Ask HN: Founders, what was the major sourcing channel for your first 100 users?
Please also share target audience to correlate better.
1. First one I started 10 years ago. I built a bot that auto DMed people in various internet forums. My first 100 users came from that. The product is highly shareable, so it quickly grew. Now it's 1.6M users (most of them free).
2. Second started 3.5 years ago. My first 100 users came from simply emailing the newsletter list from my first company. This product has no free plan, so it became profitable instantly.
3. Third started 1 month ago. And it's been a struggle. I got 10k free users just by emailing my list, but 0 paying users. So I tried ads and had similar results from the ads. Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.
Summary: once you have an email list and viral social loops built-in, marketing gets easier.
I also have it posting to a slack channel so we can quickly scan any urgent ones while I'm working.
Bugs pop in heavily on new feature launches but then it's the usual "my email didn't arrive" type of questions.
Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.
Subscriptions, insurance, bills have skyrocketed. I believe many are taking a step back and rethinking necessities.
In the product itself, social is part of the value. So the more they interact, the more value they get. Similar to any social network you see today.
I do this a number of ways, none original. Reactions, upvotes, achievements, streaks, creating summary videos (like Spotify year in review), public recommendations, etc
I see what you did there.
This phenomenon isn't new. The book The Long Tail posited (way back) that even niche software could make millions now that the Internet had made it cheaper to reach just the right audience.
Teenagers, Zach Yadegari (calai.app) and Blake Anderson (apex.inc), who built million dollar app-based businesses in 6mo, plan to release a book on it: https://x.com/zach_yadegari/status/1845842051314614681 / https://archive.md/xXf9a
> Third started 1 month ago. And it's been a struggle. I got 10k free users just by emailing my list, but 0 paying users. So I tried ads and had similar results from the ads. Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.
It's just not worth the price. You're competing against CapCut by ByteDance & that's "good enough." Their platform is freemium, uploads directly to tiktok etc. & can get you serviceable subtitles quickly.
There are a bajillion and one ways to cut videos. And they're all extremely price competitive. You aren't competing against DaVinci's studio license. You're competing against the free one.
And at the stated price point, I might as well buy Adobe After effects for $23 & use it alongside DaVinci's free license.
The value just isn't there.
But I see products like submagic doing $1m arr and I'm at loss. How are they doing so well? It can't just be their editor.
So I think the way forward for my product, if any, is to just target b2b for API usage or target users who want long form video cut into viral clips automatically. I need to niche it down.
> How are they doing so well? It can't just be their editor.
Isn't this by definition Spamming people as you were using bots to mass DM people?
Channels get saturated and marketers start looking for new ones with les noise/competition.
The oldest that I can think of is old school markets where is shops yells to tell you how good of a deal you're gonna have if you buy from them. I think they date back to the middle ages, no?
I can't hear them here in Canada, and indeed, I can't hear everyone on the planet who is shouting.
Unlike spam.
You got the initial product invite from the GP?
1. I made an app for the colorblind in 2015 and got my first 100 (and more) users from the r/colorblind subreddit.
2. I made a breathing app in 2017 and got my first users from r/breathing, r/breathwork, and r/meditation subreddits.
3. I recently made a productivity app for the mac and got my first users from r/macapps subreddit.
Reddit is incredibly powerful if you are building something niche and are already a part of the community. Also, the results are compounding because some of my posts get good SEO traffic so I still get a handful of users from Reddit every day.
May fate preserve us all from power outages.
Should be a movie.
Lots of benefits can be gained from practicing disciplined breathing, and some people want an app.
I have found that my breathing has become quite undisciplined and irregular. Also inadequate support, in terms of coming from the diaphragm and all. I sang in choirs for over 20 years. Well-regulated breathing is essential to our health in all respects.
Absolutely. Including mental and spiritual health.
Startup idea to unlock phone/PC by a number of deep breaths as password?
I too launched a business that got a large amount of customers from Reddit. In my case, it was a niche retail product for musicians who are into synthesizers. I was a longtime contributor to a few related subreddits and launched the product by producing a series of tutorials that featured the product, but didn’t really advertise it. Many thousands of people viewed the tutorials, noticed the product, and quickly figured out where to get it in the video description. People then bought the product and started using it in their own videos, so it spread quickly. This led to thousands of units sold on every continent (except Antarctica, of course).
I generally agree with this but I will say (at least in my niche) that I’ve been pretty surprised recently with both how 1) anti ‘self-promotion’ some subreddits have become and 2) how brutal people will be if your thing is not fully free and open source. I understand where they’re coming from, but I’d recommend software founders know this when trying to use Reddit as a distribution channel.
I think you're right. And this is one of the reasons I like HN so much. You're not seen as evil for sharing a software project that is paid and closed-source. It's much more friendly for this kind of stuff.
Ironically this post was flagged and got invisible within minutes of postings. However mod team was super helpful to restore it.
Whether you can rank for a specific thing people are searching and looking for is also a good litmus test of 1) is there demand for your thing ... are there people searching Google for your solution, and 2) is the market not so extremely saturated with competitors that you're able to rank?
I run a translation company, so when we started the target was not "website translation" .. it was "website translation for squarespace" (and similar niche use cases which our product worked equally well for). A the company grew, so did the breadth of our use cases.
Our first 500 users were people paying $10/mo to translate their squarespace site. The next 500 users were enterprise companies paying many orders of magnitude more to translate everything/anything you can imagine.
And as for "the first" customer... that would be the company I was working for while developing the MVP. Who actually paid me $20/mo for the product while I was working for them! (And yes, the employment contract said they owned all my IP for side projects, and no it wasn't difficult to get them to sign a simple letter negating those terms since I was open and honest about my side projects - people on HN go bonkers with legalities of contracts when in reality people tend to operate on good faith)
The 2nd customer was a cold outreach where I offered to basically do all of the work manually if the solution I was offering didn't work off the shelf. Essentially I was offering them free professional services.
The 3-10th customer came through the SEO scheme.
I wrote on this exact topic (literally - how I got my first 100 paying users) here: https://swiftjectivec.com/The-First-100-Subscribers/
Maybe a dozen of those became customers right away, and then it was word of mouth from there.
Another commenter mentioned finding relevant forums on Reddit, it's the exact same idea.
This is all very fresh (as of 1 week ago)
- Show HN: Did quite well - Post to Reddit (r/sideprojects, r/saas, etc): Did better than expected. 40 sign-ups to our waitlist over 24 hours.
If you don't have a product ready (like us), have a Waitlist on your landing page. Ours is built using our own dev-tool, so we're showing off the product and collecting sign ups.
It also helped that our landing page looks really good!
The images on the landing page are off center by design. It's supposed to be quirky/snazzy.
Perfect example of form over function, although I like showing a much bigger version of our product screenshots for mobile users. I can't think of a better solution.
To add something else to my original comment: We're going to try Reddit ads very soon. Has anyone used Reddit ads and had a successful experience?
(Basically, we really like Reddit for finding the first x customers)
See for example the disproportionate number of comments on HN from users who disable Javascript and or (all) cookies and remark about a site experience based on it (can't read article, some aspect not working, etc), yet from general statistics represents a niche minority.
(Which isn't to say that any such critiques are invalid either, just an observation on perceived audience)
* Good: That side of HN is within the target for a little niche Web site I plan to launch in a few weeks.
* Bad: I used a Web framework that requires 10x the hosting resources that it should (resume-driven-development), so I might have to upgrade from free-tier hosting before HN mention, just to not be embarrassed by hug of death.
We built up a partner network worldwide, so we had to find relevant partners who would help serve our potential customers in the relevant way that already had those customers. They are easyish to find and approach because they are trying to achieve a similar goal, although sometimes more generically if they are integrators (selling software, hardware and services). Sometimes they sell a competitive product so our USP had to be tight - such as not requiring a year of services to start up but maybe an hour or two.
Others were complimentary tech partners and very kindly helped spread the word, and got a foot in the door for direct engagement.
If each partner has 10 good customers, then thats 10 partners you have to engage with. We were more often than not involved with the relationship with the customer, and got direct knowledge of the customer problem, how well we fit solving the problem, identify UX issues, sales issues, support issues etc..
It’s been a successful way to start.
Like, cold outreach with a pitch then a doc saying more, what would you recommend to be in the doc now that you have that experience and how did you filter and find your potential partners? Could be over email too if you prefer.
This was for a tool to speed up making educational videos, so I tried to reach out to people who were doing online courses and educational materials.
What's important is after you get the first N customers, the way you acquire customers will likely change. You'll exhaust your personal network eventually. Knowing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is important and so is having a good understanding that the value/price of your product dictates what kind of sales/marketing you can do.
Things like cold emailing are fine for your first few customer development calls, but generally if your deal size is less than $1-2,000/year then (with exceptions) you should stop doing this after you get the first customers.
I run a low price point SaaS for SMEs (avg price is <$100/month), so this required switching from just messaging people I knew, to getting SEO, word of mouth, and the viral loop working. Outbound/inbound sales is not economical at that price point.
You can still do cold email don’t get me wrong. But generally for a low ARPA service (<$2k) you want the product to be simple, self-serve, and for customer acquisition to be mostly inbound (ergo from marketing efforts, not outbound emails). Low price points require low CAC, and outbound sales is generally not.
From Apollo, which sells an outbound sales tool: “As a benchmark, try to achieve at least a 20%-30% win rate by closing 2-5 deals per month per rep”. If you have a full time sales rep chasing 5 $100/year deals per month they will close $6k/year. At $1k ARPA they might close $60k/year - after paying salaries you’re not making a profit.
Obviously this doesn’t apply in the early stages, but after you have N customers. Chasing outbound sales for a low price point product is just a recipe for low/slow growth.
Thanks for detailed explanation. Do you have some ideas on how to determine N?
What problem is cold email solving, and will it eventually solve it? If the product is good enough for the initial customers, I’d switch to marketing and inbound sales.
One reason to stick with cold email is if the product is not good enough yet, so you need to chase people to talk to you and get them to help you improve it
https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/top-15-acquisition-channels...
It is better to actually read through all the anecdotes you can find, seek out the ones that match your audience, and compile your own data and conclusions.
The list should go first then go on with "here's how we go to it" for those who want the details.
First who are clear with their destinations, and simply want the best journey towards it.
Second who want to know different journeys to finalize their destinations.
Majority falls in first set, but the article is written for second.
Most new founders think that blasting your 'startup' to Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Twitter, etc. will result in first customers -- that that's 'marketing' -- but that's far from the truth for the majority of products. And contrary to popular belief, the chances your product is one of the exceptions is near-zero.
Those social media platforms bring in 'tire-kickers' and devs that value their time at $0, not customers. These aren't the first users that you should be listening to, because they will always complain about price, lack of niche functionality, etc., yet it's pointless to listen to them -- because they aren't buyers.
You want to market towards buyers, not just users, and ads are a good way to do that for early companies that have no brand awareness or distribution.
Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads (especially bootstrapped firms or solopreneurs), and in some way growing organically and slowly gives you more time to develop product better.
Having said that, I am in agreement with the essence of this reply.
My company is bootstrapped, and I'm a solo founder. If you don't have any money to grow your business, then you aren't going to be able to do much until you have some money. Hard truth, but it takes money to earn money -- either your money, or somebody else's. You have to get buyer's eyes on you, somehow.
You can start with a small budget and build from there. For the first year I only spent £100 per month on Adwords.
The bigger problem is Google et al make it very easy to waste money on their ads. You have to pay a lot of attention to the detail and constantly fight against their defaults which are nearly always in their favour rather than yours.
That's me in 2018. Spent a good amount of money in Google Ads and only attracted users that we did not want.
Just putting negative keywords wasn't sufficient, and even one miss was enough to waste all efforts.
Best way is learning through practical experience by starting with small budget, and increasing slowly with refinements.
How do you target ads when many B2C versions are trying same thing. For example, image editor that are targeted towards b2b.
I get initial interest but then people drag their feet for trials and paying after that.
Any thoughts how can I counter these drag and boost sales?
- More sophisticated logins: Google/etc.
- Integrations
- Attestations (e.g. HIPAA compliance etc.)
- Team management functionality
- APIs
- Audit trails
- Offline communications & support. I'll add payment via invoice here. I have onboarded Enterprise customers who only needed Enterprise pricing because they needed to bay by check, and/or they wanted a phone number to call for help (which they tended to not use often).
I will say that if your market is well-covered in B2C offerings, you may want to either niche down further by adding core features businesses need. For example, can you help them enforce some kind of corporate standard (possibly via workflow)?
Or you may want to get into a different market altogether.
For me personally PH would be more like ideas to copy from.
Hence the importance of industry knowledge and gut feeling.
Entrepreneurship is not for weak hearts.
Hacker News for the next 10,000.
Target audience was devs.
What made you prefer HN over dev platforms like StackOverflow or Github?
Next 50-100 was cold emails.
After that, mostly word-of-mouth.
Target audience was publishers (audience development/growth)
Ads also generate installs but since my app is a one-time sale the economics don't work out. If it costs ~$4 in ads to get an install and the one-time in-app purchase is $9 you're losing money.
Your channels are dependent on your product and market you're trying to serve. For us it's b2b enterprise customers in the United States. So email works well. If you are trying to sell to developers, or union carpenters in venezuela its going to be different per case.
I guess businesses from outside USA would need bigger effort to generate trust.
We mainly use it as a prospecting tool.
In other words SPAM.
Unsolicited messages sent over the internet is exactly what @twosdai is doing.
I've hired people who cold emailed me - in the right way. I delete without reading cold emails that seem to be bulk sent. There is a difference.
Targeted Linkedin outreach: A specific class of professionals
I had a little bit of luck as well that someone shortly after I started the newsletter mentioned it here on Hacker News when on an Ask HN for cool newsletters that they followed and this brought a bunch of users as well at the beginning of my newsletter.
Today I barely do any active marketing for it, I believe mostly comes organically from word of mouth and also from newsletter directories/aggregators.
https://news.gipety.com/hn/41862332/k/175/s/ask-hn-founders-...
The podcast is quite convincing and entertaining but not as useful at bringing out all the key points as I'd hoped it would be. Still useful for getting a quick overview though.
I had absolutely zero intentions to market it, but seems like there was a niche need as other apps weren’t making it simple for the feature I was looking for. Gives you dopamine hits when you can see others using the app, especially when you know you’re doing it just for fun and no money is involved.
It was this Show HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980
That was before showing something on HN was called "Show HN" though.
Converting beta testers to paid users took a long time, but eventually it became a profitable business.
If you make something people want, it's easy and you need very little marketing.
In my industry, there is a clear want for a better product but that isn't sufficient for them to switch due to natural resistance to change. Hence significant marketing is needed through trusted channels to remove that fear-of-unknown from their minds.
To get 1,000, we used SEO.
Our product helps people get ready for the Duolingo English Test, so our target audience was well-defined from the beginning.
There are also SEO pages which do not have any useful content. I think I should have more of them because my competitors have only SEO pages but I don’t have time for it as I have to focus on the product and customer support. Probably a good mix between useful content blog posts (maybe with SEO filling) and strictly SEO pages is best to bring traffic.
I don't know my icp and I'm prepmf.
How can I find people to try it?
How can I find people that could actually bring end users to my b2b product? I need people with existing distribution
Then you would approach them at their place of hanging out (Reddit, HN, Twitter are most common suggestions in this thread).
And hard to find distributors until you are able to prove PMF to them.
Second startup: word of mouth