560 points by amanchanda 5 days ago
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)
I like the simplicity of pricing on CloudCamping.
* 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.
Thanks for your feedback and for validating the pricing model! We see it the same way.
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 Many competitors started over 15 years ago, and you can tell by how outdated their products feel.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.
If anyone wants to check out these things:
- 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.
Was there any particular reason you stopped making music?
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.
I’d say it was mostly the general 2014 vibe. But yes, I listened to Klangkarussell and many other German producers. I was probably most influenced by Alle Farben, who was known for his mixtapes before he started producing his own tracks (which I wasn’t really a fan of). But I also showcased a darker side in some of my mixtapes (like "Der schwerste Gang einer Ente" where I used artists like Burial).
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.
Thanks for the flashback! My first coding assignment in highschool was to build a camping management tool in Visual Basic. This is what got my into coding.
> 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?
Not 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 :')
Might be fortunate instead: they're setting up to be able to train AI on specifically you and then, if needed, make music AS you undercutting you. Such is the way of things these days.
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?
Would love to hear more about the postcards you sent. Did you send these to cold prospects? Did they work? What do they look like?
Hey Jason, just saw your email and wanted to reply here.
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!
I used to run a SaaS, and I also used postcards to try to promote it! Why not use emails? I was sure that emails would get spam-collected, but physical postcards might get some attention.
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?
CloudCamping's UI is beautiful.
Did you use a UI framework or css library?
How do you handle payments while only taking 1%? Stipe charges at least 1.5%.
my guess: pass the processing fees onto the either the consumer or provider.
Grown 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/ link to product, may give an idea of what we're doing.
Cool product! How much time would you say you spend on support per week? I've always heard that it's harder to scale when you're reliant on income via support.
As it stands I'm on the other side of the scalability issues wrt support-based growth: although I do have paying customers, I'd rather have more
It is as if there is no formula for startup success and you have to experiment. Like if there was a formula everyone would follow it and it would become the only way. A bit like chat up lines- these 10 words and you always get a date. Like there is no counterforces like competition and attention against a cookie recipe for startups.
Make 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.
Is there any word of mouth ("virality") among your existing user-base?
Virality 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...
Same 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.
Yes, just use a crisp screenshot related to the use case. Especially when it's a product aimed at developers.
This comment is a bit puzzling to me given that this is literally the very top thing at the homepage.
> https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may give an idea of what we're doing.
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
I'd wager that paying customers really don't care whether the images look AI-generated or not.
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'd wager that paying customers really don't care whether the images look AI-generated or not.
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.
Still a tiny bit better than the "massive limbs bendy people" corporate style.
It's called Corporate Memphis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis)
Might be soulless and ugly too, but at least it doesn't make your customer think "Hold on is this a scam?"
> It's immediately obvious to me that the illustrations are AI slop
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.
My 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
> 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"?
Indeed, 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.
What do you mean by "cold start"? I can't figure it out, but are you saying because your site was very new google gave it more weight for those search terms and that's why you were ranking well on that competitive search terms?
My 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.
I’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/
This seems like that sort of marketing where the OP creates a question for himself to answer from another account.
Sigh. This is yCombinator’s startup school or whatever it’s called where they teach you to launch a product and solicit engagement and feedback. This template is boilerplate for the last 3 or 4 I’ve seen. Then it gets posted to hacker news to solicit feedback from “real users”. Without fail the creators happen to haha stumble in and happily take your feedback. Absolutely nothing changes and you will return to the same product page as an old bookmark 2 years from now and realize nothing on the page has changed.
Instead, notice when this happens and then take away your own experience and use it to build your own product. Good luck!
> I ended up turning that process into its own product: https://sparkflow.ai/
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?
Hi. I should have phrased it differently as I'm not totally ready yet (as you rightly pointed out).
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
Not sure if I'm allowed to link to stuff, but you can find a bunch of alternatives to offerings like these (the most basic being google alerts), both free and paid, if you look for them - especially on sites that exist to list alternatives.
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 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
Do you have numbers?
i.e. what the "success" was like in each of the outreaches?
I also run a small B2C company (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!
> daily manually done reddit posts
Can you link to an example?
I 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
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.
You 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.
For 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
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.
What is happening with the Reddit programming subs? They are totally insane
Reddit 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.
It'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.
The thing about twitter is once you do pay for a checkmark, you get a ton of traction and boost. And there is a certain amount of logic to it; if you're willing to pay $8 how badly do you really want to grow your reach.
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.
Not 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
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.
Kudos, 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?
We 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
What's your approach with getting users for your OSS product?
Build 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.
I run a small but fairly successful "embed chatGPT on your site" widget 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!
Your site would look way better with mx-auto max-w-7xl :)
The content is far too wide on big screens
Nit: Are you maybe German? You write "10.000" in a couple of places on your landing page, where native English speakers would expect to see "10,000".
How does this work? Does all files that I upload are in context or do you use rag?
I 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.
Of 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.
That last point (compliance gaps in fintech) sounds fascinating. Is there a place that I could read more about this?
Compliance gaps / legal analysis is a pretty common theme in my community (meaning - it was mentioned 3-4 times by different teams). Here is how the approach usually looks like:
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.
why no ads though? don't they give you reach and discovery to people? for so as long your profits are higher than ads cost, you are profitable, so why not?
There are way too many ads around "AI". Everybody else does that, frequently overwhelming people with too many promises of quick wins.
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
yeah, this is much slower growth... danger must be it is so slow it must be non-existent. but I am with you on same boat, there are too many AI ads for crappy apps
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)
When I was starting my community, I joined other similar communities and tried to be helpful there. No ads or links, just answering questions and supporting. People that were genuinely interested to learn more about the topic - opened my profile and followed the links there.
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.
> 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`. ;)
When 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/id15615...
First 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.
Ok. Makes sense. So basically, what we are doing, you want us to scale that. Correct?
Your 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.
So, 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.
Checkout stuff by Reforge (reforge.com) to learn about how to prioritize this kind of stuff.
We 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/), 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.
Interview 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
Managed to scale my legal tech B2B product Tritium (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.
Thank 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?
I posted on HN about Foqos: 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!
2 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
At 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!
B2C 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)
I'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.
> Get out of their fucking way when they have their wallet out.
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.
Have 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.
Without 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
I just added more context in a comment above. I am building an AI Ghostwriter for LinkedIn content (https://socialhq.me)
In 4 months I published:
- 22 YouTube videos
- two LinkedIn posts a week
Now I have:
- 100 signups
- 28 demo completions
- 500 subscribers on YouTube
so much media content and only 100 user… damn thats tough
I 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.
I wish I knew always-working answer and wish it was easier.. it is tough!
For 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.
This 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.
I have built this 3d bin packer. https://3dpack.ing Despite my best attempts didn’t take off:(
What 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.
I 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.
This 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.
I guess i am around 150 MRR level or less perhaps. So it pays the costs and leaves me some money and I can run it forever given the condition satisfied.
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”
Thanks! I know what you mean about "countless months" on an algorithm... Glad you were able to improve it to a useful level.
> 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 YC Startup School series on YouTube is pretty good! There’s a video dedicated to the topic: https://youtu.be/hyYCn_kAngI?si=cSCikwHVu5e0NGf5
I'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.
You can give a go to submitting to software directories or marketplaces - e.g. https://www.saashub.com/submit/list
Well, I am trying to do it right now through a Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971523
:)
It is supposed to be a fun demo, let's see if it works
Product: Manabi Reader 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.
I 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.
My 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%.
Built xonboard, employee onboarding tool for Xero: 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
I 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.
Make 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
So tired of people here throwing out jargon acronyms w/o explanation. Even decades in the industry I don’t know many of them.
TikTok - 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.
I 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
Find 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.
To 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.
Supabase 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.
We have a free version. For now, we have kept it invite-only. Question is TOFU.
I 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 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.
I 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.
Maybe I should give more context on what I am building. It is an AI ghostwriter for LinkedIn content (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.
Built 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.
The 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.
Education 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.
I'm building an AI product management co-pilot (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).
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).
I'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.
I'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
Founder of 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.
It's easier said than done, I suppose, but my first ~500 users for 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.
Instead 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.
Cold 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.
Not 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?
The 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.
It 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/
Built a free product (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) (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 :)
https://www.heymeta.com/sponsor/ returns a 404 currently... is that expected?
It shouldn't and doesn't for me at the moment. Is this still the case on your side?
I’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.
Good post from Lenny Rachitsky on how to acquire your first users
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/consumer-business-find-fi...
I 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.
If 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.
Give 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?
For https://poach.vc/ and 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.
I'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:
Initially, 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.
I 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.
I'm 40% through getting my first 100 users for 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.
“Kruh” means bread in Slovenian, so “making bread” with the product seems fitting :D
My 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
Since 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)
With our product (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.
It 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.
I 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.
My product, TestSmithy (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.
In 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.
I have a lot of bullet point summaries of nonfiction that I share on https://littlerbooks.com. I got my first hundred users mostly by just mentioning in it in social media posts where appropriate.
When 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.
Where 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.
I posted itter.sh on hackernews and got 400-ish really friendly people to check it out :)
I'm doing a hardware startup (the first repairable e-bike battery, https://gouach.com if you're interested) and we got users by doing an Indiegogo :)
Your silvery cylindrical cell contacts are not beating the contact-resistance-driven-fire allegations.
I 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.
I am having trouble making a product itself. Constantly having to rewrite things. So still very inspiring to see what people are upto here.
I 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.
finally! surprised to scroll so much on HN to find this comment. do SWEs on HN are really so bad at marketing?
A 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 ) . 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 ). And I post on BlueSky, Threads, and X/Twitter daily in addition to Substack Notes. Have 600 users, 5000 followers.
I would use submithunt to list on multiple directories at once
I 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?"
Can 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.
It'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.
Cold calling. Combined with email, texting, and conventions.
We’re building a SaaS analytics tool aimed at helping founders better understand their subscription metrics: 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.
I 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/
For 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.
I think this person genuinely writes like an llm. Read the rest of their comments.
My llm radar picks it up as well.
A reverse uncanny valley
I think they are simply typing on their phone. On an iPhone, three dots and a space becomes the Unicode ellipsis, two hyphens becomes an em dash, apostrophes and quotes become curvy, letters are capitalized automatically. These things are not only easy to type, but hard not to type. I think they just really, really like em dashes. Not even ChatGPT uses them so frequently.
"A reverse uncanny valley" I had to look that up, so embarrassing (especially from a tech nerd). Thank you for pointing that out, i will definitely focus less on perfection and be less worried about tyypos from now on— genuinely NOT being sarcastic and sincerely appreciate the feedback.
This whole account is AI fake blob. Honestly this is the way the world is deteriorating into. That blog is the biggest joke ever. Top to bottom completely just AI generated fake bla. The posts of this 13 days old account likely too. And the startup doesn't exis... sorry... 'can't be mentioned'. We just gotta go on 'trust me bro' here. Ok.
Wait—which startup are you referring to? My blog or my current SaaS project with 100 users? Both are real. The blog is just a creative outlet for me, while the SaaS is my latest dev project, in beta testing with a little over 100 users. I’ll be more than happy to share its success—or failure—with the community when the time is right (I’m rooting for success). Hope that clears up.
>> Solve a real, hair-on-fire problem
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.
How hard was it to get the partnership? Was that cold outreach, too?
Not cold—more like soft outreach. It happened at a social event through mutual friends. Classic “So, what do you do?” convo. I said software dev. They said, “Ugh, we use this tool—it’s garbage.”
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!
> They said, “Ugh, we use this tool—it’s garbage.”
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.
> Honestly, it could’ve been any event. Just show up, be sincere
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.
No, I’m not based in Silicon Valley. I’ve always believed location matters less these days—especially in software.
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.
i'm sorry but does this not read like chatgpt output to anyone else?
edit: I know a lot of ESL people use chatgpt now online so maybe thats an explaination
Yes, the "hair on fire" and "knock on doors" are signs for me.
What’s wrong with saying “hair on fire” and “knocking on doors”? Granted, I’m bald—but still, the words and thoughts are mine (even if some are structured by ChatGPT). I’ll admit my blogging skills need work, but it’s an original process, and it’s a start. Thanks for the feedback.
Not 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.