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Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

I think it would be interesting to see a followup to this about when they make their first $1,000, $10,000, $100,000 etc...

Getting free users is not the hardest thing in the world. People like free things. Getting them to pay you is a different thing altogether.

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I had an insightful manager once who told me 'you'd be surprised how hard it is to sell something for free.' The point being, getting their attention and usage is in fact pretty difficult.

Agree. Especially since people are sick of signing up for services, especially when it requires username and password.

I've always had the opposite problem. Users were willing to pay, but I didn't have a good enough user acquisition funnel to justify it so it shut off payments.

It took me a while before figuring out how to get to 1000, then 10000, then 100000, but user acquisition and retention are imo the hardest things for a first-time product maker.

I actually think monetization is easy once you have the user base unless your product inherently does not provide any real value.

I bet anything that 99% of startups fail due to traction, not inability to monetize.

I totally agree! Getting 1000 people to stay is hard, which is part of the point here. We want to focus on engagement.

Getting 1000 people to pay if they stick around is much easier than if they don't.

Getting free users is not the hardest thing in the world.

Out of curiosity: have you done it, or are you just speculating that it isn't difficult?

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