9 ms·
Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
I am building a B2C AI SaaS with $50/month price. How would you go about getting with first 100 users and then the next 500 users.
What we are currently doing:
1) Cold outreach to power users - to convert them into affiliates.
2) Cold outreach to individuals who have target ICP communities.
3) SEO for more long term (not for the first 500)
- the_arun 1y agoAnyone using Podcasts or social marketing?
- nikolayasdf123 1y agofinally! surprised to scroll so much on HN to find this comment. do SWEs on HN are really so bad at marketing?
- deekshaaashaaa 1y agolet me know when you figure out
- starbase3496 1y agoThe YC Startup School series on YouTube is pretty good! There’s a video dedicated to the topic: https://youtu.be/hyYCn_kAngI?si=cSCikwHVu5e0NGf5 https://youtu.be/hyYCn_kAngI?si=cSCikwHVu5e0NGf5
- dandelion9 1y ago[flagged]
- j45 1y agoDepends on the problem being solved, and where that audience hangs out. I would go find the audience it was built for.
- coolcase 1y agoExperiment alot!
- podnami 1y agoMake a cool product video. It’s easier for people to grok the basic value prop for a product (and it forces you to think about it) vs needing to read product specs. It’s definitely worthwhile using a professional to get it created as it can be used for fundraising/sales etc
- 999900000999 1y agoFind a way to make it free to start. This is how Firebase, Supabase and friends work. Getting 100 people to sign up for a free service is still work, but significantly less.
- amanchanda 1y agoWe have a free version. For now, we have kept it invite-only. Question is TOFU.
- CrulesAll 1y agoMaking it 100X harder to get them to pay for it subsequently. "If you’re good at something, never do it for free" - Joseph Joker MBA JD. If not, then you are in the ad business.
- sillystu04 1y agoTo play devil's advocate, many successful developer focused companies have gone down this route successfully. Neon, Cloudflare, Firebase, Github and many more have all made free tiers work. I suspect there's a special dynamic for developers. I'm usually more willing to try out new things on personal projects, but I also don't like paying for things on personal projects. At work I don't care how much things cost, but I'll definitely advocate for tools that worked well on personal projects.
- 999900000999 1y agoSupabase doesn't even require a credit card, but your data goes poof in 60 days if you don't pay. Ideally you want your tools to be so easy to use, clients just switch onto a paid plan when they want to get serious.
- hluska 1y agoMany successful companies that we’ve all heard of have free tiers. They offer free tiers because it works. They’re certainly not in the ad business.
- 1y ago
- reillyse 1y agoThe basic (marketing) problem is find where your users hang out and go meet them there. Usually for these kinds of products your customers will congregate somewhere online, reaching them though can be very tough. Try and drill down super narrow (if you can’t find a large community together ). Don’t try to convert new people, find people who are searching for a solution.
- herbst 1y agoThis is what I do before I spend a single minute on building anything. If you don't know how to reach your audience any product will fail
- CrulesAll 1y agoEducation marketing is the trench warfare of marketing. Unless you are a big conglomerate, this is a terrible strategy. "Finding people who are searching for a solution" is maneuver warfare. It's the best strategy, and the only one that should be employed by SMEs. OP is looking for 100 people when in reality they should be looking for 5 people who already know they want the solution you are offering. If the product/service works, these five people will become sales reps for you. NB. The trick is not selling the product to these five people. It is finding these five people.
- vanschelven 1y agoGrown way past 100 users with: • Make a great product. Everyone tells you "build it and they will come" is not working anymore, but it's working _for me_. • Outreach via your network. Talk to people with the intent of learning, not selling. • I'm personally on a freemium model. But that's in the developer-to-developer market, which is vastly different from your B2C EDIT: https://www.bugsink.com/ https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may give an idea of what we're doing.
- amanchanda 1y agoMake a great product. -- > this is an iterative process as per me. Unless users come and try it out, you won't know what a great product looks like. The need is real, and the problem is real. I am one of the users myself. I built it because I felt the need myself. I ran the MVP with 15 others in my network with similar profiles. Quesiton is how to scale beyond that.
- vanschelven 1y agoIs there any word of mouth ("virality") among your existing user-base?
- jll29 1y agoVirality can be the key to growth, and it can be engineered. I almost didn't buy the great book The One Billion Dollar App because of hits clickbait title, but it actually well-elaborates the mechanics (and the mathematics) of viral spread of apps, which not by coincident corresponds to the familiar formulas that people will have seen during the CoViD19 pandemic ("r-coefficient", r or R0 [1]). For example, if you have a mobile app that gives you something free for each friend you invite to it, it may encourage some folks to share with r friends... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
- herbst 1y agoSame here. When I create a product I try to build something that makes a good impression and if done well everything kinda goes from there. My first SaaS was basically traffic kick-started from a single comment on the digital ocean blog, that described a complicated solution to the problem I 'solved'. No freemium either.
- jrvarela56 1y agoFirst 100 users, meet them one by one wherever you can (forums, friends, ex-coworkers) and call them to talk to them and help them out with onboarding if needed. Straight up cold outreach and warm intros. Next 500 will most likely come from referrals if these first 100 users are happy. Apply this logic to the jump from 20 to 100 if it makes the task less daunting for you.
- amanchanda 1y agoOk. Makes sense. So basically, what we are doing, you want us to scale that. Correct?
- jrvarela56 1y agoYour current approach has specific techniques I would remove altogether to focus on the core interaction between you and the user: talk to so many of them so often that you truly understand their problem and how they shop for a solution. Once you understand that and make them happy, you’ll come up with ideas to experiment how to get more users.
- amanchanda 1y agoSo, I am one of the users myself. I built it because I needed it. I ran it by few users in my network. We are constantly getting feedback from our early beta users, which are around 200. Not all of them are active. My main problem is TOFU, which I need to solve for.
- jrvarela56 1y agoCheckout stuff by Reforge (reforge.com) to learn about how to prioritize this kind of stuff.
- mpeg 1y agoB2C is hard... Long term, only paid ads and SEO will work (and SEO can be fickle) Short term, run some paid experiments (knowing you will probably not get positive return yet) and maybe some influencer marketing (they'll cost money, but not as much as paid ads depending on the niche)
- amanchanda 1y agoHave you seen results with paid experiments at this early stage? One thing we are considering is to do a paid masterclass (low ticket) and run paid ads for that. Bring them in the funnel and get them signed up to use the product.
- mpeg 1y agoWithout knowing what the vertical is, hard to say whether a masterclass like that would provide good results. I know for some verticals things like free webinars etc can provide decent results, but that's usually b2b So, usually paid experiments won't really give you a return at an early stage, but occasionally they can if you get lucky, but at least they'll give you an idea of what your CAC can be, and give you a starting point to start optimising it
- amanchanda 1y agoI just added more context in a comment above. I am building an AI Ghostwriter for LinkedIn content (https://socialhq.me https://socialhq.me)
- carlosjobim 1y agoI've found B2C much easier than B2B, and much more pleasant too. SEO is extremely easy: Write in very clear prose what you are selling and give potential clients as much information as possible. This is all you need for SEO, apart from purely technical stuff like load times. Turning your SEO efforts into real sales is also easy: State your price(s) very clearly on the website and then make it as easy as possible for customers to make a purchase. Get out of their fucking way when they have their wallet out. If you insist on using paid ads and influencers, by God connect the campaigns to specific discount offers so that you know exactly how many sales origin from each channel you are paying to market in.
- abdullin 1y agoI have a course on building AI solutions in business (based on success stories from companies in Europe/USA). Sold ~400 seats so far, mostly through my community and word of mouth. No external ads or cold outreach. The process was classical. Over two years I created a community to sharing cases and insights from building LLM-driven systems. We focused on creating good non-toxic and collaborative atmosphere. No ads or SEO to grow it, standing out by sharing real-world cases and helping others. Thanks to the community, got 100 customers within the beta-testing period. Then 300 more came over the last 4 months, after opening the sales.
- hi_hi 1y agoAre you able to share. I would love to see real world success stories of LLM use cases and integrations, beyond the common ones you see often (code gen, story gen, automated summaries, etc)
- abdullin 1y agoOf course. Most of the AI cases (that turn out to be an actual success) focus around a few repeatable patterns and a limited use of "AI". Here are a few interesting ones: (1) Data extraction. E.g. extracting specs of electronic components from data-sheets (it was applied to address a USA market with 300M per year size). Or parsing back Purchase Order specs from PDFs in fragmented and under-digitized EU construction market. Just a modern VLM and a couple of prompts under the hood. (2) French company saved up to 10k EUR per month on translators for their niche content (they do a lot of organic content, translating it to 5 major languages). Switched from human translators to LLM-driven translation process (like DeepL but understanding the nuances of their business thanks to the domain vocabulary they through in the context). Just one prompt under the hood. (3) Lead Generation for the manufacturing equipment - scanning a stream of newly registered companies in EU and automatically identifying companies that would actually be interested in hearing more about specific types of equipment. Just a pipeline with ~3-4 prompts and a web search under the hood. (4) Finding compliance gaps in the internal documents for the EU fintech (DORA/Safeguarding/Outsourcing etc). This one is a bit tricky, but still boils down to careful document parsing with subsequent graph traversal and reasoning. NB: There also are tons of chatbots, customer support automation or generic enterprise RAG systems. But I don't work much with such kinds of projects, since they have higher risks and lower RoI.
- rwieruch 1y agoNot sure if my "products" compare to yours, but I’ve seen some success with a few of them over the years, maybe there are some takeaways (or pitfalls to avoid) for you: CloudCamping (PMS): 250+ Businesses, 2023 - Positioned as more modern, more accessible, and more affordable than the competition - Limited competition due to the complexity of the product - Personally visited campgrounds to demo the product - Sent physical postcards (old school!) to campgrounds with product updates and announcements - Due to limited competition, it is now ranking very high in the German marked on SEO The Road to React & The Road to Next: 1000+ Users, 2024 - Gave away The Road to React for free in exchange for an email, grew the mailing list this way - Benefited from early timing (luck!), it was the first book on the topic - Initial version wasn’t polished, but I kept iterating and improving it each year - In 2025, released the paid course The Road to Next to my audience, now over 1,000 students enrolled SoundCloud (DJ/Producing as “Schlenker mit Turnbeutel”) - Active from 2010–2015 as a hobby, grew to 10,000+ followers (a lot for the time) - SoundCloud allowed 1,000 direct messages per track - Carefully selected 1,000 high-engagement listeners in my music niche and personally messaged them to check out new tracks So yeah, a mix of timing/luck, outreach that does not scale, being better than the competition I'd say.
- robertlagrant 1y ago> SoundCloud (DJ/Producing as “Schlenker mit Turnbeutel”) Pardon my ignorance - does SoundCloud let you monetise, or is it purely it being cool that people are listening to your tracks?
- rwieruch 1y agoNot ignorant at all. I'm not sure if they’ve added any monetization features over the years. Back then, it was arguably the best platform for getting discovered as a producer or DJ. When I stopped making music, I was getting a lot of requests to play at clubs across Germany and Europe. At the time, I preferred to stay anonymous, so I never made the leap into the professional or public scene. Still, I was in touch with some producers early in their careers on SoundCloud when they had 1000 followers, like Robin Schulz and Felix Jaehn, if those names ring a bell. So yes, I’d say it was (is?) definitely a launchpad for artists. But as far as I know, there was never a real way to monetize on the platform. Unfortunately, when I stopped paying for the Pro version, they removed almost all of my music. Only 5 mixes are still up :')
- deadsec-sea 1y agoIn the spirit of “engineering as marketing” I’ve built a number of tools for clients for lead gen. There’s a surprising number of low hanging fruit keywords that suit simple calculators or forms that solve a simple problem, leading the user to the larger problem that the business in question solves.
- psmyrdek 1y agoShare stuff for free, build credibility, start charging for extra services.
- nikolayasdf123 1y agoobviously!
- Oras 1y agoMy product is a bit different as it is free. Here is what I did: 1. Write a medium article. This helped Google index the name of the product quickly. 2. Post about it on Reddit and HN (neither got massive visitors, but again, SEO helps). 3. Post in any directory I could find. It's a slow, organic process. For now, getting ~70 unique visitors, with a conversion rate of 15%.
- azizali 1y ago[dead]
- RileyJames 1y agoBuilt xonboard, employee onboarding tool for Xero: https://www.xonboard.com.au/ https://www.xonboard.com.au/ Got our first 100 users through the Xero App Store. Now getting well over 100 per month via that channel. No longer our biggest channel, but it was until we started actively marketing our product. The App Store model can work just fine, if you have a compelling value proposition that genuinely adds value to the users of that product. There’s always the threat of being copied, but that’s everywhere. Look at what larger products you could complement via integration. Make sure they have a channel for you (some are useless, Xero is great) Xero App Store: https://apps.xero.com/au/app/xonboard https://apps.xero.com/au/app/xonboard
- criddell 1y ago> target ICP communities Insane Clown Posse? Now I'm interested!
- mixmastamyk 1y agoSo tired of people here throwing out jargon acronyms w/o explanation. Even decades in the industry I don’t know many of them.
- davidjfelix 1y agoIdeal customer profile
- intalentive 1y agoHow Faygo got its first 100 users
- nicman23 1y agodumb luck and a good product
- blitzar 1y agoBot farm in India, VC's didn't notice.
- leosanchez 1y agoIs it true or you forgot /s ?
- e3bc54b2 1y agoMaybe they did, but the strategy is known to be effective and VCs are known to be stupid..
- leosanchez 1y agoBut isn't it fraud?
- qzw 1y agoYou and I may call it that, but in SV that’s just standard growth hacking.
- naman5a 1y agoTry to launch in ProductHunt and Appsumo , Good sites
- alpha_trion 1y agoProductHunt is like 90% bots these days
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- piker 1y agoManaged to scale my legal tech B2B product Tritium (https://tritium.legal https://tritium.legal) through an existing professional network. It's technically B2B but B2C in the sense that it's marketed directly to the end-user, not the enterprise. Probably not yet at a hundred users, but it's heading there. I'm using these initial users to flesh out the frequently asked questions and produce the introduction artifacts to hopefully transition to something more product-led.
- quibono 1y agoI'm not your intended audience but I've had a play with the web preview and I really like it! Is it using WASM for that?
- piker 1y agoThanks a ton. Yes it's WASM. Check out the desktop build! :) It's free unless you want to use it in your practice. [NOTE: Windows build phones home for updates; others don't yet.]
- quibono 1y agoThank you, just downloaded the binary :) As a +1 data point it's performing really well on my machine (although I don't think the dark theme toggle works). Like I said, not the target audience but wishing you good luck with the product! Do you mind sharing the stack you used to build it?
- piker 1y agoNot at all. It's Rust using egui for the UI framework with custom text layout and shaping. It uses PDFium for rendering PDFs.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoIt’s neat but I’m wondering why the immediate mode gui for a word processor?
- ramijames 1y agoMostly, begging.
- cosbgn 1y agoI run a small but fairly successful "embed chatGPT on your site" widget https://rispose.com https://rispose.com I'm acquiring customers by: - Offer a 100% free unlimited solution (with branding) I get a lot of daily clicks from people coming from my customer's website - Offer a really good price. My competitors are about 5X more expensive. I'll eventually maybe raise my price, but for now I have a lot of people switching to my tool - Affiliates. This is something new I'm still testing. In summary a good free product which links back to you get's you millions of requests per month!
- Etheryte 1y agoI've seen a number of products like this and I'm somewhat curious: how do you handle the security side of things? Do you have a server to shield the API keys and proxy all requests?
- cosbgn 1y agoYes, all requests pass by our server.
- jwblackwell 1y agoYour site would look way better with mx-auto max-w-7xl :) The content is far too wide on big screens
- cosbgn 1y agothanks, fix is already live!
- econ 1y agoWell done, an offer impossible to refuse.
- cosbgn 1y agoExactly, offer something truly polished together with a very good price and ideally vitality built in.
- 90s_dev 1y agoMy only plan is to announce my project to HN and reddit when it's done (hopefully this week or next!) and hope for the best. I figure that if it's as exciting as I think it is, then it will organically spread by word of mouth, even if slowly.
- tifa2up 1y agoFounder of https://agentset.ai https://agentset.ai here. We found lots of success posting on the r/RAG subreddit. We've been working with RAG for sometime so have enough experience to answer other people's questions and establish credibility by dropping our link.
- smohnot 1y agoGood post from Lenny Rachitsky on how to acquire your first users https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/consumer-business-find-first-users https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/consumer-business-find-fi...
- pontes 1y agoWell, I am trying to do it right now through a Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971523 :) It is supposed to be a fun demo, let's see if it works
- rorylaitila 1y agoI start by building products for myself that I know solve my problem, so at least I have a user of 1. Then I try to get to 10 users personally through my personal network. This helps me validate how easy acquisition and onboarding will be. Then to get from 10 to 100 I post more widely about the product on social media. My current product https://humancrm.io https://humancrm.io is at 16 users. I am adding about a user a week currently. All the while I work on SEO and backlinks. Once I get to 100 users then I'll probably start more bulk marketing to get to 1000.
- rikkipitt 1y agoI'm 40% through getting my first 100 users for https://www.kruh.ltd https://www.kruh.ltd. So far, I've only added a "banner" announcement on two of my products and mentioned it at the bottom of newsletters to their subscribers. It's taken a couple of months to get this far. I will probably launch in two phases of cohorts. I.e. in blocks of 50.
- curiousigor 1y ago“Kruh” means bread in Slovenian, so “making bread” with the product seems fitting :D
- rikkipitt 1y agoIt also means circle in Czech and sounds like crew. When I happened upon the word, I was very proud of myself! I'm usually not great at naming projects.
- janosch_123 1y agoIn 4 months I published: - 22 YouTube videos - two LinkedIn posts a week It has to be said that I was well plugged in to niche forums and subreddits. Now I have: - 100 signups - 28 demo completions - 500 subscribers on YouTube The product is: https://foxev.io https://foxev.io (learn about electric car tech like you learn languages with duolingo).
- nikolayasdf123 1y agoso much media content and only 100 user… damn thats tough
- janosch_123 1y agoI am quite happy with this to be honest - I am hoping for a viral post of course, but I do get noise out of it and (previously) strangers are looking at what I do. Like, how else should it work? There is of course always Google Ads but that strikes me as more short-sighted than building a backlog of content to refer back to.
- nikolayasdf123 1y agoI wish I knew always-working answer and wish it was easier.. it is tough!
- quantumwoke 1y agoI started free, and then upsold to a freemium version after a few years. In the free years, built the best product in the space and hustled to 20,000 DAUs.
- jwblackwell 1y agoInitially, I just posted my latest product, Quizgecko on HN and then manually DMd a few hundred people on Linkedin etc. That was enough for 100+ users. I think if you have a relatively novel idea, that is quick to try out, then people will naturally share. After that, I submitted to various AI tool directories. They drove a bit of traffic and helped Google find the product. Then some landing pages I made started to rank and it has snowballed from there.
- magneticmonkey 1y agoWe relied heavily on network effects early on starting with our friend group and encouraging word-of-mouth growth. We built a multiplatform app called dateit(https://dateit.com/ https://dateit.com/), which is kind of like Facebook Events but with a better user experience. Obviously, our product is very different from yours, but one thing that worked well for us was focusing on building momentum within small communities first rather than trying to appeal to everyone immediately. Tight-knit groups tend to generate stronger early engagement, which can give you the traction (and feedback) you need to grow. Another thing we learned: making it dead simple for users to share made a big difference. Even small friction points kill word-of-mouth, so optimizing for effortless sharing really amplified our reach. In your case remove as much friction as possible whatever that is.
- rrr_oh_man 1y agoI posted itter.sh on hackernews and got 400-ish really friendly people to check it out :)
- greekanalyst 1y agoI would suggest the following simple process: (1) Talk to your existing users: If your product has a free version, reach out to all of them and make sure you speak with as many of your freemium users as possible. If your product only offers a paid version, again reach out to all of them. Anyone who has already voted with their credit card is a very important person to talk to. (2) Maximize learning: Understand what are the biggest pain-points you are helping your customers solve. Drill down on their psychographic profiles. Map everything out. (3) Identify your optimal paid ICP: This is a best guess effort. Do not worry about nailing it 100%. Just make sure it is as close to your current full understanding as possible (4) Go after them. The HOW is not as important as long as you understand the WHO.
- greatNespresso 1y agoI'd say go where your users hang out. For me it was LinkedIn and reddit. Don't spend money on ads, it's simply not worth it at the beginning. Cold outreach works, the not so secret is that the message should be appealing. If you get bored reading your own outreach message, there's a high chance your audience will be too and you'll end up in spam as fast as I eat a chocolate tablet.
- helro 1y agoI got 20k+ downloads for my app by posting on Reddit. It's an app/website blocker for iPhone & Mac, so I focused on relevant communities like r/digitalminimalism and r/dumbphones with genuine, non-spammy posts: https://www.atten.app https://www.atten.app I also tried "apps gone free" campaigns by posting on Reddit and using sites like AppRaven. These were very effective for visibility, the launch is currently the #5 all-time post on r/macapps (https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/top/?t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/top/?t=all). While these campaigns drove a strong spike in downloads, retention was low, so they weren’t as useful for building a long-term user base.
- kruxigt 1y ago[dead]
- tquinn 1y agoI've been frustrated with my scheduled blocker, so based on your landing page I'm giving it a shot. So far it looks like a breath of fresh air.
- xandrius 1y agoHonest question: how do you post on Reddit without getting bashed for self-promotion in the subreddit which people would probably like the product/thing?
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoYou post those giant threads that get 600+ upvotes in niche webdev/cs communities and you tuck in a link to your thing amongst many others, making it virtually impossible to detect as promotion.
- xandrius 1y agoGot an example? Can't visualize it.
- mkbkn 1y agoForget the usual SEO and focus on high-quality, in-depth textual and video content. Build your list for email marketing. Paid ads (FB, Google) to drive targeted traffic. PS - I do that.
- sgc 1y ago> Build your list for email marketing. How do you do that? This is where I struggle.
- sph 1y agoA Show HN post works really well, if you win the front page lottery.
- reverseblade2 1y agoI have built this 3d bin packer. https://3dpack.ing https://3dpack.ing Despite my best attempts didn’t take off:(
- PostOnce 1y agoWhat did you try? It might be worth talking about here to try to gain some insight. B2B products, unless miraculous, do not generally "take off" without a lot of hard work, meetings, trade shows, client demos, etc, at least so far as I have seen. To make any sales at all, it seems like you'd have to already know a lot of people in the industry, and it would have to outcompete not only other products, but just the old "we'll load all the shit we can into the truck/container based on human intuition". In fact, ideally, you'd ask someone you know (or even better, they'll ask you) if this is a problem you can solve for them. If you can't sell it to people you already know, it'll be even harder to sell to people you don't, presumably. Plus it will be very hard to articulate to an AI "you can't sit that on top of that!", but it's obvious when looking at it. I'm in the midst of wading into B2B, alone, and low on capital, myself. My "success" so far is mostly due to dumb luck and being available to talk to.
- reverseblade2 1y agoI had face to face meetings with some clients. Well to be fair 3d packing is also relatively competed area there are few popular products. Is my product better than them for some aspects yes. Hard to say what is wrong but perhaps me or the product isn’t seriously taken, yet it does add real value by solving a real problem by some means better than others.
- akoboldfrying 1y agoThis looks really interesting! Optimisation problems like this are so much fun to solve and seem like such a natural fit for the SaaS model. Could you give more of an idea about how much it "took off"? Based on earlier comments of yours, it seems that you have some paying customers. Has it grown very gradually? Do you have much churn? Also curious how you have been splitting your time between algorithm development for the underlying optimisation problem (probably the most interesting part to me!), AI front-end (a neat value-add on top), marketing and dealing with support? If you have the time and energy, I'm sure a blog post or similar would be interesting to many people.
- ngangaga 1y agoDo people not have the work ethic to commit a small amount of fraud anymore? Smh, kids these days.
- blitzar 1y agoI don't think they read the history, biographies or even profiles of the greats anymore.
- VladVladikoff 1y agoCold calling. Combined with email, texting, and conventions.
- abhisek 1y agoNot sure if it’s relevant because you specifically mentioned about B2C. For cyber security product, we took the open source route. We build our core technology in public as open source project. https://github.com/safedep/vet https://github.com/safedep/vet The commercial SaaS is for scaling and management. Our entire funnel is based on OSS. Folks who have already found value and is looking to scale their deployment. This model works for us especially at our current stage where we are 100% engineering led.
- meander_water 1y agoKudos, this looks like a great product. I'm going to try it out today. Is there a reason why you only consume OSV and not CVE data?
- abhisek 1y agoWe felt that OSV schema is designed with security tooling and automation as primary design goal. Specifically for our use-case, it captures the package name and versions using standardised schema. Also we saw adoption of OSV by package ecosystems like Python, Go etc. While CVE is still the largest database of vulnerabilities, we felt OSV is good enough to identify most recent vulnerabilities
- psviderski 1y agoWhat's your approach with getting users for your OSS product?
- abhisek 1y agoBuild in public really. Just talk about what we are building, get feedback, bug reports etc. from users. When major security issues happen related to our domain e.g. xz or tj-actions/changed-files, we either write about how our tool can mitigate the risk or research on how to enhance our tool to handle the risk and then talk about it publicly.
- chiffre01 1y agoI made an onsite/offsite tracking platform with a project kanban system. The idea was to make it affordable, simple and lightweight, but it failed to get any traction. SaaS a crowded field for this kind of thing, and like everyone says, 20 percent of the effort is building it, the rest is marketing and support.
- ignoramous 1y agoGive out the MVP as free or freemium. Leave a link to join WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, or Subreddit in the MVP. Engage with the early adopters there and figure out what it is they need. Move to address that as soon as you can. Repeat?
- stanislavb 1y agoYou can give a go to submitting to software directories or marketplaces - e.g. https://www.saashub.com/submit/list https://www.saashub.com/submit/list
- 0xsnowcrash 1y agoMy product, TestSmithy (https://testsmithy.com/ https://testsmithy.com/ ), automates testing AI-generated code (e.g. Vibe coding). The way I'm acquiring customers is to offer a free Pro subscription worth over $100 to the first 100 early adopters.
- hurap 1y agoHow does it create the tests?
- dcchambers 1y agoB2C @ $50/month from an unknown company is a HUGE ask.
- tonyhart7 1y agolmao yeah lol, I mean claude/chatgpt etc didnt cost that much at the start maybe they use image generation, thats why launch price is so expensive
- OJFord 1y agoEven a known company! I can't name a SaaS that does. It's in the realm of telecom/utility bills.
- permo-w 1y agocreative cloud?
- dcchambers 1y agoI would call Creative Cloud B2B... I imagine the bulk of their subscribers are using the tools for professional use. And even then you can choose to subscribe to a subset of tools (eg just photoshop) for a much cheaper cost.
- qareena 1y agoWith our product (https://schezy.com/ https://schezy.com/), we're experimenting with SEO and content marketing while also tapping into school admin communities. For your B2C AI SaaS, maybe try micro-influencers or community-led growth to get quality users, not just traffic.
- burakgormek 1y agoWe’re building a SaaS analytics tool aimed at helping founders better understand their subscription metrics: https://metricster.com https://metricster.com We had ~100 early signups during initial testing, but it’s been much harder lately to get visibility — especially with the AI noise everywhere. Tried: Reddit and Facebook groups Cold outreach to founders Slowly investing in SEO for the long term Still figuring out what actually drives conversions.
- oulipo 1y agoI'm doing a hardware startup (the first repairable e-bike battery, https://gouach.com https://gouach.com if you're interested) and we got users by doing an Indiegogo :)
- antidumbass 1y agoYour silvery cylindrical cell contacts are not beating the contact-resistance-driven-fire allegations.
- wahnfrieden 1y agoProduct: Manabi Reader https://reader.manabi.io https://reader.manabi.io Japanese language learners congregate in a bunch of online discussion boards and subreddits. Some of my competitors have forums that are open to anyone posting about their own self-made tools, in addition to users discussing learning resources unrelated to the host's products. So I simply posted about my service on several of these and quickly gained thousands of early users. I had more luck than others who try the same because my product solves pain points and offers features that competition don't or don't as nicely, ie quality and value. I also attract users with friendly pricing: a standard pricing tier and an unverified student / low-income pricing tier for the same service level.
- littlerbooks 1y agoI have a lot of bullet point summaries of nonfiction that I share on https://littlerbooks.com https://littlerbooks.com. I got my first hundred users mostly by just mentioning in it in social media posts where appropriate.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nicooo 1y agoI’ve had success twice using targeted social media outreach — specifically by joining relevant subreddit discussions and commenting on YouTube videos where my target audience was already active. Instead of simply promoting your service right away (it often feels spammy), I recommend genuinely engaging in conversations until the right opportunity comes up. I ended up turning that process into its own product: https://sparkflow.ai/ https://sparkflow.ai/
- conductr 1y agoThis is inception level promotion, I’m not even mad at ya lol
- gardnr 1y agoIs this comment part of the grift?
- pc86 1y agoI don't think it's a grift in the negative sense but this is absolutely a marketing comment. They're doing exactly what they say to do in the comment. They're on HN where at least some of their target market is. They have a product that is relevant (right down to the headline/CTA). They didn't just post the link but put it at the end of an informational comment. 10/10 meta-promotion IMO
- conductr 1y agoThey also likely were involved in the the original question getting posted so they could provide that answer which is what makes it an entirely fabricated grift
- nicooo 1y agoI was not involved in the original comment and not planning to publicly talk about my service until it's live, but the opportunity was too perfect to miss.
- bitmasher9 1y agoInstead of an affiliate program I would offer my ten biggest customers a steep discount in exchange for an interview. You really need to understand what consumer is spending $50/mo on AI. The better you understand them, the easier finding 490 people like them will be.
- Caelus9 1y ago[dead]
- rylan-talerico 1y agoI'm building an AI product management co-pilot (https://magical.pm https://magical.pm) that helps PMs write requirements faster. Here is my approach: 1. Engineering-As-Marketing: Building features that have the potential to create word-of-mouth growth (e.g., the AI will write product requirements in Shakespearean sonnets: https://www.magical.pm/?goofballModal=true https://www.magical.pm/?goofballModal=true). 2. Programmatic SEO: Sitemap has over 1,000 keyword-rich pages (no AI). To accomplish this, I leverage my app's Templates feature and tools that pair well with my app (Jira, Linear, Asana, etc). 3. Blog: Product management blog, designed to find traction in product management communities. While my SEO grows, I'm improving the product's usefulness. Once it is ready, I will launch it via ProductHunt and begin a bigger marketing push (increased content marketing, community outreach, etc).
- curiousigor 1y agoBuilt a free product (https://heymeta.com https://heymeta.com) to solve my own problem and posted it here on HN and Reddit as well as Product Hunt (that was in 2018 when it was still relevant). Currently getting 15k/unique/month (it has dropped a bit less, but steadily getting up after the rewrite and bigfixes). When the website doesn't have sponsors, I promote my other free macOS tool (https://dockey.publicspace.co https://dockey.publicspace.co) (with a donation option) that get quite a nice flow of visitors from it. I'd call this a success, although it's not enough to pay the bills or anything :)
- 2YwaZHXV 1y agohttps://www.heymeta.com/sponsor/ https://www.heymeta.com/sponsor/ returns a 404 currently... is that expected?
- curiousigor 1y agoIt shouldn't and doesn't for me at the moment. Is this still the case on your side?
- 2YwaZHXV 1y agowell, I see a flash of a normal page and then it goes to 404 I'm using Chrome, with only uBlock Origin Lite but disabling it ~shows no change~ appears to allow it to work. Looking at the requests with uBOL disabled, app.68194690.js and 5.5caaec0f.js both returned 404, everything else returned 200/202. and with uBOL enabled https://plausible.hey.si/js/script.hash.outbound-links.js https://plausible.hey.si/js/script.hash.outbound-links.js shows as blocked. maybe that's the issue?
- pc86 1y agoI run a marketplace buy-sell type SaaS app that is pretty niched down. Cold outreach is key. We have a handful of competitors so really focused on "building a better mouse trap" then just reach out directly to sellers on competing platforms. Especially for the first couple dozen it's a hard sell, we had to basically give it away for free. Once there's an actual audience though it's easier to tell someone about it and just send them to the normal sign up flow with a discount code. You can't get away from cold outreach though, especially at the beginning. I'm not sure you'd want to even if you could? The feedback for us has been invaluable.
- pier25 1y agoI'm scratching my itch and I'm part of multiple communities with people in this industry/domain (audio, music production, etc). I started promoting it in a forum I've been part of for years and from there it's growing organically. I'm close to reaching the first 100 users with no ads and only the marketing website: https://wavekit.app/ https://wavekit.app/
- SenpaiHurricane 1y agoMy project is bitecritic.com, and its free. I try multiple stuff and in 2 months there are only 60 users. Producthunt, tinystartups -> garbage, no value, no users Reddit -> Mods block you on many topics, no signups from there Tiktok -> AI generated video 1000 views. Tiktok Ads -> 2k views per video 3 euros -> 5 signups Instagram -> Most of the users are coming from here. Friends and Family -> My real users :D
- ednite 1y agoFor my SaaS, the first 100 users were almost too easy. I partnered with a company sitting on thousands of clients and offered my tool—free—to just 10% of their list. But I didn’t sell features. I asked what their clients hated most, then built a fix for that. One well-placed feature, and the doors swung open. Real users, real feedback—and we’re still building on that foundation. Then there’s my blog. A creative sandbox, no overlap with my day job. No built-in audience. No distribution. Still waiting on subscriber #1 (Mom, seriously—now would be a good time). Takeaways: Partner with someone who already has meaningful reach. Solve a real, hair-on-fire problem. Offer something free to earn early trust. Knock on doors, pitch relentlessly, repeat. And hope the gods of luck are listening. As for the writing side—different beast. Slower burn, no roadmap, no shortcuts. Still wandering in the woods, but enjoying the walk. Open to ideas—and subscribers. (Mom… last chance.)
- adammarples 1y agoan idea might be providing a link to the blog
- panphora 1y agoIt's in his profile
- ednite 1y agoLol...I was trying to avoid the classic shameless plug… but since you twisted my arm—it’s over at mindthenerd.com. Just getting started, but I'm having fun with it. Really appreciate you asking!
- csomar 1y agoI am more interested by the SaaS and the partner that did free reach?
- ednite 1y agoAppreciate the interest! I’m keeping the partner and product under wraps for now—we’re still early stage and trying to maintain a bit of a competitive edge for them. I’ll happily share more once we’ve got a stronger lead. Hope you understand!
- mvkel 1y agoInterview 20 people who -could- be customers, but not pitch them. Get their honest take on what sucks about their current solution/process. Ask for their expertise. Build the thing that emerges from the 20 interviews. Not the thing they ask for, but the thing they truly need. Craft a solid pitch from the common themes of the 20 interviews, focused on being a painkiller, not a vitamin. Go to the place where you found those initial 20, except this time, talk about the thing you made. Not in a salesy way. If people 1. Aren't interested; 2. Aren't converting to customers, then the thing that was built didn't properly address the pain
- r0b05 1y agoThis is a really cool litmus test.
- s1mon 1y agoIf you haven't already, I highly recommend reading the Mom Test book [0]. It talks a lot about product market fit, as well as how to get your first customers in order to build the right product. The Path to First SaaS Customers via The Mom Test: 1. Talk to 10–30 people who might face the problem. 2. Don’t mention your idea—dig into their experiences instead. 3. If the pain is real, pitch only after confirming they care. 4. Look for commitment—not compliments. 5. Build just enough to turn their problem into a usable product and keep iterating. [0] https://www.momtestbook.com https://www.momtestbook.com
- outcoldman 1y agoI mean, this is the whole state of the industry. If you wrote something nice (you believe it could be valuable to user) - and tried to show it here in Show HN - you will get close to 0 upvotes. If you build something excellent (unique, wow factor, etc) - you will get the votes. But this is going to be an exception. The question is, how the OP got 228 points (at the time) on this "Ask HN" topic? Obviously the OP is working on SEO, and probably has ability to upvote their topics (fake users, large follow base on X, Mastodon or Emails)? And to answer your question. The best place to get your first 50/100 users is to show them at the place where your users hang out. Reddit? Obviously it is getting harder, because a lot of subreddits don't allow self-promotions. So ads, if you are lucky enough and your users don't block ads. And the best place is to actually use the Marketplaces/AppStore where your users are going to search for a solution. App Store in case of Apple, Google Store in case of Android. I have found the best way is to actually keep your own newsletter, and respect the users, don't post there too much, only post, when you see you can offer something valuable. I have about 2000 users in my newsletter, and that helps to get first 100 users of my new products/apps.
- phlsa 1y agoWhen I built my little side project (B2C iPhone app, not a SaaS [1]), I documented the development process on LinkedIn with short "developer diary" videos. That has led to a good amount of engagement at launch, which briefly lifted the app into the top-paid section on the App Store for a short time. That was enough to reach the first 100 users within a few days. Since it's a side project, I haven't worked on the app in a while, but recently picked up development again. So if you have any ideas or suggestions, they are very welcome. [1] https://apps.apple.com/app/dorepeat-checklists-todos/id1561534712 https://apps.apple.com/app/dorepeat-checklists-todos/id15615...
- econ 1y agoDumb idea of the day: can't one buy a free product and use it for promotion similarly to building one yourself?
- awaseem 1y agoI posted on HN about Foqos: https://www.foqos.app/ https://www.foqos.app/ and got a few hundred downloads that same day which is awesome. I still continue to reach out to creators in Youtube and tiktok who have reviewed similar products to see if they would give any feedback. Usually since they have a larger online presence than I do, I noticed the publicly started recommending the app to others on Reddit, Threads, etc... I've been also posting on threads after each update. I have over a 1000 downloads now, I don't have tracking but getting a consistent download rate of about 30 a day Zero marketing and its been a ton of fun so far. Hope that helps!
- jakevoytko 1y agoFor my newsletter[0], I just reached 231 subscribers in 5 months. Getting to this point has involved posting to as many channels as possible (without wearing out my welcome in any of them) My first 40 subscribers came from direct friends and my LinkedIn network. I got about 150 subscribers from a single popular post on Hacker News, posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43461618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43461618 The remainder have come from regular posting on BlueSky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Substack notes, and starting to get search traffic from Google. I've gotten no traction from Reddit (wow, the programming subreddits are so much angrier than every other subreddit where I contribute!) Twitter (seems like it's pay to play, which I won't do) or IndieHackers (I post milestones just for fun, but it hasn't amounted to anything). I've found that I need to post twice a week to grow. I had a period where I was sick and was putting less effort into posts, and another period where I was dealing with a mortgage and had to post only once a week, and my subscriber growth treaded water instead of gradually growing. Even casual visitors to the site can tell the difference between moderate and minor effort. [0] https://www.clientserver.dev/ https://www.clientserver.dev/
- mountainriver 1y agoWhat is happening with the Reddit programming subs? They are totally insane
- jakevoytko 1y agoIt's kinda always been this way (I just turned to dust thinking about this, but I've been posting to it for like 18 years), but it's worse now. r/programming is the only subreddit I regularly visit where there are a bunch of posts with 0 upvotes in the top 30. There are 16 right now on the Hot view.
- antisthenes 1y agoReddit is a self-perpetuating AI-engagement machine. Seems like 90% of the content there is now either reposts from Reddits first decade (2008-2018), engagement rage-bait, or really low-effort posts from newly registered users (who might be real, but they are normies so they ask really mundane boring questions that could be googled in seconds). I truly believe it now exists only to serve as training data for the highest bidder to pay out the initial investors, everything else be damned. I wouldn't use it for anything important.
- miros_love 1y agoMy wife cold-called about 60% of all businesses in our niche within our city. Meanwhile, I literally walked into CEOs' offices, asked politely for meetings, and pitched face-to-face. Conversion was around 1%, but that gave us our first collision with reality—and our first paying customers. Also half of my clients came from Google search ads. But it was absolutely terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were people trying to talk to chatGPT
- jnovek 1y ago> But it was absolutely terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were people trying to talk to chatGPT I don't totally follow, probably because I don't tend to run ad campaigns and I'm not up with whatever shenanigans advertisers are doing these days. What do you mean when you say that they were "trying to talk to chatGPT"?
- TZubiri 1y agoSuper curious about this one, I'm about to get into a google search campaign so wondering what to avoid.
- Zenbit_UX 1y agoMy guess is that the GP put a AI chat bot on their site, and people started asking it for things completely unrelated to his business as a way to get free access to chatgpt without an account. It’s actually quite fun, whenever you see an ai chat bot asking you if you have any questions ask it for its favorite cupcake recipe. If it answers its a poorly configured LLM.
- grepfru_it 1y agoMate that was a big jump to a conclusion..
- miros_love 1y agoIndeed, it was written in a rather unclear way. I have AI in the name of my company and I left a form on the site to fill out. My site, due to a cold start, began to appear in the search results for people from different countries who misspelled "ChatGPT for free" and stuff like that. They went to the site, saw my form, filled out the required fields and wrote "Make me an essay on the topic...". No stop words can cover such behavior. Importantly, all real clients did not use this form, but immediately went through convenient communication channels.
- know-how 1y ago[dead]
- jmstfv 1y ago2 things worked well for NotionBackups: * SEO - I started way before I launched the product. I wrote an article on how to back up a Notion workspace using their (then newly-launched) API. It still brings in traffic to this day. Granted, there was almost no competition when I started * r/Notion subreddit - only in relevant threads when someone is looking for a solution. After some time, some of my customers began recommending this tool to others
- hodder 1y agoIt really all depends on the business itself and it is hard to help you without know much more. B2C is too broad. Your getting to 100 users at 50/month is obviously a massive goal. let alone 500. 25k/month revenue is huge if this is bootstrapped. What is the business? Just share a link.
- sbennet76 1y agotry to reach people related to your niche on LinkedIn
- gethly 1y agoCold calling seems the be the prevalent approach, which is also mine. Though I am struggling with time. On one hand, I know I need to reach out to potential customers, on the other hand I need/want to work on the product. So not only is my time limited but also I don't like to shift my focus elsewhere. I wonder if it would make sense to hire someone, some student, to do the outreach for me. Paid per contact and then some bonus for subscription. Has anyone tried it? I mean, it's still just cold calling but I am wondering whether I should entrust such an important process to someone that is not familiar or invested with the product? After all, you can make the first impression only once.
- free-nachos 1y agoNot only is it making your first impression, it's also your best opportunity to get candid feedback, observe what positioning resonates with your audience, and create your playbook for working through objections. You mentioned time is your biggest constraint, and that you need to work on the product. Is there a milestone where your product will have enough features that you can shift to spending half your time acquiring customers?
- gethly 1y agoThe work never ends :) but my point was primarily about focus on the development in case of large features. In between, it's fine to be distracted by customer acquisition. You are correct though that the first impression is important, so I will just keep doing what I'm doing. On the other hand, I can see hiring someone to go and look for leads, which I can then pursue myself. Seems like a fair compromise.
- kureikain 1y agoI'm building mailwip.com (and my second saas right now) My strategy is too simple, I don't think it will works but It work good enough for me. - Just engage in the community. In early day, I helped on the cloudflare forum. I just help generic about anything related to email, explain concept and here and there try to introduce my service. I always introduce my service last. Give people free option first, always, even if the free option is my competitor. But I do explain pros/confs of my service - Build plugin that may drive traffic: For me, CloudFlare offers plugin ability so I built a CloudFlare app for that. It may not benefit me directly but get my name out there I shared my revenu and publish update on indiehacker https://www.indiehackers.com/product/hanami/revenue https://www.indiehackers.com/product/hanami/revenue
- njjv 1y agoA while back I wrote some stock market algorithms and charting software I use in my own DYOR daily stock analysis. I decided to offer up that daily information to others. I changed my SaaS delivery approach idea to be a daily Substack newsletter instead. It is a stock market info newsletter called StockQuakes ( https://stockquakes.substack.com https://stockquakes.substack.com ) . With Substack my newsletter grew by using the Substack Recommendations feature as well as their Notesfeature. Substack takes care of the signups, etc. via Stripe. You have to have value above and below the paywall line in the newsletter to keep users. And you have to have a free version in addition to the paid version. I also put up a separate website to drive SEO traffic to the newsletter ( https://stockquakes.com https://stockquakes.com ). And I post on BlueSky, Threads, and X/Twitter daily in addition to Substack Notes. Have 600 users, 5000 followers.
- dudeinjapan 1y agoAt TableCheck (Japan's answer to Resy, Tock, Sevenrooms, etc.) our first 100 customers were definitely the hardest. It took us nearly two years, and many times I came close to giving up. Even though we had built a solid MVP, in Japan's risk-averse culture, no restaurant wanted to be the first to use our product. The question was always "Who else is using it?"--basically a deadlock. After a lot of cold-calling, we found a 120-year old sukiyaki and shabu-shabu restaurant chain. They told us they always survived by adopting the latest technology, and were willing to try our product. Most of their staff were elderly women in kimonos, many of whom had not touched an iPad before. We were worried they would struggle, but after a few training sessions they got the hang of it--soon they were greeting and seating customers with no problem. 12 years on, we are at 13,000 restaurants on our platform and adding a few hundred more each month!
- rimit 1y agoHey - I'd love to hear more about this if you're up for a chat. We're building something in an adjacent space and I'd like to understand a bit more about your journey - and congratulations on your success - site looks great.
- dudeinjapan 1y agoSure find me on LinkedIn I’m the CTO
- jordanmorgan10 1y agoI wrote about this fairly extensively: TL;DR: Email sign ups before launch via a boosted IG post. Non TL;DR: https://www.swiftjectivec.com/the-first-100-subscribers/ https://www.swiftjectivec.com/the-first-100-subscribers/
- komali2 1y agoWhen I had a restaurant in Taipei, every time I posted in the Taiwan subreddit even tangentially mentioning it, we'd get 2-3 customers the next day in off that post, and a couple more throughout the week. So, niche subreddits, especially for geographies, could work well.
- mtremsal 1y ago> We have a free version. For now, we have kept it invite-only. Question is TOFU. Comment from `amanchanda`, i.e. the OP. Nice hustle writing an Ask HN post to then plug your own product, but you have to make sure to respond to questions with your _other_ account `nicooo`. ;)
- gwd 1y agoThat was in response to someone saying: > Find a way to make it free to start. FWIW I looked at all the posts on this thread from `amanchanda` and `nicooo`, and didn't see any obvious reason to think they were the same person.
- trevinhofmann 1y agoI'm also having a difficult time getting the first users for my AI software development service. I decided to start with a high-touch Early Access model to understand the users and their needs better, and I'm up to 8 users so far. For Early Access, I started with a LinkedIn post, reaching out to close colleagues, commenting in relevant Slack groups/channels, and introducing it to some of my better freelance clients. I'll be signing up 2 more of the freelance clients shortly, with one key feature request from each first. It's important not to get stuck in the trap of developing one-off features to get each new user, but these are features that would be broadly beneficial. Soon, I'm planning to add a super-simple demo at the top of the landing page to increase conversions, and then I'll start promoting it more. Likely also some relevant informational content marketing on a blog.
- nocommandline 1y agoSince my App is targeted at developers building on Google Cloud, I focused on 1) Answering questions on Stackoverflow. - A few users clicked on the profile and went to our home page - A few of my responses involved a link to post on our blog (only did this where it was absolutely necessary) 2) Answering questions on Google Cloud reddit channel and Google Cloud Community (forum)
- squiggy22 1y agoFor me personally integration marketing. Slack, IFFT those sorts of platforms already having a user base willing to try new things . Massive.
- sam1234apter 1y agoI would use submithunt to list on multiple directories at once
- rblion 1y agoMy startup is helping Maui rebuild after the fires. My early adopters and testers will be on Maui mostly. It's a win-win-win. The branding is inspired by Hawaii, so it's only right that I do it this way.
- gsaines 1y agoI don't intend this to come off as confrontational or cynical, but I think this question (and many of the responses in this thread) are mistaking the answer for the question. What I mean is that you have to understand what you most want to accomplish. If you want to build a growing business, the best way to do that is not to start from a product and then figure out how to attract users, it's to test product / user acquisition channels together. I have some authority in the space because I've done it the wrong way twice! www.skritter.com is the first company I built way back in 2008 and growing it was really challenging. It's a niche within a niche and most growth tactics simply didn't work. I'm proud that it's become so durable and taught so many people, but from a customer acquisition perspective, it was very challenging. www.codecombat.com had some organic acquisition channels that worked well, but they proved to be mostly non-repeatable. I'm now working on my third company (also an AI B2C SaaS play), but I started first and foremost by identifying a viable discovery channel / product pair. In this case, I found that paid advertising in the elder care space converts well. To put it more bluntly, a product without a customer acquisition channel is closer to a hobby than a business. A product with an acquisition channel that is somewhat scaleable and repeatable is likely to be a profitable business. A product with high growth / viral acquisition channel is a startup. I'm not knocking operating a hobby product. I've done that and there are good and bad parts to the experience. But if you want to grow, you shouldn't be asking the question "how do I grow this product?" you should instead be asking "what product could I build that has a demonstrable acquisition channel?"
- osigurdson 1y agoCan this be put more simply as "build something that people want"? I'm not sure what a "demonstrable acquisition channel" is (ChatGPT suggests it is ads, social media, etc). Honest question, not criticizing the comment - just looking for more clarification.
- gsaines 1y agoIt's more than just building something people want. I want a lot of things and would be willing to pay for some of them, but unless there is a way to reach me, it doesn't matter. There is this cultural meme that if an amazing product simply exists, then people will tell other people and it'll grow organically. The reality is that amazing, ahead-of-their time products and services are constantly being created and dying. Not because they don't solve a need, but because they weren't able to reach customers economically with the right message. That ability to reach customers and contextualize the solution in language that matches their expectation is actually a lot rarer than building a good product.
- jrhizor 1y agoFor https://poach.vc/ https://poach.vc/ and https://data.poach.vc/ https://data.poach.vc/ I just emailed and LinkedIn DM-ed a ton of people. Since the newsletter features founders and investors, I also tag them each issue on Twitter, which is a small but evergreen source of exposure.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Soupy 1y agoI also run a small B2C company (https://pastmaps.com https://pastmaps.com). Here's what worked for me: First 1000 users: daily manually done reddit posts. Very time-consuming and annoying, but it gets the job done. Just make sure the content drives users back to the site and is actually relevant, interesting, and valuable Next 100K users: programmatic long-tail SEO. obviously this is unique to my own product, but I realized that people were organically already searching for the data contained within the maps I host. By focusing on organizing that data and making it understandable to Google, I started a traffic flywheel that's paid off massively. I'm now exploring programmatic social media marketing as the next lever for the next 1M users as it directly drives even further benefits on the SEO side One last thought - whatever growth channel you pick should really align with the product you are building. Some products are a great fit for SEO, others not. Some are awesome for Tiktok/Reels, others not. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution. Good luck!
- azizali 1y ago[dead]
- blairanderson 1y ago> daily manually done reddit posts Can you link to an example?
- chilipepperhott 1y agoNot OP, but this worked out well for me: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1f8159z/the_allegations_are_true_ive_been_rewriting_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1f8159z/the_allegatio...
- Aniket-N 1y agoWhich communities did you post in? I got banned when I wasn’t even blatantly promoting. I answered questions and said I built something for this.
- xu3u32 1y ago
- justanotheratom 1y agoI have released two apps to the Apple Store, and initial 100's of users is easy to get through just organic searches on App Store, and you posting links to some places. https://kincalendar.com/ https://kincalendar.com/ https://ingredicheck.app/ https://ingredicheck.app/
- gereshes 1y agoHave you tried asking your AI?
- johnxie 1y agoBuilt Taskade by solving my own workflow pain points, need for structured note taking, and our team being remote, fully distributed. Launched on Product Hunt, joined niche subreddits/communities, responded to feedback fast, and kept shipping + relaunching. First 100 users came from showing up where early adopters hang out essentially.
- ospider 1y agoHow about going backwards? Find the first hundred users or at least 10-ish people who actually has a pain point, and build the product for them.
- jokethrowaway 1y agoWhere are your users? it's very idea dependant. Reddit often gets used by my users to make decisions (and it also has strict moderation, so you need to find a balance between being useful and spamming). For some ideas facebook could be great.
- Aziell 1y agoI’ve been thinking about how to handle the early stages as well. The first 100 users are definitely the hardest, and I think the key is to start by reaching out to core users and turning them into partners. The focus should be on building trust and creating a community around your product. Getting these early users to share their stories and feedback can make a huge difference. With more real voices, others will be more likely to believe in what you’re offering. That way, the next 500 users should come along pretty quickly.
- anshumankmr 1y agoI am having trouble making a product itself. Constantly having to rewrite things. So still very inspiring to see what people are upto here.
- nullderef 1y agoTikTok - you don't need followers to get views. It's not easy, especially if you've never used the platform before. But for B2C it's one of the best platforms. Do founder stories ("I built this") or demos ("here's this SaaS you'll like"). They get less views than memes or tangential videos. But conversion is much higher and you'll get replies from people who liked it or tried it out. So you can send them a message to ask for feedback.
- guywithahat 1y agoI liked X for a similar reason; when I ran ads, customers would comment and you could directly hear what they thought about the product or even just the ad. The big issue however was I usually couldn't DM them due to changes in how X DM's work
- dvdgrdll 1y agoThis is the workflow I use based on what other successful companies have done: 1. Start by defining an Ideal Customer Profile and be very specific (for examples, Facebook started with Harvard students in certain social circle). A good way to know how to be specific is by using a framework to define your ICP, like this you know if you are collecting the right information or not 2. Once you define your ICP, depending on the framework you are using will have mapped where they usually "hang out" online and offline -> At the beginning prioritse offline more than online. You are doing things that don't scale. 3. Having that information, you then design a way to get in front of them. If you are going the "online" route, then it can be Paid Ads, it can be social media DMs, etc... I only recommend the only route once you know you have the right messaging tested by talking with users that became paying customers. As a final note: try to get as many users that fit the same ICP as possible at the beginning, you'll want to seem a big fish in a small pond.
- radius89 1y agoIt's easier said than done, I suppose, but my first ~500 users for https://radius.to/ https://radius.to/ were from HN after hitting the front page. A year later, I still get a decent amount of traffic from that post. I'd imagine you'd get pretty good results on both ProductHunt and Reddit as well if you can get enough upvotes, though the latter is pretty difficult to promote your products on these days unless it's legitimately relevant to the community you post in.
- kkoste 1y agoI have never sold anything. But as a cheapskate when it comes to online subscriptions I think my input might hold some value. The way I get drawn in is by first trying the product for free. If your product doesn't have a free tier or free trial then I recommend you creating it.
- michalu 1y agoFor B2B I manually research ideal customers and manually reach out via cold email. I'd send a few hundred. If you don't get any buys from 200 emails sent to your target market you probably don't have a business. Once I validate and start getting traction only then I start automating cold email, ads etc. Do not validate with automated cold email agency. You can't automate something well what aren't doing with success already manually. Nothing beats manually researching your prospects and writing up personalized email - only when you understand this process and you know how, where and when to find your ICP and what to look for and what to tell them only then you can automate this process. You want to automate processes that work already. Not the other way around. Built a few businesses with this approach and still works today in 2025.
- abareplace 1y agoIt helps to start blogging about things that are related to your product or interesting to your target audience. I got the first users by writing about text-processing tasks that you can do with regular expressions: https://www.abareplace.com/blog/ https://www.abareplace.com/blog/
- AllenRen 1y ago[dead]
- amanchanda 1y agoMaybe I should give more context on what I am building. It is an AI ghostwriter for LinkedIn content (https://socialhq.me https://socialhq.me). I was fed up with human ghostwriters and honestly I didn't have enough time myself to write for LinkedIn consistently. So, I ended up designing this. I ran it with a few founders in my network and they loved it. That's when I decided to make this into an MVP. Now we have our initial set of beta users and we are just now starting to commercialize it. So, my current ICP are individuals who want to build their brands on LinkedIn. So, its predominantly an individual user product ATM.
- newyu89 1y ago[dead]