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) |
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/consumer-business-find-fi...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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
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)
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.
The way I'm acquiring customers is to offer a free Pro subscription worth over $100 to the first 100 early adopters.
I would go find the audience it was built for.
So, niche subreddits, especially for geographies, could work well.
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.
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.
Build your list for email marketing.
Paid ads (FB, Google) to drive targeted traffic. PS - I do that.
How do you do that? This is where I struggle.
Slack, IFFT those sorts of platforms already having a user base willing to try new things . Massive.
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?"
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.
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.
TL;DR: Email sign ups before launch via a boosted IG post.
Non TL;DR: https://www.swiftjectivec.com/the-first-100-subscribers/
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.
My llm radar picks it up as well.
A reverse uncanny valley
It's too bad these folks can't post somewhere in a central place, instead of us going to them and having to drag it out of them.
I listened (an underrated superpower), realized I could actually fix the problem, and suggested a meetup. One Zoom meeting later, we had the foundation of a partnership.
Honestly, it could’ve been any event. Just show up, be sincere, and listen more than you pitch.
I’ve always been an introvert—still am—but I’ve learned to be a functional extrovert when it counts- Good luck and don’t give up!
edit: I know a lot of ESL people use chatgpt now online so maybe thats an explaination
Strange times
Butvthe normal dash is just wrong in most contexts it is used, and I simply cannot stand this.
I use AI for coding too. It definitely helps with speed and boilerplate, though I’ll admit it sometimes sends me deep down the rabbit hole. Still, the ideas, creativity, and decisions are my own.
For what it’s worth, the structure is AI-assisted, but the wording and ideas are entirely my own. I use whatever AI chat window or tool is open in my browser—Grammarly, Hemingway, Word or others.
I’m here to share and learn, and I hope that still comes through—Thanks again.
:)
It is supposed to be a fun demo, let's see if it works
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.
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.
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%.
maybe they use image generation, thats why launch price is so expensive
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
(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.
Insane Clown Posse? Now I'm interested!
This is how Firebase, Supabase and friends work.
Getting 100 people to sign up for a free service is still work, but significantly less.
If not, then you are in the ad business.
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.
Ideally you want your tools to be so easy to use, clients just switch onto a paid plan when they want to get serious.
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.
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).
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).
First 100 users came from showing up where early adopters hang out essentially.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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) (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 :)
(Though I used to use the em dash with spaces on either side — like this — and only recently converted to the more common, tighter spacing—like this. I might go back to my old ways since it's different from how AI uses them, like some sort of weird shibboleth.)
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 shows as blocked. maybe that's the issue?
I'm still waiting to experience a version of this conversation where I'm not informed that the tool they want doesn't exist or all the ones they have are bad because they lack X and Y and include Z, am treated to a description of the tool they want, and then am able to find a half-dozen options for that exact thing on my very first try, all of which seem to be struggling for sales :-/
Mine are always "you're a developer? You should build X, you'd make so much money, I'd buy it!", then me: "really? That's great! Here are several options I just found for X, is this what you meant, and if not, what are they missing?", "Oh yeah, what do you know, that's exactly it!" and the topic is dropped, with them displaying so little interest in the existing solutions I showed them that it's clear they never would have paid for mine, either.
You also have to find the people who have authority to make buying decisions in the first place.
And... many times people saying "tool X sucks"... it might, but that's the only tool that is blessed, or is the only one that has integration with something else they rely on, etc.
As for the elephant in the room: large corporations are riddled with bureaucracy, inflexible policies, and, frankly, executives who often don’t give a hoot. Not impossible—but definitely more difficult. Speaking from experience (and this may be hard to believe, especially after being accused of being an LLM agent): one of my SaaS web apps I developed last year is currently in use—at no cost—by a top Fortune 500 company. I can't name them, but I maintain the app through a small fee charged to one of their 3rd-party vendors I work with. Now, to be clear: the number of users is barely worth mentioning, but the collective data and its operational value are huge for that corporate department. In short, they love it. Ever since launch, I've been trying to convince them to take on the fees directly and scale the app across all their branches. Even though their internal team, including IT department, has endorsed it and approved internal use, they have too many barriers to jump even before thinking of adopting it as their own tool. Anyway—just sharing. Sorry for the long comment! Amen.
This resonates so strongly, it's like the choir preaching to the pope while god is staring him in the face.
Instead of pushing your solution, offer to help with theirs. That might mean helping them improve their current system or even assisting with testing X. Strange as that may sound, it genuinely shows you care and want to help. You’d be surprised how much trust that can build—and how it can open doors to the opportunity you were hoping for. That said, don’t fake it. If you’re not being sincere, it won’t serve either interest. Just sharing what’s worked for me—hope it helps and wishing you the best.
This is true in just about any facet of your life. We've all heard the phrase "right place at the right time" but I don't think a lot of folks take the next step to realize you have to get out there to be in that right place. Dating, friendships, business, nothing beats being in the same place as someone else.
As for networking, I’ve always catered to businesses—and in my experience, most of them face similar challenges regardless of geography. Odds are, the problems a company faces in my neck of the woods are the same ones you’ll find in yours.
This is a bootstrapped, client-first effort—no buzz, no funding, just trying to solve one real problem at a time. It’s also my first time working directly with individual subscribers, unlike my other projects which were built for businesses and their internal teams or clients. I’m still learning as I go and looking forward to sharing more with the HN community.
And even then you can choose to subscribe to a subset of tools (eg just photoshop) for a much cheaper cost.
Also there's the personality. I've talked with chatgpt enough...
I'm open to the entire account being an agent. That's certainly possible.
There's a new market for astroturfing virality. Create hundreds of agents on various sites and have them engage in pablum and occasionally mention your product.
We're entering a phase where you can't just have a dumb model to filter that out
Just use -, that helps a lot.
This is just an LLM. I would be surprised if this guy writes like this.
Why do you think he’s NOT an LLM?
Am I the only person who proofreads emails anymore?
When you output long blog articles more than daily, it is. Proofreading takes time, and someone who cares enough to proofread will probably care enough to put in more time on other things that an LLM wouldn't care about (like information density, as noted in another comment; or editing after the fact to improve the overall structure; or injecting idiosyncratic wit into headings and subheadings).
I write a lot (maybe too much, some might say). I actually spent last weekend writing 10k words for self-help book that just popped in my mind - and yes, i trust me i did more than 2 big articles in one day, just haven't published them yet and to be frank, i'm a little worried now.
For full transparency: yes, I used ChatGPT, Grammarly, and Hemingway to assist with the writing structure, grammar and spelling. Not originality and wording. It just helps me move faster and keeps the flow going.
Will my book be a bestseller? Doubt it—it’s my first. Will anyone read it? No clue. Maybe if it’s free. Was it worth my time instead of coding? Absolutely. It cleared my mind and shifted my focus—something I think everyone should try at least once. So yeah, maybe I do write like ChatGPT... but one could also say ChatGPT writes like me. Anyway, like i said, I hope I don’t get banned—I really do like it here.
I guess where I’m coming from is this: why is it assumed that using tools like AI or Grammarly takes away from the creative process? For me, they speed up the mechanical side of things—grammar, flow, even structure—so I can spend more time on ideas, storytelling, informing, or just getting unblocked.
I do get frustrated when ChatGPT changes my wording or shifts the meaning of what I’m trying to say. It can definitely throw a wrench into the overall story. But in those cases, I rephrase my prompt, asking it not to touch the narrative or my word choices, just to act like a word processor on steroids or an expert editor.
I’m not saying these tools replace a good human editor—far from it. If I ever get to the point where I can work with a real editor or proof reader and so on, I’d choose the human every time. But until then, these tools help me keep the momentum going—and I don’t see that as a lack of care.
On the contrary, it often takes me more time to get the output right—because I’m trying to make sure it still reflects exactly what I want to say and express.
Maybe it’s just a different kind of process?
Now you’re just prompting. Just post the prompt, that’d be way more fun to read.
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.
* It includes price differentiation. Grounds that want to save the last penny can do so by handling payments themselves. I guess camping grounds are very price sensitive.
* It grows with size of the value provided
* Grounds can start using the tool without paying anything. Thus low barrier of entry
* It seems unlikely anyone can win over existing customers based on undercutting your price.
* 1% of revenue of a business sector can make up a nice indie business.
Most property management systems charge campground owners several thousand dollars upfront, before they can even try the software. That’s where our approach stands out: we offer a low barrier to entry paired with a modern user experience. Many competitors started over 15 years ago, and you can tell by how outdated their products feel.
Taking just a 1% cut can pay off if it helps capture more market share, this was my thinking too. We’re not quite there yet, as not all of the 250 campgrounds on our platform have adopted online payments. Still, it’s both exciting and a bit terrifying to see some of them already processing over $250,000 in annual bookings through our system.
I’ve had a few sleepless nights, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend building a marketplace product to everyone. Once real money flows through your platform at that scale, things get intense fast.
- CloudCamping (still only German market for now) https://www.cloud-camping.com/
- The Road to Next (fully launched last month) https://www.road-to-next.com/
- Music https://soundcloud.com/schlenkermitturnbeutel
Feel free to AMA.
I'm listening to one of your mixes right now and I'm wondering if you were influenced by Klangkarussell at all (or maybe the other way around?) or if that was just the general 2014 vibe.
Pardon my ignorance - does SoundCloud let you monetise, or is it purely it being cool that people are listening to your tracks?
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 :')
Unfortunately, I don’t think the postcards really worked. We sent them to various regions across Germany, but my guess is they ended up in a pile at the campground reception and never reached the actual owners.
That said, we manually scraped around 500 campgrounds near us, designed postcards that highlighted CloudCamping’s key selling points, and sent them out using a different mailing service. Since we didn’t hear back from anyone specifically mentioning the postcards, I assume they didn’t convince anyone in the end.
Still, it was a fun experiment, and who knows, it might work better in a different context!
Did you use a UI framework or css library?
How do you handle payments while only taking 1%? Stipe charges at least 1.5%.
• 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/ link to product, may give an idea of what we're doing.
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!
Can you link to an example?
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"?
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.
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.
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/
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). 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
The content is far too wide on big screens
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
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.
While CVE is still the largest database of vulnerabilities, we felt OSV is good enough to identify most recent vulnerabilities
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.
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`. ;)
> 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.
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/id15615...
Apply this logic to the jump from 20 to 100 if it makes the task less daunting for you.
Once you understand that and make them happy, you’ll come up with ideas to experiment how to get more users.
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.
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
[NOTE: Windows build phones home for updates; others don't yet.]
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!
* 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
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!
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)
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.
Cannot be emphasised enough.
I have seen enough B2C funnel optimization work to be able to say that at every minor obstacle you create 90% of the people will fall off.
You need to get people invested in your solution and make it super easy for them to throw money at you.
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
- 22 YouTube videos
- two LinkedIn posts a week
Now I have:
- 100 signups
- 28 demo completions
- 500 subscribers on YouTube
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's immediately obvious to me that the illustrations are AI slop
You should invest 20 bucks into getting some pictures of a guy in a datacenter, or 200 to pay some dude on Fiverr to draw you some sinks, instead of having these be the first thing customers see when checking out your product
They care much more about whether this product solves a problem they have.
This is based on my 17 years of running first a successful B2C product then a successful B2B SaaS.
Minor changes to one's home page tend to have little observable change in numbers of trial signups, the rate of conversion to paid customer, and so on.
I don't believe this qualifies as AI Slop. They are all consistent in their style and thus 'on brand' for what they are trying to convey. While visuals are fairly subjective and these may not speak to you, they don't have 'obvious slop characteristics' eg 6 fingers or 3 eyes imho.
Instead, notice when this happens and then take away your own experience and use it to build your own product. Good luck!
Makes sense though. I’ve been thinking of creating a very similar tool; delighted that it might already exist!
That implies that the product is ready, which it does not seem to be? The product does seem interesting, what do you do to differentiate yourself from different offerings that do basically the same? E.g. you mention Discord on the website - are you finding all the relevant discord channels for me, or do I have to join them myself, and you just monitor my account?
Yes, I find the discussions, let you engage with them trough the app, and monitor replies.
Do you mind sharing the competition you're referring to? I've not found any similar solution so far. Thanks
i.e. what the "success" was like in each of the outreaches?
It is frustrating though, because it makes it slightly harder to find communities of people who just want to have fun but it's better for people trying to grow a service.
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.
I prefer to distinguish from this hype and reach people through other channels - good content, word of mouth and interesting collaborative events (like our last Enterprise RAG Challenge). This might lead to slower sales in the short term, but I think the long-term value to the brand is worth it.
EDIT: fixed typo
This and interesting content was enough to grow community organically to 14k subscribers over 2 years.
Another approach to speed up the growth - organise some fun event that benefits the entire community, highlights and showcases the participants.
E.g. when I organised last Enterprise RAG challenge, we got 350 submissions from the teams around the world. Plus IBM joined as a sponsor. People were mostly participating not for the prises, but because of the approachable challenge and ability to push state of the art. Plus some were hired away because of the good leaderboard scores.
Article of the winner (just google "Ilya Rice: How I Won the Enterprise RAG Challenge") is considered by some companies as one of the best resources on building document-based AI systems. And the entire community sees it as the result of their work together - further reinforcing the spirit of the collaboration.
People tend to share and spread fruits of their labor and love.
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.
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.
I have spent countless months on the algorithm earlier. It improved from trash to something commercially reasonable gradually, it was more like getting stuck for a while then getting small break throughs.
My biggest mistake was changing my domain perhaps. Earlier it was bindrake.com Then I added 3d pack.ing and due to complexity of canonical pages google kicked me out.
Ironically recently I get contacted by a client and they said “you don’t exist on google but we found you from ChatGPT”
I saw myself more as a consumer than a producer. I mainly created mixtapes because I was constantly discovering and consuming new music. When I had the chance to play at a club or an open-air event (I tried it once), I quickly realized I wasn’t too comfortable performing in front of an audience :)
Around that time, I had just started learning to code and built my first little automations to help me discover even more music on SoundCloud. So I noticed this was another (more lucrative with the similar level of passion) career path where I didn't had to be in front of an audience.
I don't know if the tactic worked.
These days, if I were mailing postcards, I'd make sure to add a special QR code to them. That way, if someone went to my sales page using the QR code, I'd have an idea that the postcard had been seen by the right person. Postcards are rather expensive (both the postcard and the stamp). Who wants to keep trying that without knowing it was successful?
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...
Maybe, but in a conversation about acquiring your first hundred users; you don't have a lot of word-of-mouth backing up the quality of your product. Your ability to effectively present your product will never be more important.
If it's important enough that your brochure website has images on it at all, then it's also important enough for them to not look like something you'd see slapped on a scam.
Some let you link accounts, some give you lists of platforms they scan. I've specifically mentioned Discord because there's no easy way to discover communities without being invited, so if you can actually discover relevant Discord communities and monitor discussions (beyond the few sites that aggregate some popular communities), then you have a USP, since most products don't do that, at least in any capacity that people think is worth paying for.
I dropped Soundcloud paid version too, and migrated to just YouTube. Currently YouTube is trying very hard to learn to reply to my fans AS me, but through pushing buttons to immediately supply AI-generated responses. I'm sure anyone else with a substantial YouTube presence has seen this too.
So far, they are not self-pressing the button and taking over replying to my fans for me, against my will. So far. They'd also be looking at some challenges in AIing my content as it's weekly open source software development serving a specialized audience, though they would have a considerably easier time AIing my thumbnails, as those are a very predictable pattern and reproducible.
Regarding OP, and in the light of what I've said, maybe ask yourself in what way you can disambiguate yourself from any random AI-powered startup in targeting what for the other startup will be an arbitrary or shotgun selection of customer targets. Is there an audience you can work specifically for, and is there a way you can signal to that audience that you're particularly aware of them and interested in working for them?
My main problem is TOFU, which I need to solve for.
Might be soulless and ugly too, but at least it doesn't make your customer think "Hold on is this a scam?"
His website seems fine to me.
0. (the most painful step) Carefully parse all relevant documents into a structural representation that could be walked like a graph.
1. Extract relevant regulatory requirements using ontology-based classification and hybrid searches.
2. Break regulatory requirements into actionable analytical steps (turning a requirement into checklist/mini-pipeline)
3. Dynamically fetch and filter relevant company documents for each analytical step.
4. Analyze documents to generate intermediate compliance conclusions.
5. Iteratively validate and adjust analysis approach as needed.
6. Summarize findings clearly, embedding key references and preserving detailed reasoning separately.
7. Perform gap analysis, prioritizing compliance issues by urgency.
but I guess it speaks to flood of crap-ware, and flood bad content in social networks
^not meaning about you, of course (those folks must not be even on HN)
Just keep on pushing on it, and it will eventually work out.
Maybe it will work out, at low growth rate... in 180 years, when it does not matter anyways. Extremely low grow rates are functionally indistinguishable from death.
And even successful great products will not be used by anybody, ... if nobody even knows about it.
Think of Facebook or Apple hiding somewhere in corner vs screaming about themselves in Times Square billboards and streets storefronts in rural India.
Marketing, Distribution, Discovery is important for to-be great products too, just as it is important for crap-ware. (unfortunately later makes bad name and bad look for the whole industry).
> it was more like getting stuck for a while then getting small break throughs
Like simulated annealing itself ;-) (Yes, I watched the deep dive clip)
Really cool that you give API examples right on the landing page BTW. Do you know if many customers use the API directly? Also really interesting to me that your algo is quick enough that you can return a solution directly before the HTTPS connection times out (I would have thought it might take half an hour to optimise, meaning you'd probably need to instead return some kind of handle that the user can use to pick up the solution via a different endpoint later).
A couple of minor nits I noticed, hope this is helpful rather than annoying:
- The "Blog" link at the top appears to produce a copy of the original landing page. Maybe just delete that link?
- The "API Response Structure" section is duplicated
- In the deep dive clip, at 5:31, the subtitle contains "three dpaq.ing", while at 5:54, both the voice and the subtitle say "third bin packer" (I suspect you meant "3D bin packer")
The API came about the same way. Currently, there’s just one active API user: a company from Sri Lanka that built a Unity WASM interface on top of it.
I coded the algorithm completely from scratch, with no external inspiration and fun fact, it’s written in F# using functional programming. There are a lot of immutable lists floating around. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have been able to write it without functional programming (even though it’s notoriously slow for this kind of problem). The immutability allowed me to focus on individual parts of the app without worrying about side effects.
That said, how it works and how fast it works still feels like magic to me, just like any meta-heuristic algorithm applied to combinatorial problems.
And thanks for the feedback! I knew the Blog link was broken after I redid the landing page, but I didn’t notice the duplicated API Response Structure section. I’ll definitely fix that. Though part of me thinks, “Should I really bother?”
Also, thanks for catching the audio/subtitle issues. I was aware of both, but I figured it wouldn’t make much difference at this stage. Maybe that attitude explains my low traction… who knows? Either way, I appreciate you taking the time to point these out!
10/10 meta-promotion IMO
Technically, using immediate mode avoids a ton of callbacks/listeners or something else which allows for hundreds of docs to be held in memory usefully without hogging resources. That's an actual use case for this.
Hard to recreate but at the time I commented it was also the top comment with only a few others and it was on the front page. I've been a HN'er for a while and this is a rare situation to say the least if it's not a setup. I'm not willing to die on the hill and would gladly admit I'm wrong, I just see it as very suspicious forum spam as the most likely scenario