Ask HN: Where have you found your early adopters | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where have you found your early adopters

10 pointswiwoworld16 comments

Just curious to read your early adopters finding journeys :) Would love to hear something unusual or funny for example :)

View on HN

I promoted Ambiphone [0] (white noise/ambient sounds/music) on HN [1], Twitter and Reddit.

The HN post made the front page and got me the most traffic and feedback I'd had so far (about 6k visitors). It also resulted in articles on BoingBoing and Metalfloss, among others, which also sent a decent number of users.

The 1440 newsletter [2] also picked it up - just a small one-liner in a list of interesting links - and sent about 8k visitors in one day.

On Twitter it got picked up, unexpectedly by quite a lot of DJs. Turns out that a lot of DJs get tinnitus and white noise can be really helpful to mask it. So I got much less traffic from that but some really nice feedback on how useful it is. That also led to The Economist's podcast team contacting me and I ended up featuring in a piece about ambient music and white noise apps.

I did try ProductHunt and it got nowhere. It probably didn't help that I didn't really promote the launch, but it also got buried under a lot of AI projects. Ho hum.

User numbers have stabilised now at about 600-800 a day. I'm not really sure where to turn next - I hate constantly banging on about it on my personal Twitter and reposts of things that have got traction are discouraged on HN and Reddit (rightly so). I'm happy that it's got a decent userbase though.

[0]: https://ambiph.one

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856999

[2]: https://join1440.com/newsletter/florida-drug-imports-starsky...

I'm glad you posted about it here! I've not come across it before and really enjoying it right now.

Thanks! It's one of the few side projects I've actually followed through on releasing. There are hundreds of similar products (Noisli, A Soft Murmur, myNoise, tons of apps) which is usually why I lose interest but I hubristically thought I could build something better, or at least different enough that people would be interested, or free enough that people would be able to overlook any missing features.

I guess lots of competition means there's definitely an audience for it at least.

But that's the thing: I wasn't looking for this, and even having found it, I won't bother looking at "the competition". In my mind I don't even see "missing features" because I have zero awareness of what features could be.

I'll be honest, would I pay for it? Probably not, because I already pay Spotify. But I did look you up on LinkedIn earlier today, so as a calling card it works.

And, judging by the parent comment, you clearly have a knack for marketing it, which tends to be the differentiating factor...

They're the ones hacking together a solution for more expensive.

I made a health recipe app. The early adopters were using blogs and posting recipes to Facebook.

I did e-commerce. The early adopters were hiring agents to go around selling their products or paying "personal shopper" fees for friends who were at a larger city to post certain goods to them.

I made a meditation app. The early adopters hired a consultant to make sure that employees sit quietly in front of a mirror for 20 minutes and then record their emotions into a notebook.

I made a digital punch card app for lockdown. Early adopters were taking selfies when they got into work and posting it to an FB group.

I worked on a sports social media app. Early adopters were selling bicycle tires in WhatsApp groups because people didn't trust the e-commerce sites. The only way to build trust was to hang around these people and talk about bicycles.

I posted on HN before heading to lunch (at my law firm) on day. Got tons of users that way (but not as many as I'd have gotten if I had an email signup form on the site...doh). I later learned it was the 9th-most-popular Show HN post ever. [1]

I also got some good traction posting on a couple subreddits, but I learned that you have to be very careful abiding by the rules about posting about your own stuff, and other details. After a couple posts with amazing trajectories that were shot down, I stopped even trying. I know some people have had more success by convincing their users to post there, which sidesteps much of the potential drama around self-promotion.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784

I feel bit ashamed that I heard about HN just last week, although I am in a search of early adopters for quite a bit. :D

Who, demographically, maybe even stereotypically, do you envision your product helping?

Do you mean my product or gnicholas's? If you mean our product the early adopters that we imagine are young locals who are searching what is to be attended in their area & tourists who are visiting and want to find what to do in the area.

More detailed:

Concerts: - 20-40 age - concerts as interest - > 2-3 concerts per year - male & female - big cities - music lovers - following famous musicians - Spotify/iTunes account - who are missing interesting concerts - who like local outgoings - earn good money - vote for music charts - single - artists - Tech Enthusiasts - students

Parties: - 18-30 age - night life lovers - single - big cities - male & female - music lovers - social media users - students - Tinder users - Friday and Saturday are out - networking - extroverts/ social - travel/tourists

Sport: - male - 18-45 - read sport articles - read sport websites - watch sport on TV - part of sport communities (social network, fan clubs) - in relationship/married - cities - who are former or current athlete - Livescore, etc. users - Betting lovers - ESPN/NFL/NBA Pass - DAZN app user - tourist - students

Theater: - 30-65 - high education - top earners - part of cultural groups - politics/actual news - society activists (NGOs, Foundations, etc.) - in relationship/married - male & female - high social status - artists

Tech Enthusiasts: - people who like to test new stuff

Those are all pretty specific avenues you can use to capture users!

Perform cheap/reasonably cheap (for your goals) advertising, like in Arts and Culture type newspapers, billboards or building-side ads.

Digital ads on social media like Instagram and dare I say TikTok, geotargeted in the areas your app is bringing up the most events/where your highest quality users can even potentially be.

LinkedIn is the number one way for me to find early adopters. I love browsing LinkedIn and learning about new tech, and I think others do the same and like my content!

At its peak, I’ve received 10,000 views from LinkedIn in a week. I post interesting content every day, and I promote the latest happenings in my business and startup.

A lot of the AI community has migrated to LinkedIn after the collapse of Twitter/X for AI influencers.

You can check out my LinkedIn by searching “Josh agilend” in LinkedIn search :)

Out of interest, how many other folk here use LinkedIn in this manner?

Admittedly I find LinkedIn for the most part a pretty horrible place. It’s filled with dark patterns, people never really being genuine and thus always in a weird sort of “I am totally a normal casual human being right now and definitely not pretending because I might make people angry and lose my job or hurt my career otherwise” mode. Feels super artificial and sort of like a constant popularity contest of demonstrating peacocks and the occasional “congratulations on your X” post that LinkedIn told them to make.

I recommend you post across these sites. 1. Hacker New 2. LinkedIn (Join the relevent groups and post in these groups) 3. ProductHunt (you can only post once) 4. IndieHackers 5. AppSumo 6. Reddit Groups

LinkedIn, when I worked on a B2B product

Did you do manual outreach, do searches for conversations and jump into the comments, or something else?

Only manual outreach. It was a high-ticket, high-touch sales process. Few prospects, high effort dedicated to each sale.

For low- or mid-ticket products where a landing page is suitable to collect leads, commenting on other people's posts can attract a lot of attention.

But don't market in the comments. It's too obvious and will be flagged as spam.

Use the profile sub-title (what shows up below your name) to write something that will entice your audience to click and view your profile. When people view your comment, they'll also view this statement.

In your bio description, write about the pain you're solving. Invite people to visit a web page, read a post you published before, send you a direct message, whatever.

Connecting with your target audience is also good. Just send an invitation saying you work on the same field and you'd like to stay in touch, whatever.

The book "The LinkedIn Playbook", bu Adam Houlahan, is a good source of guidance on creating a personal brand and selling on LinkedIn.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com