How To Get Your First 1,000 Users (2011) | Hacker News Reader

How To Get Your First 1,000 Users (2011)

viniciusvacanti.com

106 pointsColinWright26 comments

I once started a social network around car culture. It did OK, and we got an exit offer, but decided to pivot to something else (which was the right move).

Anyways, the way we got our early users was nontraditional. We went in person to car shows, took pictures of the cars, making sure one of them was with a polaroid camera. We then handed the Polaroid to the owner of the car and asked if we could feature their car on our website. If they said yes, we wrote out a email/pass on the back of the polaroid and then went home and set up their account. This seeded our original social graph.

Harder to do these days, but don't forget about your legs. It's a lot easier to convince people in person than over a rote email.

We got on Techcrunch as well, but it didn't help nearly as much. Techcrunch is mostly good for the inner industry[0]

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2006/06/11/cnet-veterans-launch-boomp...

Doing things that don't scale is the best way to obtain loyal users.

Oh, I remember Boompa! I was at Edmunds when we rolled out CarSpace.

https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/edmundscom-launches-cars...

Do you think harder to do these days because the existing social networks are so deeply entrenched?

For the most part yes. I think it's also harder because Facebook, YouTube and Reddit pretty much ate up community message boards. My original premise was that any magazine in an Airport had enough community to build a website around. We simply looked for communities that had crappy websites and tried to fill the space. It worked well then, but it wouldn't be a strategy I'd employ now.

Niche social networks are easier to get traction with today than at any other time in the past decade. Vast numbers of people are turned off by the vile major networks like Twitter and Facebook, which are overflowing with hate, calls to violence, constant threats, psychotic mobs that will try to ruin your life over basic disagreements, and so on. The future of social media - where the best experiences will be had - is in niche communities that are heavily insular and can easily blockade against terrible users and their terrible posts.

I agree with all that, but I think people just make a discord server in 10 minutes when they want a niche insular community. The terrible users get blocked out and then go complain about discord server mods on reddit :)

My guess "in person" is harder these days due to COVID-19.

A lot of these industry gatherings have either been cancelled or gone virtual.

Interesting! I am trying to start a social network around car culture, I’d be interesting in knowing your thoughts!

Unfortunately I'm not a good person to ask. I didn't own a car at the time, which was part of the problem :D

I curated a list of 400+ places to post your startup [1]. Getting your first 1000 users aren't that difficult when you know where to find them.

What i do is:

- Post to startup directories (brings some traffic and some shout-out)

- Post to communities, to better understand your customers and make friends

- Create some content around your product and post it to Facebook groups, big Sub reddit and blog that allow guest post.

That is pretty much how i get my early users to get the first feedback and iterate on my first version. Then I go with ads and newsletter sponsorship.

[1] https://spreadtheworld.net

In some ways, it's quite astonishing to see how little has changed since 2011.

"Get on Hacker News and Techcrunch, post ads on Facebook and Google Adwords". I think back in 2011 I would expect this list to be completely obsolete in 10 years. Back then, it felt like the whole ecosystem would shift every two years..

The current players are comfortably entrenched. Thankfully China does not allow them to operate there. It gives us some hope that new players will form and become competitive like TikTok. Google and friends are only beholden to their stock holders.

Google and Facebook destroy competitors. And make sure new entrants cannot gain traction. They are about as anti-competitive as they can be.

> Google and Facebook destroy competitors.

I agree that they both hold onto their monopolies. But I don't think it's because they "destroy competition". Take Bing for example: it is quite alive. Google just delivers better search results. Yes the results have been deteriorating, but every time I get frustrated with them and try Bing as standard search engine, I switch back after a week. I don't like the google monopoly, but their core product is still not being challenging by anything I know of.

To be fair, Google can deliver that quality because they have so much more data. For every search in Bing where a user clicks on the first result and never clicks back on the first search, Google will much more. Likewise, for every frustrated chain of search refinements in Bing, Google will have many more to learn from.

Their position as market share leader gives them everything they need to know to maintain quality. Any deterioration in search quality with the data Google has means far worse than the competition in relative terms.

Which is a complete shame since people like quality in absolute terms so it’s gonna stay that way. Even I’ve tried DuckDuckGo and Bing - regardless of how not-Google they are, the results are absolutely worse. So I’m not switching either, despite knowing how Google keeps its position.

Have you tried DuckDuckGo? If yes, how's your experience?

Yes, I have... same experience. I switch back because I get frustrated.

it's way way way behind

First 1,000 users is great if you have something with a "free" version. Any advice on how to get your first 1,000 customers?

Came here to say this. Ten years later, there are many more entrepreneurs who think about revenue (and even profitability!), not just sending their user numbers to the moon.

Presumably the first thousand users will help you to figure out what are the most important aspects of your product/service, what you can charge for, what you should give away for free, etc.

It would be really interesting to see a follow-on article titled How To Get Your First 1,000 Customers.

Focus on getting just 1 customer. 1000 customers is already a sustainable business if you are running things properly.

Yeah, I was going to note that probably 100 customers is a more appropriate target for B2C, and 10 for B2B.

I do wonder what if you are mobile first? You are trying to get the first 1000 users for your mobile app, how would you then pitch on HN? Again the same landing page but with links to the app store?

If that's the path to install, yes. I think most apps have some sort of web landing page to sell the idea that then sends user to the app store when they are ready to download

Yeah, that sounds fine to me.

Not sure what your confusion is...

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2193539

Reply on news.ycombinator.com