sales effort - In an effort to make the page look good, people often try
to have as little text as possible. In my experience, the more you say the
better because you eventually touch on points the lead cares about. You simply
need to make it engaging. This can be done well with a screen capture you
record on your computer if you really want to have a page with minimal copy.
(But test lots of copy either way)

Price/ product - most people are making stuff people don't care about and
won't be interesting enough to part with money for. Might not be nice to read
but in many cases, it's true.

I hope this helps.

------
adamdecaf
I've found that Traction [0] covers and explains most of the ideas people will
mention here on HN.

[0]:
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0976339609/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0976339609/)

------
dtougas
I would say that it depends on your project. I recently launched my personal
side project ([https://outsideways.com/](https://outsideways.com/)) and it
took me about 9 months to get my first 100 (soft launch with little marketing,
I was busy working on features), and my next 30 in the 10th month. Now I am
getting 2 - 3 sign-ups a day (In my case, there will be a seasonal aspect to
new sign-ups). I am doing a number of things to promote it:

\- Released a multi-week YouTube video series on a related topic of interest,
with a plug for my site at the beginning of each video.

\- I regularly participate in Facebook groups related to the niche and
occasionally plug it there.

\- I am babysitting my most active users so that their experience is really
good, learning their pain points, and responding quickly to their needs. They
are in turn starting to spread the word on their own.

\- Talking to friends and family who I think might be interested.

\- Personally welcoming everyone who joins to try to make the experience a
little more personal.

\- Being active in social media (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook), posting
interesting and relevant content that would attract the kind of users I am
looking for. Following users who I think might be interested. Participating in
their content too (i.e. likes, comments, etc.)

------
hokihy72
For us it was through a Kickstarter ([https://medium.com/@alexobenauer/how-i-
launched-my-company-w...](https://medium.com/@alexobenauer/how-i-launched-my-
company-without-outside-funding-connections-or-even-a-track-record-and-how-
you-c8f04924a3c8)), and the majority of the first 100 backers (that I didn't
already know) were from Hacker News.

~~~
homero
What happened to mail pilot

~~~
hokihy72
We stopped selling it last year to focus on our next product, which is aimed
to solve the root of the email problem. It definitely has a future, so stay
tuned!

But through working with our customers for years, we saw that while we really
helped people get their email more organized, we weren't solving the root
problem: that anyone can dump anything they want into your inbox in the first
place.

We felt called to double down on a killer solution we figured out for that
problem first ([https://throttlehq.com/](https://throttlehq.com/)).

~~~
homero
Is it like 33mail? I'm currently using that and tried
[https://leemail.me/](https://leemail.me/) in the past

------
calyhre
Posted here, get roasted by HN community, being noticed and mentioned in
LifeHacker.

------
yesimahuman
I posted on hacker news and made sure to get people signed up to a newsletter.
Hacker News has been the launching point for a lot of my projects over the
years.

------
ajuhasz
We have SaaS aimed at developers[1] (platform for coding/hosting chatbots) and
have tried 3 major prongs to getting our first 100 users (in order of
usefulness)

\- Meetups

\- Content marketing

\- Adwords

By far the best is our meetup group. We host a weekly meetup[2] series where
we go through the platform and framework and help people write their first
bots. It's nice because it also allows us to see how people are using our
platform and where the rough edges are. This has been invaluable in quickly
fixing small bugs that are meaningful to new devs. Some stuff we wouldn't have
even noticed through analytics. We're working on getting better follow-up
engagement. We have about 5-10% come back week after week.

We write entries on our blog[3] and post links to a few places (FB groups,
twitter) and it's helped out too with recognition. Though our conversion from
people signing up for an account from the blog is about 3%. We try a mix of
posts that range from non-developer focused to developer focused. We host on
medium and have had success with medium's tags and getting readership from
other medium articles and the suggested articles bar on the bottom.

Adwords is almost useless at this point, though neither of us has had any
prior experience so it could just be us not using the tools to their full
potential.

Finally we've gone to 1 conference, NY Techday a few weeks ago. We handed out
~150 business cards and >250 stickers. I think we may have generated 3-4
leads. It was exciting that a few people recognized us from the blog and
posting in FB groups, so that was a good reinforcement to keep posting on the
blog.

[1] [https://alana.cloud](https://alana.cloud)

[2] [https://www.meetup.com/from-just-a-thought-to-your-1st-
chat-...](https://www.meetup.com/from-just-a-thought-to-your-1st-chat-bot/)

[3] [https://blog.alana.cloud](https://blog.alana.cloud)

~~~
matt_lo
> Adwords is almost useless at this point, though neither of us has had any
> prior experience so it could just be us not using the tools to their full
> potential.

For our B2C company, AdWords turned out to be a stable revenue driver for us.
I had little experience in it (I'm a software engineer) and it took about $3k
burned over 60 days to really understand how to build a profitable acquisition
model using AdWords. I bought a couple books and worked on a bunch of multi-
variant testing. I eventually obtained a sustainable and predictable process
of obtaining revenue.

Never use AdWords Express, spend about 160 hours minimum of learning how
marketing and PPC works, and use only data to drive decisions. ROI comes 4
months later when first starting out. If you're an engineer, AdWords API is a
really useful to combine CRM and user data to discover new keywords and
personas.

------
jwmoz
I seeded my site with scraped data for quite a while. Once organic started
coming in and twitter referrals and hits increasing I added an email
subscription.

[http://weworkcontract.com/](http://weworkcontract.com/)

~~~
aalhour
I love your website, please continue doing what you're doing! Best of luck!

~~~
jwmoz
Thanks man!

------
minhajuddin
I have launched a few products. It is really difficult to get the discussion
going on many places like reddit or other discourse forums as there are rules
against promoting your products. However, I have had huge success with
advertising my product ( a paid contact form endpoint service
[https://liveformhq.com/](https://liveformhq.com/) ) on another free product
([https://getsimpleform.com/](https://getsimpleform.com/)) that I built. If
you can build a smaller version of your product which provides value to
customers it can be a great source of leads :)

~~~
tmat
I use your service and found it through Google searches :) liveform is great,
would be nice if it had a pipedriver, salesforce, and other crm integrations

~~~
minhajuddin
Thanks for the feedback. I'll take a look at integrations and see if they can
be added. LiveForm has a webhook which can be integrated with any apps that
are supported by Zapier, so that should support a lot of use cases.

Do you have any other feedback on improving LiveForm or SimpleForm? I'd love
to hear if you've had any pain points.

------
1ba9115454
I was a frequent visiter to a forum where there was a problem I was able to
fix. 1 post in that forum was enough to start to get traction.

------
iEchoic
/r/wow got Guilded's[0] first 100 users. Reddit has a (well-earned) reputation
for being very hostile to self-promotion, but I think it's under-appreciated
how charitable and enthusiastic redditors are, too. If redditors can tell you
put your heart into something, you don't sound like Lord Business, and you
actually listen to their feedback, they'll go above and beyond to help you
out. Users like this are invaluable, and just as importantly, they make making
things fun.

[0] [http://www.guilded.gg](http://www.guilded.gg)

~~~
aisofteng
I think the fine line regarding self promotion on Reddit is about whether
you're part of the community you post in. If you're clearly a community member
and have made something to solve a common problem, that tends to be received
well, it seems, while if you come in as an outsider clearly trying to sell
something to make money, you'll be rejected.

------
thebaer
I started by building something simple that would appeal to a tiny group of
people I understood: a pastebin service only available over telnet [1]. I
posted it on /r/linux, which led to some good conversations and open sourcing
what I was doing, building a small HTTP-based service (the start of our API),
and having a small group of people to talk to when the product evolved.

The goal was to become a seamless publishing platform, so I built the Android
app next (which brought me closer to the broad audience I wanted) and told
/r/goodguyapps about it. Every time I went after a new platform -- Chrome OS,
iOS, desktop via command-line, web -- I found a community that would want to
hear about it and simply had a conversation. I went to listen to people's
problems instead of just selling my app, and ended up learning exactly what I
should build and what the product could do outside of what I'd originally
imagined. Write.as didn't have user accounts for the first year and a half it
existed, but somewhere in that process we passed 100 users across various
platforms.

[1]: [https://github.com/writeas/nerds](https://github.com/writeas/nerds)

------
paltry_digger
My company ([http://www.gosmartride.com](http://www.gosmartride.com)) allows
seniors without smartphones to use Uber.

Two main ways of marketing:

ProductHunt, which gained exposure among tech savvy people. Some referred
parents/grandparents to use.

I then went to senior centers with business cards and flyers. All managers
there were excited about the idea and happy to let me post a few flyers and
distribute business cards.

~~~
mattbgates
Wow, this is a great idea! Wish I had known about this last week. I have yet
to use Uber, but needed to get my dad to the airport in a hurry.
Unfortunately, he did have to hail a cab. Wish I had known about this...
thanks for sharing! It'll come in handy in the future.

------
mezod
I asked for honest feedback for my app
[https://everydaycheck.com](https://everydaycheck.com) on a couple of
subreddits where people are trying to get disciplined and improve themselves.
Since it was my personal goal too I could easily relate and that brought a lot
of signups, great feedback and most importantly, engaged users!

~~~
lloeki
Looks nice, feels a bit like the old Lift app, which sadly turned into a
coaching marketplace social thing.

~~~
mezod
never saw the old Lift app but it is not the first time that someone names it
when seeing everydaycheck :p

be assured this won't turn into a coaching marketplace. My goal is to charge a
symbolic yearly fee and keep it as it is. After all, it does one thing and it
does it right!

------
danielfoster
I wrote a passionate blog post made the front page of a major subreddit. The
story was then syndicated across a few other large blogs in my niche. This
resulted in 3,000 sign-ups in a few days-- much more than I had expected!

I've also found reddit ads to be quite useful if you take the time to craft
relevant ads and quickly nix ones that do not perform.

~~~
whrect
OT: Just saw that your company Pixsy is registered in the US and in Germany
but based in Germany. Is the US Inc the top company or the German GmbH? Why
did you choose that setup and is it working out for you?

------
danm07
I hired a growth hacker to accelerate our app to ~1000 users. I tried sending
emails out to people to use the app, but my network just didn't fit the niche
we were targeting. I also showed the app to people in Starbucks and wrote
custom replies to people online looking for the app: they were of little help.

~~~
newyearnewyou
Who did you hire?

------
CM30
Well for my community sites, they just tended to come in on their own through
minimal promotion. I mean, one of my forums is literally about a topic that no
one else online is running a website about. For the members there simply were
no viable alternatives.

However, when I failed the issue was getting people to use the site, not to
sign up. People will sign up for sites and services almost at a whim, but the
percentage who will actually contribute is in the single digits. So I ended up
with a 'service' that mostly people ended up reading rather than posting on.

Just getting 100 users? Some active social media accounts, posts on other
forums and communities, some good content and just damn faking activity until
real people join tends to work well enough there.

------
SRasch
We provide on-demand freelance services, customers are b2b

Got first 100 by

1) Friends: first asking a few to try; then telling about the idea at parties
(also hosted a "launch party" at home, etc. Then at last emailing whole
LinkedIn-contactlist. First couple were free, rest more or less discounted but
paid. 2) PR. Had a few early newspaper articles when we had initial traction
which gave us perhaps 20 customers each. Also posted the article to our
facebook, which I think perhaps got us half of those.

(We also tried a lot of other stuff that didnt work, including a big cold call
campaign and paying for leads via ads, but it didnt yield much results as it
is very hard to do well)

------
Kiro
Facebook ads are always really effective for me to build some initial
traction.

~~~
IAmGraydon
Clever Facebook ads are definitely effective. Approach it like 99% of FB
advertisers, however, and you'll undoubtedly lose money.

~~~
GoToRO
Please, define clever. I installed fb pixel and it made a huge diference. What
else?

------
needz
My app is for a very niche population so spreading the word for it was
incredibly easy as there are only 3-5 really good hubs for this crowd (pinball
players) online.

~~~
anfractuosity
Cool, do you mean physical pinball machines?

~~~
needz
Yeah! It's a social score-ranking app for physical pinball machines. We
recently broke 1k users and 20k scores since release this past June.

------
nhorob67
Facebook Ads -> Blog Posts/Lead Magnets -> Email List

Bootstrapped Solo founder. Beta launch in June 2016. Full launch in December
2016. Crossed $200k in ARR last week.

~~~
titel
I would be interested in finding out more on the subject. Would you care to
expand a bit on the above?

~~~
nhorob67
I built a farm management SaaS product. It's basically a managerial accounting
platform. I've written a bunch of blog posts (75 I think) over the last 2
years.

I see what posts perform well on FB, then boost them.

I've spent $22,000 on Facebook ads and have acquired 6,000 leads from the
spend.

~~~
titel
That's really cool. Thanks for the followup.

------
viniciusbo
My partners and I run a business advertising website in Brazil. Since we
didn't have any funds to bootstrap PPC/FB Ads we decided to manually send
messages to advertisers (and actually chat with them) running ads on other big
websites. That provided us some initial traction without having to put down
any money, and also precious feedbacks that guides us through design
iterations until today.

------
PascLeRasc
I published my Chrome extension on the Chrome Web Store and wrote up a little
post on Github about how I made it, then posted that to a subreddit, I can't
remember if it was /google or /chrome or /webdev. Unfortunately since then I
can't seem to get past ~400 users but it was a pretty good kickstart.

------
karthiksk2012
Really great feedback. The reason I asked this question is I just launched my
app [https://pipecourse.com/](https://pipecourse.com/) and its been few days.
I tried cold emailing people but getting almost no response. Any particular
feedback for this will be appreciated.

~~~
leblancfg
If you want real feedback, take away every mention of YOU and the company from
the home page. Rewrite it from the perspective of your potential first 100
users. Show them exactly what pipecourse is doing that they can't find on some
other site.

~~~
karthiksk2012
Got it. I actually created a pipecourse on my startup thinking it will be a
way to show users one of the usecases of the platform.But i get your
point.Thank you.

~~~
osel
Nothing particularly wrong with showing off on the landing page, quite cool
that your app suits it. The issue is the topic - it should be about the app
and it's relation to the user, not about you or the company. You could quite
easily (if I follow the product idea) create a course about the product
itself. Sort of like a walk through or tutorial explaining it.

~~~
karthiksk2012
True.The idea behind creating on the story of pipecourse is because usually
people blog about what worked for them and only when things get succesful. By
blogging also about what i tried,what didn't work , i thought people can
relate better and I think if lot of startups did this, I think we can learn a
lot from each other.

------
ew
I replied to every single thread in the Dropbox forums pushing my new app that
would help solve their problems. Seemed to work well enough!

I then also left comments on every blog I could find talking about the
problem. A lot of manual leg work that definitely paid off.

------
morisy
1)Mailing lists.

2) Personally calling up/emailing up with a few dozen people I thought were a
good fit, and then always asking them "Who else do you think would be
interested in this?", even if they thought it was a bad concept.

------
david90
Ads are good actually to acquire your first 100 users. But not on common
platforms (Google Ads, Youtube, Facebook). You can find with websites with
high traffic and ask them to put up your ad messages.

------
juiyout
If: 100 phone calls -> 10 meetings

10 meetings -> 1 contracts

To get 100 contracts, just make 10,000 phone calls.

Find your ratio and start from the top.

In the beginning, improving ratio is not as importatnt as increasing your
denominator. Just get out there.

------
pryelluw
You can get lots of users on social media. Just work through the social graph
starting with your connections. Personalized messages work best. Just ask for
their opinion.

------
amgin3
Bought them from India, like every other company.

~~~
Kurtz79
Could you be more specific, for those of us that are not used to "buy"
customers from India ?

~~~
ctrlrsf
Probably a Silicon Valley joke:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-W0CBOGnnI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-W0CBOGnnI)

------
maxblack
I acquired our first 100 users by running Facebook Lead Generation ads. I got
their emails and thousands of page likes.

~~~
joshdance
How much did that cost you?

------
edpichler
I did a thing that don't scale. I wrote emails to my potential customers, not
cold emails but real emails.

------
horusthecat
We made it a requirement for managers to use our internal application. Har-
har-har

------
skdotdan
Very interesting thread. I would like to read answers for B2B.

------
bosky101
i became a customer of each of my customers - to build a rapport/communication
line.

PS: in my case it was booking a ride/cab, so not as expensive as you think

------
interdrift
I think building an amazing product is the way to get them automatically.

~~~
starikovs
If you have an amazing product you can start from
[http://www.appsumo.com](http://www.appsumo.com) :-)

~~~
titel
Do you have more information on that? Did you do a deal with Appsumo before?
What are usually the terms for such a deal?

~~~
starikovs
As I know they have about ~1M users. Once your product is verified almost all
of them receive a newsletter about your product. Your product is sold by the
fixed price forever. But they take a big % (40%+) for that deal. I heard from
some projects which have been used AppSumo and that the impact is really
great. Thousands of new users and sales.

------
jankedeen
What is an app I wonder? Is it sort of a codeword for frontend embedded in
logic impossible for the user to decipher with invisible sys hooks everywhere
because the os is opaque to the user or is it something else?

