
Ask HN: How should i acquire my first 100 customers? - dprophecyguy
Hello Everyone,
I am going to launch my product with in 20 days and what i am looking for advice and tips that work for you and that you think can work for me. It could be anything. I am hoping for going door to door for acquiring my first 100 or 200 customers.
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owens99
Hustle as hard as you can. Read, "Do things that don't scale" by Paul Graham
for inspiration. Acquiring customers is as important as building a good MVP,
actually, more important. If you struggle to think where to find your first
100 customers it's usually a sign for caution. Get them by whatever (legal and
honest) means necessary. If you are solving a real problem, complete strangers
will gladly try your product. So again, try everything: Reddit, Twitter,
Facebook Groups, Forums, Coffee Shops, Shopping Malls, etc. Get Out of the
Building! If your target customer doesn't sign up quickly, pivot. There are
better uses of your time.

Small tip: describe your product in the description of this post and link to
it. You might find your first 5 customers here or generate word of mouth. Lost
opportunity. Try to be reasonably shameless. If you are solving a problem no
one will find you distasteful. People love to be sold good stuff.

~~~
dprophecyguy
We are about to launch within 15 to 20 days. I will post it here when it will
be completed.

~~~
byoung2
Not sure if you've done launched a product before but I'll describe my
experience at my last company.

We built amazing technology that crawled Yelp, Google, foursquare, Facebook,
citysearch, superpages, etc. and we displayed listing info, likes, checkins,
ratings, and reviews all in one place. Even better, we let businesses update
their info in our dashboard and we pushed it out to the sites. We let them
reply to and flag reviews in our dashboard and we posted them on the sites. We
spent from 2010 to 2013 building all this tech, and all the devs kept pushing
the founders to get it in the hands of customers but they kept insisting that
we have a "finished" product first.

So in 2013 when we had all the features in place we launched our beta and
while people signed up, in app usage patterns showed they didn't do much. It
turns out that small businesses don't really care about anything outside yelp
or Facebook (TripAdvisor for some) and they can do that manually. If only we
had asked them first...

The next 2 years were spent retooling the app to serve franchise and
multilocation customers (the most active customers turned out to be part of
bigger chains so we went after these). If the founders had gone out to talk to
customers before we started writing code, we could have learned this first.

