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Comment by dustedcodes | Hacker News Reader

How long did it take you to find your first paying customer and which channels did you find to be most successful in acquisition?

I've just launched my own SaaS as a Solopreneur (https://msgdrop.io) and and trying to figure out where to invest most of my limited free time to grow it now.

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Nice looking page? Did you design it? If so, where did you get the graphics?

My design work looks like a kindergartener drew it with a fat crayon on Big Chief paper! ;-)

Yes I designed it myself and I did all the drawings myself on an iPad Pro with the pen. I wanted to create a unique and relatable website which didn't look like every other default Starter template and I also was too cheap to pay for professional images so whenever my brain was fried in the evening and I couldn't do any coding work anymore I grabbed my iPad and drew a couple graphics for the current page I was working on whilst winding down in front of the telly watching some British drama series which my wife picked and I didn't need to focus on anyway LOL

Completely understand fried brain and TV with the wife.

Thanks for the response

Paid advertising or organic marketing with reels/shorts and blog posts that are SEO optimized,lastly, a bit of luck.

Thank you, I'll try the blog posts with SEO route first :)

A quick easy (but a bit dirty) trick is to post in a couple appropriate sub-reddits asking for a solution to a problem your app solves and let the comments organically populate. Make sure your question will be worded similarly to a search query on google. Come back a few days later after nobody is looking at your post any longer and edit your question to say you found a solution and link to your website. This is sometimes an effective way to get traffic via search since so many people append reddit to their search queries.

Also, you could just reply to your question with a link to your app under a different account but I'm not sure this as effective as having the link in the post which guarantees the link will be seen if someone clicks on that Reddit thread via Google, otherwise, there is no guarantee that your comment will get up voted and be visible, unless of course you game this also.

I started work on billing after this HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10431524

Billing was ready in December 2015, and the first customer ($5 MRR) was in March 2016.

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