
Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users? - brandonhsiao
I&#x27;ve never done any kind of user acquisition besides posting to Reddit and HN. I realize that this is, needless to say, not a working strategy. What do you people do?
======
gabemart
I haven't done any promotion for
[http://asoftmurmur.com](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 respectfully.

Something I've used for other projects is searching for coverage of
competitors in the same space, then pitching to people who have already
featured them. Again, very important to hand-tailor each pitch and offer value
to the person you're contacting.

~~~
97s
This is fantastic. I am in love, I feel like I'm beside the ocean while I'm
working. Thanks for this. Instantly bookmarked.

~~~
iterationx
[https://archive.org/details/Sounds_of_Nature_Collection](https://archive.org/details/Sounds_of_Nature_Collection)

------
gbelote
One cool technique I saw recently (which isn't always applicable) is from a
talk by Jason Cohen: [http://vimeo.com/74338272](http://vimeo.com/74338272)
(around minute 7)

In a nutshell when he was building WPEngine he went to LinkedIn and found
folks who were Wordpress consultants. He then sent them a follow email and
said he's building a product for "folks like you and would love to talk to you
about your pains, needs, etc" (customer development stuff) and offered to pay
for their time. It worked well - he sent 40, 100% agreed to talk, actually
talked to 38, and 0 asked for money. He suggests this worked so well because
the offer to pay showed he was respectful of their time so they were happy to
help. YMMV.

~~~
dclara
You have a very good example for shooting against the target niche where you
have your best audience to listen to you. But the question is: "when he was
building WPEngine", there are already 40 folks "who were Wordpress
consultants"? Then the result is not unexpected, and can not be consider a
good example. Sorry if I misunderstood you. What we want know is how he got
that 40 consultants to working on WPEngine in the first place.

~~~
itengelhardt
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..)

~~~
dclara
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 introduced. And this is still
happening now. Once a group of people accept a new concept, building on top of
it to improve the system is a little easier.

~~~
itengelhardt
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

------
jonnathanson
This is going to sound overly reductive, but I promise it's not:

1) What existing solution do you believe your product (or prospective product)
is better than?

2) Where can you find a critical mass of people who use the existing solution?

3) Go there. Talk to them. Show them your product.

Now, none of this is trivial. First, because assuming you're operating lean,
you start with no real clue if you're "better" than anyone or anything else,
or on what dimensions that actually matter. You start with a hypothesis, and
you have to seek out opinions (customer development). Second, because the
existing solution might not be what you think it is. Or it might not be a
product at all. It might be a _behavior_ people are doing, or an "off-label"
use of another product.

But by and large, this method works. It might not get you scale. But it'll get
you in front of potential users, and those users will be primed to try out
your product. The trick is in identifying the existing solution, finding
people who use it, and getting some of their time.

I'd definitely advocate doing this _before_ doing any "Show HN" posts. Show HN
is a (potential) way to get a lot of traffic and attention in one blast. You
don't want to play that card until you know you can benefit from it: either in
terms of feedback (you'll want to have vetted out basic users and assumptions
first), or in terms of users (aim for some indications of fit before firing
the shotgun). The other problem with relying on Show HN, or Reddit, is that
there's luck of the draw involved. Sometimes your post gets buried or washed
out by the noise. Being good is no firm guarantee of charting to page one.

~~~
logicallee
I'm going to go ahead and disagree with you completely. Apple didn't find a
critical mass of blackberry users (the leading smart phone at time of iPhone
introduction) and market something better to them. It just made a smart phone
and marketed it to everyone. When it made the iPod back in the day, it didn't
find a critical mass of people using hard drive based players already. It
created one for everyone.

In more formal terms, if you are trying to steal someone else's customer you
have to do something on day 1 (first sale) that is more than 100% as good.

But if you are marketing to different customers, you are acting like a
reseller of your competition, with the difference that you don't actually have
to buy it from them, but can make it at cost.

It's far better to be in the second situation. I don't think the right
strategy is to take on entrenched competition head-on. It's better to create a
new market.

~~~
lee
I think what he's getting at is that a fairly large problem with starting a
start-up is that you don't know if your product or service has a market in the
first place.

If you start with a fresh idea, then you have to test and discover if what you
are offering is viable. By taking an existing product or service, and
improving upon it, that entire first phase of discovery is done for you.

That's why most new businesses aren't building something novel (ie: opening up
a restaurant, retail store, software consulting, etc...).

That discovery phase is expensive. So if you're boot-strapping or limited on
capital and time, then you're in a situation where creating something new is
extremely risky. Even large companies with lots of resources often fail when
launching a novel product.

Not every company is like Apple.

And conversely, many successful companies built on existing solutions. Google
wasn't the first search engine. Facebook wasn't the first social network.
Microsoft Word wasn't the first word processor.

I'll agree that "It's better to create a new market." But only IF you have the
resources to take on that kind of risk.

~~~
logicallee
sure - the resources, _or_ the vision.

~~~
dhoulb
One of the biggest advantages some companies have, is having one or more
people who can, kinda, SEE the future, without needing to focus group
everything.

An ability to intuit what's right - what'll work - without needing to test and
prove every hypothesis (expensive), or worse: launch a product that falls flat
(crazy expensive). It's definitely something some people are better at than
others. Jobs was obviously a total pro. Gates was alright. Ballmer sucks at
it.

A lot of that is taste. Taste mixed with direction.

------
dbla
In my opinion reddit is very underrated in terms of customer acquisition. It's
a target community of early adopters who are willing to start a conversation
with you. For my start-up, 900dpi, I got our first 400 users from reddit after
failing miserably through other channels. We found our best success in
/r/web_design but have also looked at /r/frontend and /r/webdev. Sometimes
your best traffic comes from comments in other peoples posts (where redditors
are asking for a product like yours or discussing a problem that you solve).
Our product has been picked up on a couple blogs too after being discovered by
the bloggers via a reddit post.

I've also had luck with some other niche community sites such as Designer
News. The important piece here is to try and integrate yourself into the
community instead of just spamming them with links to your website. Get
involved in conversations about things other than your start-up (people notice
this and appreciate it). Make friends with the moderators. When Designer News
was still private with no search capabilities I wrote a quick search engine
built on sphinx to index all of the posts and make them searchable. Not only
did this get me an invite to the community but also sent some nice traffic to
my start-ups site via a small link on the search page.

I've had little to no success with twitter and facebook, although I might be
doing it wrong. Some of the targeted communities that you can find through
google plus look somewhat promising, but I've yet to fully explore these.

Our most vocal power users are people we know personally, or met at local
events (our local co-working space).

~~~
habosa
r/startups was great for one of my launches, gave a lot of interesting
feedback and drove some traffic. Wasn't hard to hit the front page.

------
mgl
If you have a product that may generate profit, e.g. a SaaS application
targeting businesses, not a money burning consumer-app train (see: twitter or
another photo album app) one of the strategies that work is cold emailing:

0\. Identify and name your target group, e.g. commercial real estate agents in
CA.

1\. Find these people on Linkedin using advanced search option and invite them
to connect.

2\. Once connected you have their e-mail address, so send them a short e-mail
(better response rate than InMails) describing the business problem and your
solution. Short means 3-5 sentences, no attachments, just try to attract their
attention.

3\. Don't forget about follow-ups.

4\. They will reply if interested and bam, you have a lead! Now it's time to
set up a call and go into details.

5\. Rinse and repeat. Stay persistent, you should send at least 20+ every day.
Track response rates and adjust, you should achieve at least 5-10% easily.

~~~
mrtksn
This is borderline to SPAM, so I think the e-mails should be very personal.

If you have many competitors I am probably getting lot's of these e-mails
which means you would have much harder time to get my attention.

Let's say you are a hosting provider, I probably would not like to get an
e-mail from you offering me some good price or hard to understand feature of
yours, because there are probably lot's of cheap hosting providers out there
and every other provider is trying to differentiate themselves somehow. Other
than "identifying my problem" you really shouldn't sound like giving me a
sales pitch.

But if you noticed that, let's say I have 350ms response time in Asia when
it's only 50 in USA and you have some solution for it, I probably will reply
you even if I am not going to buy your service right away.

~~~
byoung2
_But if you noticed that, let 's say I have 350ms response time in Asia when
it's only 50 in USA and you have some solution for it, I probably will reply
you even if I am not going to buy your service right away._

That reminds me of a technique I used when doing freelance Web design. I
focused on restaurants with bad websites. I wrote a crawler that searched for
restaurants with email addresses on the site, but bad html like font or center
tags or flash. I would then email them a sample site with their name and logo
inserted programmatically. It got pretty good response.

~~~
mrtksn
This is Cool! Actually it was my plan to find local businesses with
bad/outdated websites and offer them a "renovation" but I didn't think to do
this pragmatically. Thanks for the cool idea :) If I am going to look for some
freelance work, I may actually try to imitate your approach.

------
lobotryas
It 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 product is a fit
(ie: don't try to sell a social network for cats to a dog owner). If it seems
like there's some product fit, ask how they are filling the need now. If
appropriate, give the the elevator pitch and a 1min demo on your live product.
Ideally, convert them by having them sign up for a trial right then and there
on your computer, followed by walking them through the COOLEST thing they can
do on your product.

Rinse, repeat.

That's my 2 cents. Also interested what others think.

~~~
DorintheFlora
_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.

~~~
lucaspiller
I think if you want to be successful you need to have good knowledge about
your audience. Maybe not when you are first starting out, but you should when
you have a product to sell.

You won't be a good golf club salesman if you know absolutely nothing about
golf.

~~~
DorintheFlora
That's part of my point. We don't know where the OP is coming from though in
terms of how well he/she knows the problem space, etc. If they don't know it
well enough, perhaps pointing this out will help them.

------
cl8ton
I tried many options to get to our first 100 users.

Tech Blogs (they thought we were to boring to cover)

HN (no interest)

Reddit (no interest)

Ad Words (I think I sucked at it)

So I shrugged and kept improving then one day out of the blue, a big Mommy
blog covered us for ways to keep up to date on coupons.

This one coverage leads to our first 200 users, and then another blog
(MakeUseOf) covered us, which then lead to other industry specific blogs to
cover us. Now we are getting 70+ new accounts a day and have over 120k users.

My advice (if the OP is asking) would be to target industry specific
blogs/sites that would find your product useful and covers news that relates
to your websites offerings, that is what I do now.

~~~
yitchelle
What's your product?

------
itengelhardt
Here's a tactic that has worked for me so far

1\. Set up a blog on your domain

2\. write 20+ articles on industry-related topics (this alone will bring in
some traffic)

3\. get a number of emails from prospective customers

4\. write a PERSONALIZED email to everyone on the list and ask if they are
interested in an interview to be published on your blog. Offer a link from
your blog as additional incentive

My response rate so far was >80%

~~~
pairing
"3\. get a number of emails from prospective customers" Can you elaborate on
this step? How are getting these emails?

~~~
patio11
Typically, you swap them their email address for something they'd presumably
want. Instant download of a white paper, one-month free course delivered over
email about $FOO, etc.

------
loomio
Our first customer for our collaboration tool Loomio (htp://www.loomio.org)
was the coworking space we were working in and the social enterprise hub that
was based there.

We built a tool that was instantly useful to them, and in exchange we
instantly had 100+ users. We released an extremely "M" MVP and had real users
from day one. Because they were using it free and we were building features in
response to their direct feedback, they were very understanding about it being
a rough prototype. Two years later, they voluntarily opted to generously
backpay us for use of the tool (we didn't even ask them to).

If you can get real users from very early on, even if your tool is rough, do
it! It will help you build what's really useful to people, and involving early
users in the design process actively means they are motivated to use the tool
early and help you make it work as well as possible as quickly as possible.

~~~
lucaspiller
The pay what you want model is interesting - I'd like to know how that's
working for you!

~~~
loomio
A lot of people have happily paid us money, which is awesome. But we've
decided to transition to a true "gift economy" model now. In the next few
weeks, we're launching a big crowdfunding campaign to fund development of
Loomio 1.0, where we're taking the learnings from our first 10,000 users and
creating a much more accessible, mobile responsive, intuitive tool. After
crowdfunding, we're going to just be giving the basic software away for free
and accepting donations instead of having a structured subscription model.

At the same time though, we've had massive pull from enterprise customers for
consulting to go alongside the tool to help them do really good internal
collaboration and culture change to a more distributed leadership model, as
well as facilitate constituent and stakeholder collaboration. That's been a
significant source of income for us.

Overall, the commitment to "pay what you can" has been core to our model and
our values, and we're sticking with it, but we're experimenting with
interpreting it in different ways. It's very important to us to both be
independently financially sustainable, and to give our tool to groups doing
great stuff in their communities regardless of their financial means.

------
neals
I've got 3 people cold-calling and driving around the country showcasing our
product. They started last week. This is the first time I'm trying selling an
online service this way, I must say that I am pleasantly surprised by the
feedback and the signups.

~~~
brandonhsiao
What's your product? And how'd you find the 3 people?

------
lgilchrist
What's your product and who is your target user? Where do they spend their
time? LinkedIn, Reddit, and HN won't help if you're trying to reach, for
example, teenage girls.

I collected some thoughts on this that you might find helpful:
[http://lgilchrist.github.io/how_to_get_your_first_100_users/](http://lgilchrist.github.io/how_to_get_your_first_100_users/)

TL:DR; \- get a splash page up and start collecting emails \- guest blog -
particularly in places you know your would-be-users will read \- organize an
event \- play around with paid marketing

~~~
jamesq
Great resource and some great ideas and reminders - I've bookmarked this for
later!

------
Jasber
My friend and I just started a site to help do this:
[http://leaklist.org/](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 or a developer—we're
sending out stuff weekly!

~~~
speakme
cool concept. Is it meant just for games and just mobile? Would your customers
be interested in beta testing a web-based social network?

~~~
Jasber
Right now just games and mobile but the focus is to open up other
categories/platforms as we hit critical mass.

------
eli
This is almost the exact same question as this front page post from an hour
earlier:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7248460](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
for energy providers.

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

~~~
eli
I'm very lucky to have two co-founders who are both much better at sales and
business development than I, so one of them handled the details... But my
recollection is that they approached us with a very vague idea that we were
doing good stuff and maybe we can work together somehow? First instinct might
have been to try to sell them ads (we're fully ad-supported), but after
talking to them what they really wanted was 1) ways to provide more value to
their members, 2) ways to do internal promotions to existing members and 3)
things that are really easy for them to execute. So we racked our brains and
came up with a deal where we write, manage, and send a weekly email newsletter
with content tailored for their audience. The newsletter has both our logos in
it and we promote it to our larger audience. They have a section they can use
to promote their own events and content, and we promote the newsletter to our
larger audience. We also provide discounts on ads to their members.

It's not the sort of deal that "easy" in that it took real work to put
together. But I think it's worked out great for everyone.

------
girasquid
I was after people who used iTunes to listen to their music for Beathound
([http://beathound.com](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.

------
muratmutlu
[http://betali.st/](http://betali.st/) got us our first 300 users for
[http://www.marvelapp.com](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

~~~
speakme
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.

~~~
muratmutlu
Actually for us it was pretty long (which I don't recommend). I think what you
suggested is a much better strategy.

I think it was around 3 months so it wasn't as fresh but what I did was go
through email addresses one by one, picked out the companies that sounded the
most promising and opened up a dialogue to get those guys in early.

Then kept the other guys informed to try and keep them excited. Although if I
would have done it just before launching I would have saved a lot of effort.

~~~
speakme
Yea that's what I'd be afraid of. It sounds like you handled it well. Since
betali.st only features products that haven't fully launched yet, I just don't
want to submit, and then by the time they see my submission we're live and
they won't accept it. How long did it take between when you submitted to them
and when you were actually featured?

------
DanBC
You don't appear to have any links to your product on your HN user page!!!

------
vetleen
There are a lot of great answers here already, however if you just do
everything at once, you have no idea what works and not. Therefore, my advice
is to take all of the great strategies mentioned here and write them down in
“column A” in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Then write todays date in “column B”.
Then choose one of the strategies in the list, preferably one you believe in.
In the intersection between the date and the strategy write “Procedure:
<exactly how you plan to proceed>, Measure: <exactly how you plan to measure
the result, i.e. pageviews, signups etc.>, Result: <the results per metric>,
Comments: <any comments that you think you’d like to remember when you read
this in three months> ”. Then do exactly what you planned to do, measure the
results and write them down in the designated field. Next day (or when the
first strategy is done) pick a new strategy and repeat the process.

I work with a lot of startups, and one of the things we keep learning is that
it is a lot harder to get customers than it is to build something. Therefore
try to think of marketing as a puzzle, a challenge to be solved. The key is to
keep experimenting, and measure everything until you find something that
works, then keep experimenting and measuring.

------
shasa
Back in Dec 2012, when we were planning to launch TripTern we were
bootstrapped and didn't have any money for marketing. So we relied heavily on
Facebook for promotion. One thing that we used to spread the word was to
create promotional material based on movie posters ( see the links below). It
helped us in getting the initial signups and also was instrumental in us
getting featured on Mashable.

[https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.38683168472634...](https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.386831684726346.90214.336934619716053/386831691393012/)

[https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.38683168472634...](https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.386831684726346.90214.336934619716053/388076751268506/)

[https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.38683168472634...](https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.386831684726346.90214.336934619716053/389555237787324/)

You can see the entire album here

[https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.386831684726346.90...](https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.386831684726346.90214.336934619716053)

------
Disruptive_Dave
Quick background on Collabo (www.letscollabo.com) for some context - we're a
bootstrapped startup aimed at creating a safe environment for freelancers,
solopreneurs, and work-from-homers to video chat about anything they want. No
selling, just camaraderie. We're very much in the P/M fit stage and wanted to
test our theories that we can build and sustain and engaged community of peers
willing to share/learn/give/seek with each other. So, here's what we did to
get our first 100:

1\. When users sign up for our email drip campaign (which consists of drive-
to's for our blog), they also receive an invite to a private Facebook Group.
We manually approve every person in the Group, and use the Group to learn
about our customers, connect them with each other, survey new ideas, and build
a sense of community. The Group has been wildly key to our building process.
We're seeing about 55-60% of our email sign-ups join the Group, with about 20%
being active participants.

2\. My co-founder and I put out an offer to all our customers/readers to meet
us for a cup of coffee, on us. We're in Portland and NYC, so only for those
folks.

3\. Sent personal emails to our networks promoting Collabo and asking them for
feedback.

4\. I manually scraped the follower lists of our competitors and industry big
dogs on Twitter and followed them, which yielded some really good results,
mostly in terms of gaining targeted followers.

5\. Lots of time spent offering advice and sharing stories/knowledge on
communities like r/startups and r/freelance.

6\. In the process of guest blogging on sites that serve our niche market.

------
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/](https://briefmetrics.com/)],
email summaries of your Google Analytics.

[1] Show HN
[[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641385](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...](https://lobste.rs/s/ppcmud/show_lobsters_i_built_briefmetrics_to_remove_the_pain_of_using_google_analytics)],
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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/analytics/comments/1uk9na/briefmetrics_simple_overview_of_your_google/)]
Got a chunk of visitors, but all the comments were from people I knew so the
feedback was a bit of an echochamber.

~~~
mgl
How would you describe your actual paying client?

~~~
shazow
How do you mean? My target customer audience?

Right now it falls into two groups across two dimensions:

1a. Small-medium businesses

1b. Individuals with many web projects

2a. Already use the Google Analytics frontend regularly but feel that this
recurring process is too cumbersome (often 20-40 clicks per property) and
would rather have email reports to save time/effort.

2b. Have GA and like the idea of it, but never remember to check it regularly
so they miss out on the value of analytics unless they get regular email
reports.

~~~
mgl
You should find people with such problems on Digital Point, Flippa and
obviously here.

~~~
shazow
Digital Point is a great lead, thanks!

Why do you think Flippa? I imagine people looking to get rid of their property
for money are less likely to pay to monitor its analytics? Then again, it
could be a good audience for people who own multiple properties.

~~~
mgl
Exactly, I guess a solid number of Flippa users own multiple websites for
profit, so they should be interested in tight control of stats. You may also
e.g. post a sell offer for your web app and a) a number of your target clients
will see your pitch, b) you may end with a nice exit at an early stage, so
only good things may happen! ;)

~~~
shazow
Hah very crafty. I'll consider it. :) Thanks for the outside-of-the-box
suggestion. Btw, I liked your LinkedIn suggestion in the other thread, going
to try that too.

------
helen842000
Adwords, Forums, facebook groups, blog audiences, commenting, twitter,
pinterest.

Go and find out where you customer hangs out online. Who already has your
perfect audience on their mailing list? See if you can write something of
value for their audience and tap into existing groups.

When you do get users, ask how they found you then double down on promoting in
that channel.

~~~
jfoster
Some of those suggestions (eg. comments) may represent a risk to search
ranking. From what I understand, Google considers comments a negative signal.
Perhaps it's only duplicate comments, though. Can someone more experienced
than I am please provide their perspective here?

~~~
helen842000
Perhaps! However I think it's important to jump in with a community and
comments give you the chance to be a valued member that contributes.

Also, if your customers can find you without the assistance of search rankings
(which can change at any time) then surely that's a good thing.

------
Bartweiss
What's your general field? B2B, especially for big industries, tends to call
for networking and possibly cold calls. Individual sales tends to call for
advertising with a focus on high relevance sites. Social or two-sided markets
(think credit card companies and users) tend to call for narrow early focus
via outreach to online or physical communities. This simulates widespread use
by creating a regionally high use space.

If you're in a specific field (e.g. online cello sales), do outreach to things
like relevant forums and subreddits. You'll get targeted use which will
provide quality feedback, hopefully. If it's a broad spectrum project, buy up
relevant and cheap(ish) ads in several venues. Push use with some definable
group that you can interact with directly, get emails via a newsletter, etc.

------
adambrod
Striking up conversations in targeted areas works well for Blonk [0].

We're targeting software engineers & smaller startups looking to hire in the
bay area. Find an icebreaker and when they naturally ask what you do, have
your elevator pitch ready. If they're interested they'll ask you for url info
or start downloading it on the spot. If not, no worries.

We often work at coffee shops in that area. When someone starts talking, we're
happy to chat. Typically when they need to plug in a laptop or they ask you to
watch their stuff. Attending meetups that your target audience goes to can be
very worthwhile.

[0] [http://blonk.co](http://blonk.co) is an job finding app that connects job
seekers to co-founders or their potential dept. leader in large companies,
skipping the recruiters entirely.

------
yaur
My last personal project was a fan site for an MMORPG where I was doing around
250k monthly uniques before the game tanked. Promoting it was just a matter of
establishing a presence on the official forums prelaunch, looking at referrers
and extending the presence to other sites that were generating traffic.

My last commercial project was an OTT IPTV startup which we mainly promoted
through adwords, some premium online ads in our target demographic, and doing
interviews with media outlets that were serving that demographic. In terms of
CPA adwords were by far the most cost effective.

My current project is in the entertainment. We are looking to get buy in from
a couple of prominent people in the space before we go live and expect that a
"we like it" from them will give us critical mass very quickly.

------
elgrito
We don't have budget for marketing at
[http://www.cloquo.com](http://www.cloquo.com) so the only way we can do in
order to promote our platform is by inviting bloggers, related with our
service, to try out what we have develop so far, and we got some good feedback
and reviews. Other way we are experimenting is to listen on twitter what kind
of upcoming events people is interesting to not miss out and we add some value
to them by sharing an alarm to easily activate it and being reminded when time
comes. As a Google Mentor told me once, is better to reach first your primary
audience instead going mad to be reviewed at big tech media.

Maybe our experience can help others...

------
spencerfry
I've grown [https://www.uncover.com](https://www.uncover.com) (a simple tool
to give employees perks and rewards) in various different ways. A lot of it
began with telling my network of friends who run startups. Getting them signed
up. Then getting them to tell their friends how much they liked it. Once that
source was depleted, I began to do a lot of content marketing. I started
writing for a lot of different blogs, websites, etc. That helped get out name
out there and brought in about a third of our current customers. I'm now
beginning to experiment with buying ads. It's still too early to tell how well
that will work out, though.

~~~
namenotrequired
I'm not in your target audience, but I found your site originally on a Show HN
and have seen it be recommended to others on various places ever since so you
seem to be doing something right! :)

~~~
spencerfry
Thanks! That's awesome. Referrals are our best source of new customers.

------
dsugarman
Focus on getting a product to the point that some small group (as small as one
person) really loves the product. If you focus on that getting to 100 will be
easy. Of course you will need to pick a product that at least 100 people have
a use for.

------
bredren
Friends and family count for your first dozen at least, hopefully. After that,
consider looking for online communities that need your product. For example,
vbulletin forums that focus on them.

Ingratiate yourself to these communities by participating in discussions
unrelated to what you're working on.

By then, you should be able to post a full thread describing what you've done,
offer a few screenshots and ask if people will try it. By replying to people's
questions and being friendly, you will keep the thread reasonably topped and
pick up users that way.

This also works in general interest internet forums, so long as you are a
reasonable participant and posting in the correct areas.

------
Sindrome
It 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.

------
trevordev
I created a website chatleap.com about a month ago and I had moved on since I
was unable to get people to use it. I saw the twitch plays pokemon post and
realized that it was hard to chat in the twitch chat due to all the people
spamming commands so I decided to post my website there in hopes to get 1 or
two people to visit my lonely chat. I ended up getting around 130 people and
even had others posting my link in the twitch chat. So thats how I got my
first 100 users but I am afraid they wont stay for long.

------
blase40
I struck up a partnership with the owner of the largest forum in my vertical.
I just published this blog post about the whole process a few days ago:

How One Strategic Partnership Generated Hockey Stick Growth For Our Online
Community [http://justinblase.quora.com/How-One-Strategic-
Partnership-G...](http://justinblase.quora.com/How-One-Strategic-Partnership-
Generated-Hockey-Stick-Growth-For-Our-Online-Community?srid=jII&share=1)

------
phinett
Similar to what others have said...when I setup my DJ mixes website for
electronic dance music back in 2008 ([http://www.house-
mixes.com](http://www.house-mixes.com)), I literally jumped on to like-minded
forums asking if people would be willing to trial it out, there was only a
handful of competitors at the time which helped I suppose, but today we have
over 550,000 registered users and an extremely active site.

------
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.

------
junglhilt
At Jungl VPN we do the following:

1) Personally craft a unique, thoughtful reply to every sales question. 2) Use
our own VPN ourselves on a daily basis so we can empathize with our customers
and improve our product 3) Provide stellar support for our product. For
example remotely troubleshooting issues on customers computers or setting up a
custom VPN server temporarily if customers are in a pinch. 4) Reward our
influential customers by offering a referral fee.

www.jungl.me

------
wuhha
We had a idea for a group messenger tool to bridge teams and their customers
([http://peer.im](http://peer.im)). Then we signed up an advisor to help us on
sales and marketing. His is a sales director so he started used this tool in
his team. Then we had a media press covered which brings us several dozen of
real users who can give us feedback and iterate on features.

~~~
isadeal
I checked out your site. The product looks very promising.

------
pypetey
How should I acquire users for classified ads website? I've done this site
recently, it's my first personal project:
[http://oglos.info/](http://oglos.info/)

I managed got some ads etc. I will appreciate feedback :) and suggestions
related with the site (it's not in english but it's extremely easy so it
should be understandable).

------
vetleen
I work with a startup that sells education games to elementary schools in
Norway. We did a survey, where we sent out 600 forms to teachers and got 154
responses. At the end of the form we had an extremely short description of the
concept and a check-box for “yes, I would like to try this product together
with my students”. We got 94 signups from that.

------
davidw
With LiberWriter, I targeted forums where our users actually hang out, and
gave useful answers to questions, with the URL at the end of the message as a
sort of '.signature'.

HN is far, far away from our target audience, so posts here - even on the top
of the front page - have gotten me pretty much 0 conversions. That's fine,
though.

~~~
dclara
Me too. I tried hard here, but I dare not to attaché the URL with every post.
I got 0 conversations too, even though part of my target users/customers are
here.

~~~
eli
Putting your URL at the bottom of every comment is actually against the HN
guidelines:
[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

But yeah, I would think few startups would find the HN community a bullseye.

~~~
dclara
I know. That's why I only embed URLs when it's relevant to the topic and
provide my input to the topic first. I usually got negative points up to -4
which made me so frustrated.

------
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.

~~~
esdailycom
How did you get referrals from a mailing list you were a subscriber to? Could
you elaborate?

------
nhebb
Before launching my first product, I wrote ten articles on related subjects
and put up an email sign-up form. The article were static html pages, not blog
posts. They were howto's and other reference pieces that had lasting traffic
value.

~~~
qsun
Did it work out (or not)?

------
dangrossman
Advertising. AdWords PPC and banners on relevant sites. You can use tools like
[http://mixrank.com/](http://mixrank.com/) (YC S11) to see where your
competitors advertise and what ads they use.

------
arikrak
If you have a project associated with your startup, you can launch it on
Kickstarter and get both users and money. That's what I did for Learneroo.com.

~~~
jamesq
Hoe did you find the Kickstarter experience in terms of getting traction and
interest with users? Did you promote the Kickstarter campaign elsewhere too?

------
ry0ohki
Who is your customer? You need to go to where they are. Depending on your
customer there will be wildly different marketing strategies.

------
MarkIceberg
HN got me the first 260 users for [http://crushify.org](http://crushify.org)
(Reddit was a no show.)

------
GnarfGnarf
Not post on HN or Reddit, that's for sure.

~~~
dclara
Thank you. Agreed.

------
BorisMelnik
cold called - I hired interns and commission based workers to call people they
thought would buy our product. I didn't have to worry about selling it to the
customers, I just had to figure out how to sell it to our sales reps. Cold
calling worked great, just got tired of the bS that came along with it.

~~~
missn
Can you elaborate what you meant by the "bs that came along with it"? Was it
mostly setting up the system (getting the right folks, script, etc.) that was
hard?

Really interested to hear your experience (and the "pain points") as I know
someone who is trying to write a book about this and he's always on the
lookout for folks with different perspectives.

------
raghavb
Bunkmate.in told a few friends about it in college and . Grew from there.

------
prottmann
Thats the holy grail of marketing, and you will not get the answer here.

------
cmelbye
Advertising on social media and lots of instrumentation.

------
mehulkar
Reach out to 100 strategic people individually.

------
sharemywin
you might try your local chamber of commerce. I believe one the mail apps
tried that. probably need a general business app.

------
pekk
What kind of customer are you trying to get?

------
mbesto
Talk to people. In person.

------
enra
Told friends, twitter, HN.

------
jarnix
I would give a kidney.

------
pikachu_is_cool
I 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.

~~~
tokyonoise
Could you let us know about your product?

~~~
pikachu_is_cool
Sorry I can't, i'd be revealing my identity.

