11 ms·

Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?

214 points by brandonhsiao 13y ago

I've never done any kind of user acquisition besides posting to Reddit and HN. I realize that this is, needless to say, not a working strategy. What do you people do?

pekk 13y ago
What kind of customer are you trying to get?
dangrossman 13y ago
Advertising. AdWords PPC and banners on relevant sites. You can use tools like http://mixrank.com/ http://mixrank.com/ (YC S11) to see where your competitors advertise and what ads they use.
ry0ohki 13y ago
Who is your customer? You need to go to where they are. Depending on your customer there will be wildly different marketing strategies.
helen842000 13y ago
Adwords, Forums, facebook groups, blog audiences, commenting, twitter, pinterest. Go and find out where you customer hangs out online. Who already has your perfect audience on their mailing list? See if you can write something of value for their audience and tap into existing groups. When you do get users, ask how they found you then double down on promoting in that channel.
- jfoster 13y ago
  Some of those suggestions (eg. comments) may represent a risk to search ranking. From what I understand, Google considers comments a negative signal. Perhaps it's only duplicate comments, though. Can someone more experienced than I am please provide their perspective here?
  - helen842000 13y ago
    Perhaps! However I think it's important to jump in with a community and comments give you the chance to be a valued member that contributes. Also, if your customers can find you without the assistance of search rankings (which can change at any time) then surely that's a good thing.
neals 13y ago
I've got 3 people cold-calling and driving around the country showcasing our product. They started last week. This is the first time I'm trying selling an online service this way, I must say that I am pleasantly surprised by the feedback and the signups.
- brandonhsiao 13y ago
  What's your product? And how'd you find the 3 people?
lobotryas 13y ago
It can be a working strategy if you're building a lifestyle business and don't care about hockey-stick growth or making millions. I'm an armchair entrepreneur for now (just getting that out of the way), but the advice I've seen over and over again can be generalized as: "Go out and talk to peope". You'll want to avoid starting with a sales pitch. Instead, talk to them about their business (or life) and see if your product is a fit (ie: don't try to sell a social network for cats to a dog owner). If it seems like there's some product fit, ask how they are filling the need now. If appropriate, give the the elevator pitch and a 1min demo on your live product. Ideally, convert them by having them sign up for a trial right then and there on your computer, followed by walking them through the COOLEST thing they can do on your product. Rinse, repeat. That's my 2 cents. Also interested what others think.
- DorintheFlora 13y ago
  If appropriate, give the the elevator pitch and a 1min demo on your live product. I want to point out the the above snippet assumes/implies a fairly deep knowledge of your intended audience, the problem space you are working in and several other things, any one of which might be the real problem as to why the OP is not getting traction. Not a criticism. Just ...an elaboration, I guess.
  - lucaspiller 13y ago
    I think if you want to be successful you need to have good knowledge about your audience. Maybe not when you are first starting out, but you should when you have a product to sell. You won't be a good golf club salesman if you know absolutely nothing about golf.
    - DorintheFlora 13y ago
      That's part of my point. We don't know where the OP is coming from though in terms of how well he/she knows the problem space, etc. If they don't know it well enough, perhaps pointing this out will help them.
  - 13y ago
muratmutlu 13y ago
http://betali.st/ http://betali.st/ got us our first 300 users for http://www.marvelapp.com http://www.marvelapp.com, it's free to submit, I recommend it, great way to get momentum. To get our first 1000 I used a combination of Twitter, LinkedIn Groups and my own blog and newsletter
- speakme 13y ago
  How long was the turnaround between submitting to betali.st and getting featured? I've heard some people submit just a few days before going live, so by the time users get invites it's still fresh in their minds.
  - muratmutlu 13y ago
    Actually for us it was pretty long (which I don't recommend). I think what you suggested is a much better strategy. I think it was around 3 months so it wasn't as fresh but what I did was go through email addresses one by one, picked out the companies that sounded the most promising and opened up a dialogue to get those guys in early. Then kept the other guys informed to try and keep them excited. Although if I would have done it just before launching I would have saved a lot of effort.
    - speakme 13y ago
      Yea that's what I'd be afraid of. It sounds like you handled it well. Since betali.st only features products that haven't fully launched yet, I just don't want to submit, and then by the time they see my submission we're live and they won't accept it. How long did it take between when you submitted to them and when you were actually featured?
Bartweiss 13y ago
What's your general field? B2B, especially for big industries, tends to call for networking and possibly cold calls. Individual sales tends to call for advertising with a focus on high relevance sites. Social or two-sided markets (think credit card companies and users) tend to call for narrow early focus via outreach to online or physical communities. This simulates widespread use by creating a regionally high use space. If you're in a specific field (e.g. online cello sales), do outreach to things like relevant forums and subreddits. You'll get targeted use which will provide quality feedback, hopefully. If it's a broad spectrum project, buy up relevant and cheap(ish) ads in several venues. Push use with some definable group that you can interact with directly, get emails via a newsletter, etc.
enra 13y ago
Told friends, twitter, HN.
dbla 13y ago
In my opinion reddit is very underrated in terms of customer acquisition. It's a target community of early adopters who are willing to start a conversation with you. For my start-up, 900dpi, I got our first 400 users from reddit after failing miserably through other channels. We found our best success in /r/web_design but have also looked at /r/frontend and /r/webdev. Sometimes your best traffic comes from comments in other peoples posts (where redditors are asking for a product like yours or discussing a problem that you solve). Our product has been picked up on a couple blogs too after being discovered by the bloggers via a reddit post. I've also had luck with some other niche community sites such as Designer News. The important piece here is to try and integrate yourself into the community instead of just spamming them with links to your website. Get involved in conversations about things other than your start-up (people notice this and appreciate it). Make friends with the moderators. When Designer News was still private with no search capabilities I wrote a quick search engine built on sphinx to index all of the posts and make them searchable. Not only did this get me an invite to the community but also sent some nice traffic to my start-ups site via a small link on the search page. I've had little to no success with twitter and facebook, although I might be doing it wrong. Some of the targeted communities that you can find through google plus look somewhat promising, but I've yet to fully explore these. Our most vocal power users are people we know personally, or met at local events (our local co-working space).
- habosa 13y ago
  r/startups was great for one of my launches, gave a lot of interesting feedback and drove some traffic. Wasn't hard to hit the front page.
mgl 13y ago
If you have a product that may generate profit, e.g. a SaaS application targeting businesses, not a money burning consumer-app train (see: twitter or another photo album app) one of the strategies that work is cold emailing: 0. Identify and name your target group, e.g. commercial real estate agents in CA. 1. Find these people on Linkedin using advanced search option and invite them to connect. 2. Once connected you have their e-mail address, so send them a short e-mail (better response rate than InMails) describing the business problem and your solution. Short means 3-5 sentences, no attachments, just try to attract their attention. 3. Don't forget about follow-ups. 4. They will reply if interested and bam, you have a lead! Now it's time to set up a call and go into details. 5. Rinse and repeat. Stay persistent, you should send at least 20+ every day. Track response rates and adjust, you should achieve at least 5-10% easily.
- mrtksn 13y ago
  This is borderline to SPAM, so I think the e-mails should be very personal. If you have many competitors I am probably getting lot's of these e-mails which means you would have much harder time to get my attention. Let's say you are a hosting provider, I probably would not like to get an e-mail from you offering me some good price or hard to understand feature of yours, because there are probably lot's of cheap hosting providers out there and every other provider is trying to differentiate themselves somehow. Other than "identifying my problem" you really shouldn't sound like giving me a sales pitch. But if you noticed that, let's say I have 350ms response time in Asia when it's only 50 in USA and you have some solution for it, I probably will reply you even if I am not going to buy your service right away.
  - dclara 13y ago
    Very good point on "identifying my problem", maybe it's better to be "identifying my specific problem" that nobody else can resolve for me. Thank you. I'm sort of learning this point from others and trying to apply it to draw people's attention. I showed people that you need to build a private version of the web that stores the only information you are interested in or related to you. And we have a tool to help you create your Private Web with a few clicks. But I failed. Can you please pinpoint out why? The Kickstarter project is here: http://kck.st/JNqv8z http://kck.st/JNqv8z
gbelote 13y ago
One cool technique I saw recently (which isn't always applicable) is from a talk by Jason Cohen: http://vimeo.com/74338272 http://vimeo.com/74338272 (around minute 7) In a nutshell when he was building WPEngine he went to LinkedIn and found folks who were Wordpress consultants. He then sent them a follow email and said he's building a product for "folks like you and would love to talk to you about your pains, needs, etc" (customer development stuff) and offered to pay for their time. It worked well - he sent 40, 100% agreed to talk, actually talked to 38, and 0 asked for money. He suggests this worked so well because the offer to pay showed he was respectful of their time so they were happy to help. YMMV.
- dclara 13y ago
  You have a very good example for shooting against the target niche where you have your best audience to listen to you. But the question is: "when he was building WPEngine", there are already 40 folks "who were Wordpress consultants"? Then the result is not unexpected, and can not be consider a good example. Sorry if I misunderstood you. What we want know is how he got that 40 consultants to working on WPEngine in the first place.
  - byoung2 13y ago
    WordPress was around for years before WPEngine started. There were thousands of WordPress consultants at that time, and he was building a WordPress hosting platform.
  - itengelhardt 13y ago
    There were numerous WP consultants when he did this. They were his target customers. He interviewed them about their pain points and found that their pain was in line with what he had in mind for WPEngine (easy, fast, secure, no-friction hosting for WP) He asked them to write him a check at the end of the interview. BAM, customers. (I make this sound easier than it is..)
    - dclara 13y ago
      Oh, thank you both for your quick responses. So he really did a good job to solve the pains of his potential customers. Now the question becomes: how WP got so many consultants in the first place? But that's out of the scope of the parent posting, it still within the scope of the OP though, :) Based on my experience, it's very hard for people to accept something new in the first place, for example, when WP was introduced. And this is still happening now. Once a group of people accept a new concept, building on top of it to improve the system is a little easier.
GnarfGnarf 13y ago
Not post on HN or Reddit, that's for sure.
- dclara 13y ago
  Thank you. Agreed.
pypetey 13y ago
How should I acquire users for classified ads website? I've done this site recently, it's my first personal project: http://oglos.info/ http://oglos.info/ I managed got some ads etc. I will appreciate feedback :) and suggestions related with the site (it's not in english but it's extremely easy so it should be understandable).
sharemywin 13y ago
you might try your local chamber of commerce. I believe one the mail apps tried that. probably need a general business app.
DanBC 13y ago
You don't appear to have any links to your product on your HN user page!!!
lgilchrist 13y ago
What's your product and who is your target user? Where do they spend their time? LinkedIn, Reddit, and HN won't help if you're trying to reach, for example, teenage girls. I collected some thoughts on this that you might find helpful: http://lgilchrist.github.io/how_to_get_your_first_100_users/ http://lgilchrist.github.io/how_to_get_your_first_100_users/ TL:DR; - get a splash page up and start collecting emails - guest blog - particularly in places you know your would-be-users will read - organize an event - play around with paid marketing
- jamesq 13y ago
  Great resource and some great ideas and reminders - I've bookmarked this for later!
itengelhardt 13y ago
Here's a tactic that has worked for me so far 1. Set up a blog on your domain 2. write 20+ articles on industry-related topics (this alone will bring in some traffic) 3. get a number of emails from prospective customers 4. write a PERSONALIZED email to everyone on the list and ask if they are interested in an interview to be published on your blog. Offer a link from your blog as additional incentive My response rate so far was >80%
- agilebyte 13y ago
  When you write the articles, do you SEO on questions that people may ask in their searches or just write general articles not necessarily pushing your product?
  - itengelhardt 13y ago
    I do both. Sometimes I look for long tail keywords (< 200 local exact match searches in Google's Keyword Planner tool). I then write mildly optimized posts for that. On other days I am like "that should be an interesting topic and I want to write about it". When I do this I don't even think about SEO.
    - agilebyte 13y ago
      Thank you Christoph and best of luck to you and your projects.
- dclara 13y ago
  Good for you to have such high response rate. I learned the first two tactics from other people and applied it to my project. My blog posts usually have some hits everyday without prospects. I think my blogs did help some people and brings interesting topics. Unfortunately no luck. I'd appreciate if you can give me any input. Here is the blog: http://bingobo.info/blog/ http://bingobo.info/blog/.
- pairing 13y ago
  "3. get a number of emails from prospective customers" Can you elaborate on this step? How are getting these emails?
spencerfry 13y ago
I've grown https://www.uncover.com https://www.uncover.com (a simple tool to give employees perks and rewards) in various different ways. A lot of it began with telling my network of friends who run startups. Getting them signed up. Then getting them to tell their friends how much they liked it. Once that source was depleted, I began to do a lot of content marketing. I started writing for a lot of different blogs, websites, etc. That helped get out name out there and brought in about a third of our current customers. I'm now beginning to experiment with buying ads. It's still too early to tell how well that will work out, though.
- namenotrequired 13y ago
  I'm not in your target audience, but I found your site originally on a Show HN and have seen it be recommended to others on various places ever since so you seem to be doing something right! :)
  - spencerfry 13y ago
    Thanks! That's awesome. Referrals are our best source of new customers.
davidw 13y ago
With LiberWriter, I targeted forums where our users actually hang out, and gave useful answers to questions, with the URL at the end of the message as a sort of '.signature'. HN is far, far away from our target audience, so posts here - even on the top of the front page - have gotten me pretty much 0 conversions. That's fine, though.
- dclara 13y ago
  Me too. I tried hard here, but I dare not to attaché the URL with every post. I got 0 conversations too, even though part of my target users/customers are here.
  - eli 13y ago
    Putting your URL at the bottom of every comment is actually against the HN guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html But yeah, I would think few startups would find the HN community a bullseye.
    - dclara 13y ago
      I know. That's why I only embed URLs when it's relevant to the topic and provide my input to the topic first. I usually got negative points up to -4 which made me so frustrated.
prottmann 13y ago
Thats the holy grail of marketing, and you will not get the answer here.
Jasber 13y ago
My friend and I just started a site to help do this: http://leaklist.org/ http://leaklist.org/ It's super early, but we've already gotten 500 users who are looking to beta test software and we've already started sending out codes. Our goal is to make it the best platform for developers to get their first 100 users and the best place for users to get early & free access to awesome apps. If you're interested please sign up either as a user or a developer—we're sending out stuff weekly!
- speakme 13y ago
  cool concept. Is it meant just for games and just mobile? Would your customers be interested in beta testing a web-based social network?
  - Jasber 13y ago
    Right now just games and mobile but the focus is to open up other categories/platforms as we hit critical mass.
- pairing 13y ago
  How did you get those 500 users?
cmelbye 13y ago
Advertising on social media and lots of instrumentation.
eli 13y ago
This is almost the exact same question as this front page post from an hour earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7248460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7248460 In essence: Go where your users hang out. With few exceptions, this is probably NOT the same place as where startup geeks hang out. One example: my startup has a website for the Energy & Utilities industry. We got a bunch of early users by forming a partnership with a trade organization for energy providers.
- notastartup 13y ago
  how did you manage to form a partnership with the trade organization? step by step approach?
  - eli 13y ago
    I'm very lucky to have two co-founders who are both much better at sales and business development than I, so one of them handled the details... But my recollection is that they approached us with a very vague idea that we were doing good stuff and maybe we can work together somehow? First instinct might have been to try to sell them ads (we're fully ad-supported), but after talking to them what they really wanted was 1) ways to provide more value to their members, 2) ways to do internal promotions to existing members and 3) things that are really easy for them to execute. So we racked our brains and came up with a deal where we write, manage, and send a weekly email newsletter with content tailored for their audience. The newsletter has both our logos in it and we promote it to our larger audience. They have a section they can use to promote their own events and content, and we promote the newsletter to our larger audience. We also provide discounts on ads to their members. It's not the sort of deal that "easy" in that it took real work to put together. But I think it's worked out great for everyone.
gabemart 13y ago
I haven't done any promotion for http://asoftmurmur.com http://asoftmurmur.com besides posting to reddit and HN, and it now has 400-500 regular daily users. It depends entirely on what type of product or service you're offering. Another key thing is to understand the community. There is radical cultural diversity between subreddits which manifests in very different reactions to self-promotion. It's essential to engage appropriately and respectfully. Something I've used for other projects is searching for coverage of competitors in the same space, then pitching to people who have already featured them. Again, very important to hand-tailor each pitch and offer value to the person you're contacting.
- brandonhsiao 13y ago
  I have to say, that's probably partly because you actually have a good product. Added to my bookmarks. I've been looking for something like this for years. Thanks for making it!
  - gabemart 13y ago
    Thanks very much for using it! I built it because I wanted it to exist. I got tired of jury rigging three instances of VLC together on my laptop every time I wanted some background noise.
    - NicoJuicy 13y ago
      Ever tried http://coffitivity.com/ http://coffitivity.com/ ?
      - phoenix1887 13y ago
        SWEET!
      - NicoJuicy 13y ago
        And i see the op has added "humans", which is a sound of coffitivity ;-)
- 13y ago
pikachu_is_cool 13y ago
I got my first 50,000 users in a few days by posting to reddit. And literally doing nothing else. If you're trying this hard to market then you're probably making a bad product.
- tokyonoise 13y ago
  Could you let us know about your product?
  - pikachu_is_cool 13y ago
    Sorry I can't, i'd be revealing my identity.
    - zmonteca 13y ago
      Must be a product you're really proud of.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
Sindrome 13y ago
It really depends on the business. But ideally you want to find a place where your ideal user is and promote there. Some Example: - If you are doing something entertainment based try posting branded content on Tumblr and promoting it through social media. - If you are building a SaaS application for developers, try to speak at a conference. Be sure not to fall into the trap of using users/straight growth as a vanity metric. Any website can get decent growth with a spammy strategy. You want quality users that will help grow the product.
girasquid 13y ago
I was after people who used iTunes to listen to their music for Beathound (http://beathound.com http://beathound.com), so I created a survey asking them about their listening habits and offered a $100 iTunes gift card as a reward in the hopes that folks filling it out would self-select based on how much they cared about the gift card. I posted a link to the survey in a handful of survey-oriented subreddits (/r/SampleSize is good) as well as some specific ones (like /r/music and /r/itunes). I had them leave their email if they wanted to be notified of the survey results, and then when Beathound was ready to go I sent them a nice email that said "Thanks for filling out my survey! You didn't win the gift card, but [here] are the results, and [here] is what I built using them." I had a terrible time giving the gift card to the person who won it, because they were in Australia and I'm in Canada - if you're going to give something away for your survey, make sure that you can easily do it internationally.
mrborgen 13y ago
A few years ago I started a norwegian Fiverr.com clone, called Mikrojobb.no. We got our first 100 users by: 1. Telling all of our friends to create accounts and post some 'gigs', so the site didnt look like a ghost town. 2. Going to various forums for bloggers, web developers, part-time entrepreneurs etc and asking them for feedback. (In other word, finding communities that we thought would use the site and asking them for feedback.) 3. Pushing some press releases to local news sites. Quite straightforward.
morisy 13y ago
30% from mailing lists where I was already an active member. 30% direct referrals from people I knew in field. 30% referrals from when I would find people not interested in product, and ask them if they knew anyone who was interested. 10% media coverage of product. Super labor intensive.
- esdailycom 13y ago
  How did you get referrals from a mailing list you were a subscriber to? Could you elaborate?
shazow 13y ago
For Briefmetrics[0], first 10 users were basically the people I was building the product for. About half of those immediately and enthusiastically converted to paying customers. The next 100 were friends, people who follow me on Twitter/Facebook, and Show HN[1]/Show Lobsters[2]/Show Reddit[3]. Got a few more paid customers from this segment but the conversion rate was not great at all. Now I'm working on the next 1,000 which will probably involve some "real press coverage" and some reviews on niche blogs or guest posts. This part has been the hardest for me and would love any advice/intros. -- [0] Briefmetrics [https://briefmetrics.com/ https://briefmetrics.com/], email summaries of your Google Analytics. [1] Show HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641385], which annoyingly got flagged pretty early on and never got any traction. Considering doing another Show HN, but kind of worried about annoying the HN hivemind. [2] Show Lobsters [https://lobste.rs/s/ppcmud/show_lobsters_i_built_briefmetrics_to_remove_the_pain_of_using_google_analytics https://lobste.rs/s/ppcmud/show_lobsters_i_built_briefmetric...], some good feedback, this went as well as I could have hoped for the size of the audience. Been really enjoying the Lobsters community. [3] Show Reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/analytics/comments/1uk9na/briefmetrics_simple_overview_of_your_google/ http://www.reddit.com/r/analytics/comments/1uk9na/briefmetri...] Got a chunk of visitors, but all the comments were from people I knew so the feedback was a bit of an echochamber.
- mgl 13y ago
  How would you describe your actual paying client?
  - shazow 13y ago
    How do you mean? My target customer audience? Right now it falls into two groups across two dimensions: 1a. Small-medium businesses 1b. Individuals with many web projects 2a. Already use the Google Analytics frontend regularly but feel that this recurring process is too cumbersome (often 20-40 clicks per property) and would rather have email reports to save time/effort. 2b. Have GA and like the idea of it, but never remember to check it regularly so they miss out on the value of analytics unless they get regular email reports.
cl8ton 13y ago
I tried many options to get to our first 100 users. Tech Blogs (they thought we were to boring to cover) HN (no interest) Reddit (no interest) Ad Words (I think I sucked at it) So I shrugged and kept improving then one day out of the blue, a big Mommy blog covered us for ways to keep up to date on coupons. This one coverage leads to our first 200 users, and then another blog (MakeUseOf) covered us, which then lead to other industry specific blogs to cover us. Now we are getting 70+ new accounts a day and have over 120k users. My advice (if the OP is asking) would be to target industry specific blogs/sites that would find your product useful and covers news that relates to your websites offerings, that is what I do now.
- yitchelle 13y ago
  What's your product?
jarnix 13y ago
I would give a kidney.
adambrod 13y ago
Striking up conversations in targeted areas works well for Blonk [0]. We're targeting software engineers & smaller startups looking to hire in the bay area. Find an icebreaker and when they naturally ask what you do, have your elevator pitch ready. If they're interested they'll ask you for url info or start downloading it on the spot. If not, no worries. We often work at coffee shops in that area. When someone starts talking, we're happy to chat. Typically when they need to plug in a laptop or they ask you to watch their stuff. Attending meetups that your target audience goes to can be very worthwhile. [0] http://blonk.co http://blonk.co is an job finding app that connects job seekers to co-founders or their potential dept. leader in large companies, skipping the recruiters entirely.
nhebb 13y ago
Before launching my first product, I wrote ten articles on related subjects and put up an email sign-up form. The article were static html pages, not blog posts. They were howto's and other reference pieces that had lasting traffic value.
- qsun 13y ago
  Did it work out (or not)?
mehulkar 13y ago
Reach out to 100 strategic people individually.
mbesto 13y ago
Talk to people. In person.
arikrak 13y ago
If you have a project associated with your startup, you can launch it on Kickstarter and get both users and money. That's what I did for Learneroo.com.
- jamesq 13y ago
  Hoe did you find the Kickstarter experience in terms of getting traction and interest with users? Did you promote the Kickstarter campaign elsewhere too?
yaur 13y ago
My last personal project was a fan site for an MMORPG where I was doing around 250k monthly uniques before the game tanked. Promoting it was just a matter of establishing a presence on the official forums prelaunch, looking at referrers and extending the presence to other sites that were generating traffic. My last commercial project was an OTT IPTV startup which we mainly promoted through adwords, some premium online ads in our target demographic, and doing interviews with media outlets that were serving that demographic. In terms of CPA adwords were by far the most cost effective. My current project is in the entertainment. We are looking to get buy in from a couple of prominent people in the space before we go live and expect that a "we like it" from them will give us critical mass very quickly.
bredren 13y ago
Friends and family count for your first dozen at least, hopefully. After that, consider looking for online communities that need your product. For example, vbulletin forums that focus on them. Ingratiate yourself to these communities by participating in discussions unrelated to what you're working on. By then, you should be able to post a full thread describing what you've done, offer a few screenshots and ask if people will try it. By replying to people's questions and being friendly, you will keep the thread reasonably topped and pick up users that way. This also works in general interest internet forums, so long as you are a reasonable participant and posting in the correct areas.
BorisMelnik 13y ago
cold called - I hired interns and commission based workers to call people they thought would buy our product. I didn't have to worry about selling it to the customers, I just had to figure out how to sell it to our sales reps. Cold calling worked great, just got tired of the bS that came along with it.
- missn 13y ago
  Can you elaborate what you meant by the "bs that came along with it"? Was it mostly setting up the system (getting the right folks, script, etc.) that was hard? Really interested to hear your experience (and the "pain points") as I know someone who is trying to write a book about this and he's always on the lookout for folks with different perspectives.
jonnathanson 13y ago
This is going to sound overly reductive, but I promise it's not: 1) What existing solution do you believe your product (or prospective product) is better than? 2) Where can you find a critical mass of people who use the existing solution? 3) Go there. Talk to them. Show them your product. Now, none of this is trivial. First, because assuming you're operating lean, you start with no real clue if you're "better" than anyone or anything else, or on what dimensions that actually matter. You start with a hypothesis, and you have to seek out opinions (customer development). Second, because the existing solution might not be what you think it is. Or it might not be a product at all. It might be a behavior people are doing, or an "off-label" use of another product. But by and large, this method works. It might not get you scale. But it'll get you in front of potential users, and those users will be primed to try out your product. The trick is in identifying the existing solution, finding people who use it, and getting some of their time. I'd definitely advocate doing this before doing any "Show HN" posts. Show HN is a (potential) way to get a lot of traffic and attention in one blast. You don't want to play that card until you know you can benefit from it: either in terms of feedback (you'll want to have vetted out basic users and assumptions first), or in terms of users (aim for some indications of fit before firing the shotgun). The other problem with relying on Show HN, or Reddit, is that there's luck of the draw involved. Sometimes your post gets buried or washed out by the noise. Being good is no firm guarantee of charting to page one.
- logicallee 13y ago
  I'm going to go ahead and disagree with you completely. Apple didn't find a critical mass of blackberry users (the leading smart phone at time of iPhone introduction) and market something better to them. It just made a smart phone and marketed it to everyone. When it made the iPod back in the day, it didn't find a critical mass of people using hard drive based players already. It created one for everyone. In more formal terms, if you are trying to steal someone else's customer you have to do something on day 1 (first sale) that is more than 100% as good. But if you are marketing to different customers, you are acting like a reseller of your competition, with the difference that you don't actually have to buy it from them, but can make it at cost. It's far better to be in the second situation. I don't think the right strategy is to take on entrenched competition head-on. It's better to create a new market.
dsugarman 13y ago
Focus on getting a product to the point that some small group (as small as one person) really loves the product. If you focus on that getting to 100 will be easy. Of course you will need to pick a product that at least 100 people have a use for.
loomio 13y ago
Our first customer for our collaboration tool Loomio (htp://www.loomio.org) was the coworking space we were working in and the social enterprise hub that was based there. We built a tool that was instantly useful to them, and in exchange we instantly had 100+ users. We released an extremely "M" MVP and had real users from day one. Because they were using it free and we were building features in response to their direct feedback, they were very understanding about it being a rough prototype. Two years later, they voluntarily opted to generously backpay us for use of the tool (we didn't even ask them to). If you can get real users from very early on, even if your tool is rough, do it! It will help you build what's really useful to people, and involving early users in the design process actively means they are motivated to use the tool early and help you make it work as well as possible as quickly as possible.
- lucaspiller 13y ago
  The pay what you want model is interesting - I'd like to know how that's working for you!
  - loomio 13y ago
    A lot of people have happily paid us money, which is awesome. But we've decided to transition to a true "gift economy" model now. In the next few weeks, we're launching a big crowdfunding campaign to fund development of Loomio 1.0, where we're taking the learnings from our first 10,000 users and creating a much more accessible, mobile responsive, intuitive tool. After crowdfunding, we're going to just be giving the basic software away for free and accepting donations instead of having a structured subscription model. At the same time though, we've had massive pull from enterprise customers for consulting to go alongside the tool to help them do really good internal collaboration and culture change to a more distributed leadership model, as well as facilitate constituent and stakeholder collaboration. That's been a significant source of income for us. Overall, the commitment to "pay what you can" has been core to our model and our values, and we're sticking with it, but we're experimenting with interpreting it in different ways. It's very important to us to both be independently financially sustainable, and to give our tool to groups doing great stuff in their communities regardless of their financial means.
shasa 13y ago
Back in Dec 2012, when we were planning to launch TripTern we were bootstrapped and didn't have any money for marketing. So we relied heavily on Facebook for promotion. One thing that we used to spread the word was to create promotional material based on movie posters ( see the links below). It helped us in getting the initial signups and also was instrumental in us getting featured on Mashable. https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.386831684726346.90214.336934619716053/386831691393012/ https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.38683168472634... https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.386831684726346.90214.336934619716053/388076751268506/ https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.38683168472634... https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.386831684726346.90214.336934619716053/389555237787324/ https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.38683168472634... You can see the entire album here https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.386831684726346.90214.336934619716053 https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.386831684726346.90...
blase40 13y ago
I struck up a partnership with the owner of the largest forum in my vertical. I just published this blog post about the whole process a few days ago: How One Strategic Partnership Generated Hockey Stick Growth For Our Online Community http://justinblase.quora.com/How-One-Strategic-Partnership-Generated-Hockey-Stick-Growth-For-Our-Online-Community?srid=jII&share=1 http://justinblase.quora.com/How-One-Strategic-Partnership-G...
MarkIceberg 13y ago
HN got me the first 260 users for http://crushify.org http://crushify.org (Reddit was a no show.)
vetleen 13y ago
There are a lot of great answers here already, however if you just do everything at once, you have no idea what works and not. Therefore, my advice is to take all of the great strategies mentioned here and write them down in “column A” in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Then write todays date in “column B”. Then choose one of the strategies in the list, preferably one you believe in. In the intersection between the date and the strategy write “Procedure: <exactly how you plan to proceed>, Measure: <exactly how you plan to measure the result, i.e. pageviews, signups etc.>, Result: <the results per metric>, Comments: <any comments that you think you’d like to remember when you read this in three months> ”. Then do exactly what you planned to do, measure the results and write them down in the designated field. Next day (or when the first strategy is done) pick a new strategy and repeat the process. I work with a lot of startups, and one of the things we keep learning is that it is a lot harder to get customers than it is to build something. Therefore try to think of marketing as a puzzle, a challenge to be solved. The key is to keep experimenting, and measure everything until you find something that works, then keep experimenting and measuring.
vetleen 13y ago
I work with a startup that sells education games to elementary schools in Norway. We did a survey, where we sent out 600 forms to teachers and got 154 responses. At the end of the form we had an extremely short description of the concept and a check-box for “yes, I would like to try this product together with my students”. We got 94 signups from that.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
junglhilt 13y ago
At Jungl VPN we do the following: 1) Personally craft a unique, thoughtful reply to every sales question. 2) Use our own VPN ourselves on a daily basis so we can empathize with our customers and improve our product 3) Provide stellar support for our product. For example remotely troubleshooting issues on customers computers or setting up a custom VPN server temporarily if customers are in a pinch. 4) Reward our influential customers by offering a referral fee. www.jungl.me
elgrito 13y ago
We don't have budget for marketing at http://www.cloquo.com http://www.cloquo.com so the only way we can do in order to promote our platform is by inviting bloggers, related with our service, to try out what we have develop so far, and we got some good feedback and reviews. Other way we are experimenting is to listen on twitter what kind of upcoming events people is interesting to not miss out and we add some value to them by sharing an alarm to easily activate it and being reminded when time comes. As a Google Mentor told me once, is better to reach first your primary audience instead going mad to be reviewed at big tech media. Maybe our experience can help others...
trevordev 13y ago
I created a website chatleap.com about a month ago and I had moved on since I was unable to get people to use it. I saw the twitch plays pokemon post and realized that it was hard to chat in the twitch chat due to all the people spamming commands so I decided to post my website there in hopes to get 1 or two people to visit my lonely chat. I ended up getting around 130 people and even had others posting my link in the twitch chat. So thats how I got my first 100 users but I am afraid they wont stay for long.
wuhha 13y ago
We had a idea for a group messenger tool to bridge teams and their customers (http://peer.im http://peer.im). Then we signed up an advisor to help us on sales and marketing. His is a sales director so he started used this tool in his team. Then we had a media press covered which brings us several dozen of real users who can give us feedback and iterate on features.
- isadeal 13y ago
  I checked out your site. The product looks very promising.
Disruptive_Dave 13y ago
Quick background on Collabo (www.letscollabo.com) for some context - we're a bootstrapped startup aimed at creating a safe environment for freelancers, solopreneurs, and work-from-homers to video chat about anything they want. No selling, just camaraderie. We're very much in the P/M fit stage and wanted to test our theories that we can build and sustain and engaged community of peers willing to share/learn/give/seek with each other. So, here's what we did to get our first 100: 1. When users sign up for our email drip campaign (which consists of drive-to's for our blog), they also receive an invite to a private Facebook Group. We manually approve every person in the Group, and use the Group to learn about our customers, connect them with each other, survey new ideas, and build a sense of community. The Group has been wildly key to our building process. We're seeing about 55-60% of our email sign-ups join the Group, with about 20% being active participants. 2. My co-founder and I put out an offer to all our customers/readers to meet us for a cup of coffee, on us. We're in Portland and NYC, so only for those folks. 3. Sent personal emails to our networks promoting Collabo and asking them for feedback. 4. I manually scraped the follower lists of our competitors and industry big dogs on Twitter and followed them, which yielded some really good results, mostly in terms of gaining targeted followers. 5. Lots of time spent offering advice and sharing stories/knowledge on communities like r/startups and r/freelance. 6. In the process of guest blogging on sites that serve our niche market.
phinett 13y ago
Similar to what others have said...when I setup my DJ mixes website for electronic dance music back in 2008 (http://www.house-mixes.com http://www.house-mixes.com), I literally jumped on to like-minded forums asking if people would be willing to trial it out, there was only a handful of competitors at the time which helped I suppose, but today we have over 550,000 registered users and an extremely active site.
raghavb 13y ago
Bunkmate.in told a few friends about it in college and . Grew from there.

214 points by brandonhsiao 13y ago

I've never done any kind of user acquisition besides posting to Reddit and HN. I realize that this is, needless to say, not a working strategy. What do you people do?

pekk 13y ago

What kind of customer are you trying to get?

dangrossman 13y ago

Advertising. AdWords PPC and banners on relevant sites. You can use tools like http://mixrank.com/ http://mixrank.com/ (YC S11) to see where your competitors advertise and what ads they use.

ry0ohki 13y ago

Who is your customer? You need to go to where they are. Depending on your customer there will be wildly different marketing strategies.

helen842000 13y ago

Adwords, Forums, facebook groups, blog audiences, commenting, twitter, pinterest. Go and find out where you customer hangs out online. Who already has your perfect audience on their mailing list? See if you can write something of value for their audience and tap into existing groups. When you do get users, ask how they found you then double down on promoting in that channel.

jfoster 13y ago
Some of those suggestions (eg. comments) may represent a risk to search ranking. From what I understand, Google considers comments a negative signal. Perhaps it's only duplicate comments, though. Can someone more experienced than I am please provide their perspective here?
- helen842000 13y ago
  Perhaps! However I think it's important to jump in with a community and comments give you the chance to be a valued member that contributes. Also, if your customers can find you without the assistance of search rankings (which can change at any time) then surely that's a good thing.

neals 13y ago

I've got 3 people cold-calling and driving around the country showcasing our product. They started last week. This is the first time I'm trying selling an online service this way, I must say that I am pleasantly surprised by the feedback and the signups.

brandonhsiao 13y ago
What's your product? And how'd you find the 3 people?

lobotryas 13y ago

It can be a working strategy if you're building a lifestyle business and don't care about hockey-stick growth or making millions. I'm an armchair entrepreneur for now (just getting that out of the way), but the advice I've seen over and over again can be generalized as: "Go out and talk to peope". You'll want to avoid starting with a sales pitch. Instead, talk to them about their business (or life) and see if your product is a fit (ie: don't try to sell a social network for cats to a dog owner). If it seems like there's some product fit, ask how they are filling the need now. If appropriate, give the the elevator pitch and a 1min demo on your live product. Ideally, convert them by having them sign up for a trial right then and there on your computer, followed by walking them through the COOLEST thing they can do on your product. Rinse, repeat. That's my 2 cents. Also interested what others think.

DorintheFlora 13y ago
If appropriate, give the the elevator pitch and a 1min demo on your live product. I want to point out the the above snippet assumes/implies a fairly deep knowledge of your intended audience, the problem space you are working in and several other things, any one of which might be the real problem as to why the OP is not getting traction. Not a criticism. Just ...an elaboration, I guess.
- lucaspiller 13y ago
  I think if you want to be successful you need to have good knowledge about your audience. Maybe not when you are first starting out, but you should when you have a product to sell. You won't be a good golf club salesman if you know absolutely nothing about golf.
  - DorintheFlora 13y ago
    That's part of my point. We don't know where the OP is coming from though in terms of how well he/she knows the problem space, etc. If they don't know it well enough, perhaps pointing this out will help them.
- 13y ago

muratmutlu 13y ago

http://betali.st/ http://betali.st/ got us our first 300 users for http://www.marvelapp.com http://www.marvelapp.com, it's free to submit, I recommend it, great way to get momentum. To get our first 1000 I used a combination of Twitter, LinkedIn Groups and my own blog and newsletter

speakme 13y ago
How long was the turnaround between submitting to betali.st and getting featured? I've heard some people submit just a few days before going live, so by the time users get invites it's still fresh in their minds.
- muratmutlu 13y ago
  Actually for us it was pretty long (which I don't recommend). I think what you suggested is a much better strategy. I think it was around 3 months so it wasn't as fresh but what I did was go through email addresses one by one, picked out the companies that sounded the most promising and opened up a dialogue to get those guys in early. Then kept the other guys informed to try and keep them excited. Although if I would have done it just before launching I would have saved a lot of effort.
  - speakme 13y ago
    Yea that's what I'd be afraid of. It sounds like you handled it well. Since betali.st only features products that haven't fully launched yet, I just don't want to submit, and then by the time they see my submission we're live and they won't accept it. How long did it take between when you submitted to them and when you were actually featured?

Bartweiss 13y ago

What's your general field? B2B, especially for big industries, tends to call for networking and possibly cold calls. Individual sales tends to call for advertising with a focus on high relevance sites. Social or two-sided markets (think credit card companies and users) tend to call for narrow early focus via outreach to online or physical communities. This simulates widespread use by creating a regionally high use space. If you're in a specific field (e.g. online cello sales), do outreach to things like relevant forums and subreddits. You'll get targeted use which will provide quality feedback, hopefully. If it's a broad spectrum project, buy up relevant and cheap(ish) ads in several venues. Push use with some definable group that you can interact with directly, get emails via a newsletter, etc.

enra 13y ago

Told friends, twitter, HN.

dbla 13y ago

In my opinion reddit is very underrated in terms of customer acquisition. It's a target community of early adopters who are willing to start a conversation with you. For my start-up, 900dpi, I got our first 400 users from reddit after failing miserably through other channels. We found our best success in /r/web_design but have also looked at /r/frontend and /r/webdev. Sometimes your best traffic comes from comments in other peoples posts (where redditors are asking for a product like yours or discussing a problem that you solve). Our product has been picked up on a couple blogs too after being discovered by the bloggers via a reddit post. I've also had luck with some other niche community sites such as Designer News. The important piece here is to try and integrate yourself into the community instead of just spamming them with links to your website. Get involved in conversations about things other than your start-up (people notice this and appreciate it). Make friends with the moderators. When Designer News was still private with no search capabilities I wrote a quick search engine built on sphinx to index all of the posts and make them searchable. Not only did this get me an invite to the community but also sent some nice traffic to my start-ups site via a small link on the search page. I've had little to no success with twitter and facebook, although I might be doing it wrong. Some of the targeted communities that you can find through google plus look somewhat promising, but I've yet to fully explore these. Our most vocal power users are people we know personally, or met at local events (our local co-working space).

habosa 13y ago
r/startups was great for one of my launches, gave a lot of interesting feedback and drove some traffic. Wasn't hard to hit the front page.

mgl 13y ago

If you have a product that may generate profit, e.g. a SaaS application targeting businesses, not a money burning consumer-app train (see: twitter or another photo album app) one of the strategies that work is cold emailing: 0. Identify and name your target group, e.g. commercial real estate agents in CA. 1. Find these people on Linkedin using advanced search option and invite them to connect. 2. Once connected you have their e-mail address, so send them a short e-mail (better response rate than InMails) describing the business problem and your solution. Short means 3-5 sentences, no attachments, just try to attract their attention. 3. Don't forget about follow-ups. 4. They will reply if interested and bam, you have a lead! Now it's time to set up a call and go into details. 5. Rinse and repeat. Stay persistent, you should send at least 20+ every day. Track response rates and adjust, you should achieve at least 5-10% easily.

mrtksn 13y ago
This is borderline to SPAM, so I think the e-mails should be very personal. If you have many competitors I am probably getting lot's of these e-mails which means you would have much harder time to get my attention. Let's say you are a hosting provider, I probably would not like to get an e-mail from you offering me some good price or hard to understand feature of yours, because there are probably lot's of cheap hosting providers out there and every other provider is trying to differentiate themselves somehow. Other than "identifying my problem" you really shouldn't sound like giving me a sales pitch. But if you noticed that, let's say I have 350ms response time in Asia when it's only 50 in USA and you have some solution for it, I probably will reply you even if I am not going to buy your service right away.
- dclara 13y ago
  Very good point on "identifying my problem", maybe it's better to be "identifying my specific problem" that nobody else can resolve for me. Thank you. I'm sort of learning this point from others and trying to apply it to draw people's attention. I showed people that you need to build a private version of the web that stores the only information you are interested in or related to you. And we have a tool to help you create your Private Web with a few clicks. But I failed. Can you please pinpoint out why? The Kickstarter project is here: http://kck.st/JNqv8z http://kck.st/JNqv8z

gbelote 13y ago

One cool technique I saw recently (which isn't always applicable) is from a talk by Jason Cohen: http://vimeo.com/74338272 http://vimeo.com/74338272 (around minute 7) In a nutshell when he was building WPEngine he went to LinkedIn and found folks who were Wordpress consultants. He then sent them a follow email and said he's building a product for "folks like you and would love to talk to you about your pains, needs, etc" (customer development stuff) and offered to pay for their time. It worked well - he sent 40, 100% agreed to talk, actually talked to 38, and 0 asked for money. He suggests this worked so well because the offer to pay showed he was respectful of their time so they were happy to help. YMMV.

dclara 13y ago
You have a very good example for shooting against the target niche where you have your best audience to listen to you. But the question is: "when he was building WPEngine", there are already 40 folks "who were Wordpress consultants"? Then the result is not unexpected, and can not be consider a good example. Sorry if I misunderstood you. What we want know is how he got that 40 consultants to working on WPEngine in the first place.
- byoung2 13y ago
  WordPress was around for years before WPEngine started. There were thousands of WordPress consultants at that time, and he was building a WordPress hosting platform.
- itengelhardt 13y ago
  There were numerous WP consultants when he did this. They were his target customers. He interviewed them about their pain points and found that their pain was in line with what he had in mind for WPEngine (easy, fast, secure, no-friction hosting for WP) He asked them to write him a check at the end of the interview. BAM, customers. (I make this sound easier than it is..)
  - dclara 13y ago
    Oh, thank you both for your quick responses. So he really did a good job to solve the pains of his potential customers. Now the question becomes: how WP got so many consultants in the first place? But that's out of the scope of the parent posting, it still within the scope of the OP though, :) Based on my experience, it's very hard for people to accept something new in the first place, for example, when WP was introduced. And this is still happening now. Once a group of people accept a new concept, building on top of it to improve the system is a little easier.

GnarfGnarf 13y ago

Not post on HN or Reddit, that's for sure.

dclara 13y ago
Thank you. Agreed.

pypetey 13y ago

How should I acquire users for classified ads website? I've done this site recently, it's my first personal project: http://oglos.info/ http://oglos.info/ I managed got some ads etc. I will appreciate feedback :) and suggestions related with the site (it's not in english but it's extremely easy so it should be understandable).

sharemywin 13y ago

you might try your local chamber of commerce. I believe one the mail apps tried that. probably need a general business app.

DanBC 13y ago

You don't appear to have any links to your product on your HN user page!!!

lgilchrist 13y ago

What's your product and who is your target user? Where do they spend their time? LinkedIn, Reddit, and HN won't help if you're trying to reach, for example, teenage girls. I collected some thoughts on this that you might find helpful: http://lgilchrist.github.io/how_to_get_your_first_100_users/ http://lgilchrist.github.io/how_to_get_your_first_100_users/ TL:DR; - get a splash page up and start collecting emails - guest blog - particularly in places you know your would-be-users will read - organize an event - play around with paid marketing

jamesq 13y ago
Great resource and some great ideas and reminders - I've bookmarked this for later!

itengelhardt 13y ago

Here's a tactic that has worked for me so far 1. Set up a blog on your domain 2. write 20+ articles on industry-related topics (this alone will bring in some traffic) 3. get a number of emails from prospective customers 4. write a PERSONALIZED email to everyone on the list and ask if they are interested in an interview to be published on your blog. Offer a link from your blog as additional incentive My response rate so far was >80%

agilebyte 13y ago
When you write the articles, do you SEO on questions that people may ask in their searches or just write general articles not necessarily pushing your product?
- itengelhardt 13y ago
  I do both. Sometimes I look for long tail keywords (< 200 local exact match searches in Google's Keyword Planner tool). I then write mildly optimized posts for that. On other days I am like "that should be an interesting topic and I want to write about it". When I do this I don't even think about SEO.
  - agilebyte 13y ago
    Thank you Christoph and best of luck to you and your projects.
dclara 13y ago
Good for you to have such high response rate. I learned the first two tactics from other people and applied it to my project. My blog posts usually have some hits everyday without prospects. I think my blogs did help some people and brings interesting topics. Unfortunately no luck. I'd appreciate if you can give me any input. Here is the blog: http://bingobo.info/blog/ http://bingobo.info/blog/.
pairing 13y ago
"3. get a number of emails from prospective customers" Can you elaborate on this step? How are getting these emails?

spencerfry 13y ago

I've grown https://www.uncover.com https://www.uncover.com (a simple tool to give employees perks and rewards) in various different ways. A lot of it began with telling my network of friends who run startups. Getting them signed up. Then getting them to tell their friends how much they liked it. Once that source was depleted, I began to do a lot of content marketing. I started writing for a lot of different blogs, websites, etc. That helped get out name out there and brought in about a third of our current customers. I'm now beginning to experiment with buying ads. It's still too early to tell how well that will work out, though.

namenotrequired 13y ago
I'm not in your target audience, but I found your site originally on a Show HN and have seen it be recommended to others on various places ever since so you seem to be doing something right! :)
- spencerfry 13y ago
  Thanks! That's awesome. Referrals are our best source of new customers.

davidw 13y ago

With LiberWriter, I targeted forums where our users actually hang out, and gave useful answers to questions, with the URL at the end of the message as a sort of '.signature'. HN is far, far away from our target audience, so posts here - even on the top of the front page - have gotten me pretty much 0 conversions. That's fine, though.

dclara 13y ago
Me too. I tried hard here, but I dare not to attaché the URL with every post. I got 0 conversations too, even though part of my target users/customers are here.
- eli 13y ago
  Putting your URL at the bottom of every comment is actually against the HN guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html But yeah, I would think few startups would find the HN community a bullseye.
  - dclara 13y ago
    I know. That's why I only embed URLs when it's relevant to the topic and provide my input to the topic first. I usually got negative points up to -4 which made me so frustrated.

prottmann 13y ago

Thats the holy grail of marketing, and you will not get the answer here.

Jasber 13y ago

My friend and I just started a site to help do this: http://leaklist.org/ http://leaklist.org/ It's super early, but we've already gotten 500 users who are looking to beta test software and we've already started sending out codes. Our goal is to make it the best platform for developers to get their first 100 users and the best place for users to get early & free access to awesome apps. If you're interested please sign up either as a user or a developer—we're sending out stuff weekly!

speakme 13y ago
cool concept. Is it meant just for games and just mobile? Would your customers be interested in beta testing a web-based social network?
- Jasber 13y ago
  Right now just games and mobile but the focus is to open up other categories/platforms as we hit critical mass.
pairing 13y ago
How did you get those 500 users?

cmelbye 13y ago

Advertising on social media and lots of instrumentation.

eli 13y ago

This is almost the exact same question as this front page post from an hour earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7248460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7248460 In essence: Go where your users hang out. With few exceptions, this is probably NOT the same place as where startup geeks hang out. One example: my startup has a website for the Energy & Utilities industry. We got a bunch of early users by forming a partnership with a trade organization for energy providers.

notastartup 13y ago
how did you manage to form a partnership with the trade organization? step by step approach?
- eli 13y ago
  I'm very lucky to have two co-founders who are both much better at sales and business development than I, so one of them handled the details... But my recollection is that they approached us with a very vague idea that we were doing good stuff and maybe we can work together somehow? First instinct might have been to try to sell them ads (we're fully ad-supported), but after talking to them what they really wanted was 1) ways to provide more value to their members, 2) ways to do internal promotions to existing members and 3) things that are really easy for them to execute. So we racked our brains and came up with a deal where we write, manage, and send a weekly email newsletter with content tailored for their audience. The newsletter has both our logos in it and we promote it to our larger audience. They have a section they can use to promote their own events and content, and we promote the newsletter to our larger audience. We also provide discounts on ads to their members. It's not the sort of deal that "easy" in that it took real work to put together. But I think it's worked out great for everyone.

gabemart 13y ago

I haven't done any promotion for http://asoftmurmur.com http://asoftmurmur.com besides posting to reddit and HN, and it now has 400-500 regular daily users. It depends entirely on what type of product or service you're offering. Another key thing is to understand the community. There is radical cultural diversity between subreddits which manifests in very different reactions to self-promotion. It's essential to engage appropriately and respectfully. Something I've used for other projects is searching for coverage of competitors in the same space, then pitching to people who have already featured them. Again, very important to hand-tailor each pitch and offer value to the person you're contacting.

brandonhsiao 13y ago
I have to say, that's probably partly because you actually have a good product. Added to my bookmarks. I've been looking for something like this for years. Thanks for making it!
- gabemart 13y ago
  Thanks very much for using it! I built it because I wanted it to exist. I got tired of jury rigging three instances of VLC together on my laptop every time I wanted some background noise.
  - NicoJuicy 13y ago
    Ever tried http://coffitivity.com/ http://coffitivity.com/ ?
    - phoenix1887 13y ago
      SWEET!
    - NicoJuicy 13y ago
      And i see the op has added "humans", which is a sound of coffitivity ;-)
13y ago

pikachu_is_cool 13y ago

I got my first 50,000 users in a few days by posting to reddit. And literally doing nothing else. If you're trying this hard to market then you're probably making a bad product.

tokyonoise 13y ago
Could you let us know about your product?
- pikachu_is_cool 13y ago
  Sorry I can't, i'd be revealing my identity.
  - zmonteca 13y ago
    Must be a product you're really proud of.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

Sindrome 13y ago

It really depends on the business. But ideally you want to find a place where your ideal user is and promote there. Some Example: - If you are doing something entertainment based try posting branded content on Tumblr and promoting it through social media. - If you are building a SaaS application for developers, try to speak at a conference. Be sure not to fall into the trap of using users/straight growth as a vanity metric. Any website can get decent growth with a spammy strategy. You want quality users that will help grow the product.

girasquid 13y ago

I was after people who used iTunes to listen to their music for Beathound (http://beathound.com http://beathound.com), so I created a survey asking them about their listening habits and offered a $100 iTunes gift card as a reward in the hopes that folks filling it out would self-select based on how much they cared about the gift card. I posted a link to the survey in a handful of survey-oriented subreddits (/r/SampleSize is good) as well as some specific ones (like /r/music and /r/itunes). I had them leave their email if they wanted to be notified of the survey results, and then when Beathound was ready to go I sent them a nice email that said "Thanks for filling out my survey! You didn't win the gift card, but [here] are the results, and [here] is what I built using them." I had a terrible time giving the gift card to the person who won it, because they were in Australia and I'm in Canada - if you're going to give something away for your survey, make sure that you can easily do it internationally.

mrborgen 13y ago

A few years ago I started a norwegian Fiverr.com clone, called Mikrojobb.no. We got our first 100 users by: 1. Telling all of our friends to create accounts and post some 'gigs', so the site didnt look like a ghost town. 2. Going to various forums for bloggers, web developers, part-time entrepreneurs etc and asking them for feedback. (In other word, finding communities that we thought would use the site and asking them for feedback.) 3. Pushing some press releases to local news sites. Quite straightforward.

morisy 13y ago

30% from mailing lists where I was already an active member. 30% direct referrals from people I knew in field. 30% referrals from when I would find people not interested in product, and ask them if they knew anyone who was interested. 10% media coverage of product. Super labor intensive.

esdailycom 13y ago
How did you get referrals from a mailing list you were a subscriber to? Could you elaborate?

shazow 13y ago

For Briefmetrics[0], first 10 users were basically the people I was building the product for. About half of those immediately and enthusiastically converted to paying customers. The next 100 were friends, people who follow me on Twitter/Facebook, and Show HN[1]/Show Lobsters[2]/Show Reddit[3]. Got a few more paid customers from this segment but the conversion rate was not great at all. Now I'm working on the next 1,000 which will probably involve some "real press coverage" and some reviews on niche blogs or guest posts. This part has been the hardest for me and would love any advice/intros. -- [0] Briefmetrics [https://briefmetrics.com/ https://briefmetrics.com/], email summaries of your Google Analytics. [1] Show HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641385], which annoyingly got flagged pretty early on and never got any traction. Considering doing another Show HN, but kind of worried about annoying the HN hivemind. [2] Show Lobsters [https://lobste.rs/s/ppcmud/show_lobsters_i_built_briefmetrics_to_remove_the_pain_of_using_google_analytics https://lobste.rs/s/ppcmud/show_lobsters_i_built_briefmetric...], some good feedback, this went as well as I could have hoped for the size of the audience. Been really enjoying the Lobsters community. [3] Show Reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/analytics/comments/1uk9na/briefmetrics_simple_overview_of_your_google/ http://www.reddit.com/r/analytics/comments/1uk9na/briefmetri...] Got a chunk of visitors, but all the comments were from people I knew so the feedback was a bit of an echochamber.

mgl 13y ago
How would you describe your actual paying client?
- shazow 13y ago
  How do you mean? My target customer audience? Right now it falls into two groups across two dimensions: 1a. Small-medium businesses 1b. Individuals with many web projects 2a. Already use the Google Analytics frontend regularly but feel that this recurring process is too cumbersome (often 20-40 clicks per property) and would rather have email reports to save time/effort. 2b. Have GA and like the idea of it, but never remember to check it regularly so they miss out on the value of analytics unless they get regular email reports.

cl8ton 13y ago

I tried many options to get to our first 100 users. Tech Blogs (they thought we were to boring to cover) HN (no interest) Reddit (no interest) Ad Words (I think I sucked at it) So I shrugged and kept improving then one day out of the blue, a big Mommy blog covered us for ways to keep up to date on coupons. This one coverage leads to our first 200 users, and then another blog (MakeUseOf) covered us, which then lead to other industry specific blogs to cover us. Now we are getting 70+ new accounts a day and have over 120k users. My advice (if the OP is asking) would be to target industry specific blogs/sites that would find your product useful and covers news that relates to your websites offerings, that is what I do now.

yitchelle 13y ago
What's your product?

jarnix 13y ago

I would give a kidney.

adambrod 13y ago

Striking up conversations in targeted areas works well for Blonk [0]. We're targeting software engineers & smaller startups looking to hire in the bay area. Find an icebreaker and when they naturally ask what you do, have your elevator pitch ready. If they're interested they'll ask you for url info or start downloading it on the spot. If not, no worries. We often work at coffee shops in that area. When someone starts talking, we're happy to chat. Typically when they need to plug in a laptop or they ask you to watch their stuff. Attending meetups that your target audience goes to can be very worthwhile. [0] http://blonk.co http://blonk.co is an job finding app that connects job seekers to co-founders or their potential dept. leader in large companies, skipping the recruiters entirely.

nhebb 13y ago

Before launching my first product, I wrote ten articles on related subjects and put up an email sign-up form. The article were static html pages, not blog posts. They were howto's and other reference pieces that had lasting traffic value.

qsun 13y ago
Did it work out (or not)?

mehulkar 13y ago

Reach out to 100 strategic people individually.

mbesto 13y ago

Talk to people. In person.

arikrak 13y ago

If you have a project associated with your startup, you can launch it on Kickstarter and get both users and money. That's what I did for Learneroo.com.

jamesq 13y ago
Hoe did you find the Kickstarter experience in terms of getting traction and interest with users? Did you promote the Kickstarter campaign elsewhere too?

yaur 13y ago

My last personal project was a fan site for an MMORPG where I was doing around 250k monthly uniques before the game tanked. Promoting it was just a matter of establishing a presence on the official forums prelaunch, looking at referrers and extending the presence to other sites that were generating traffic. My last commercial project was an OTT IPTV startup which we mainly promoted through adwords, some premium online ads in our target demographic, and doing interviews with media outlets that were serving that demographic. In terms of CPA adwords were by far the most cost effective. My current project is in the entertainment. We are looking to get buy in from a couple of prominent people in the space before we go live and expect that a "we like it" from them will give us critical mass very quickly.

bredren 13y ago

Friends and family count for your first dozen at least, hopefully. After that, consider looking for online communities that need your product. For example, vbulletin forums that focus on them. Ingratiate yourself to these communities by participating in discussions unrelated to what you're working on. By then, you should be able to post a full thread describing what you've done, offer a few screenshots and ask if people will try it. By replying to people's questions and being friendly, you will keep the thread reasonably topped and pick up users that way. This also works in general interest internet forums, so long as you are a reasonable participant and posting in the correct areas.

BorisMelnik 13y ago

cold called - I hired interns and commission based workers to call people they thought would buy our product. I didn't have to worry about selling it to the customers, I just had to figure out how to sell it to our sales reps. Cold calling worked great, just got tired of the bS that came along with it.

missn 13y ago
Can you elaborate what you meant by the "bs that came along with it"? Was it mostly setting up the system (getting the right folks, script, etc.) that was hard? Really interested to hear your experience (and the "pain points") as I know someone who is trying to write a book about this and he's always on the lookout for folks with different perspectives.

jonnathanson 13y ago

This is going to sound overly reductive, but I promise it's not: 1) What existing solution do you believe your product (or prospective product) is better than? 2) Where can you find a critical mass of people who use the existing solution? 3) Go there. Talk to them. Show them your product. Now, none of this is trivial. First, because assuming you're operating lean, you start with no real clue if you're "better" than anyone or anything else, or on what dimensions that actually matter. You start with a hypothesis, and you have to seek out opinions (customer development). Second, because the existing solution might not be what you think it is. Or it might not be a product at all. It might be a behavior people are doing, or an "off-label" use of another product. But by and large, this method works. It might not get you scale. But it'll get you in front of potential users, and those users will be primed to try out your product. The trick is in identifying the existing solution, finding people who use it, and getting some of their time. I'd definitely advocate doing this before doing any "Show HN" posts. Show HN is a (potential) way to get a lot of traffic and attention in one blast. You don't want to play that card until you know you can benefit from it: either in terms of feedback (you'll want to have vetted out basic users and assumptions first), or in terms of users (aim for some indications of fit before firing the shotgun). The other problem with relying on Show HN, or Reddit, is that there's luck of the draw involved. Sometimes your post gets buried or washed out by the noise. Being good is no firm guarantee of charting to page one.

logicallee 13y ago
I'm going to go ahead and disagree with you completely. Apple didn't find a critical mass of blackberry users (the leading smart phone at time of iPhone introduction) and market something better to them. It just made a smart phone and marketed it to everyone. When it made the iPod back in the day, it didn't find a critical mass of people using hard drive based players already. It created one for everyone. In more formal terms, if you are trying to steal someone else's customer you have to do something on day 1 (first sale) that is more than 100% as good. But if you are marketing to different customers, you are acting like a reseller of your competition, with the difference that you don't actually have to buy it from them, but can make it at cost. It's far better to be in the second situation. I don't think the right strategy is to take on entrenched competition head-on. It's better to create a new market.

dsugarman 13y ago

Focus on getting a product to the point that some small group (as small as one person) really loves the product. If you focus on that getting to 100 will be easy. Of course you will need to pick a product that at least 100 people have a use for.

loomio 13y ago

Our first customer for our collaboration tool Loomio (htp://www.loomio.org) was the coworking space we were working in and the social enterprise hub that was based there. We built a tool that was instantly useful to them, and in exchange we instantly had 100+ users. We released an extremely "M" MVP and had real users from day one. Because they were using it free and we were building features in response to their direct feedback, they were very understanding about it being a rough prototype. Two years later, they voluntarily opted to generously backpay us for use of the tool (we didn't even ask them to). If you can get real users from very early on, even if your tool is rough, do it! It will help you build what's really useful to people, and involving early users in the design process actively means they are motivated to use the tool early and help you make it work as well as possible as quickly as possible.

lucaspiller 13y ago
The pay what you want model is interesting - I'd like to know how that's working for you!
- loomio 13y ago
  A lot of people have happily paid us money, which is awesome. But we've decided to transition to a true "gift economy" model now. In the next few weeks, we're launching a big crowdfunding campaign to fund development of Loomio 1.0, where we're taking the learnings from our first 10,000 users and creating a much more accessible, mobile responsive, intuitive tool. After crowdfunding, we're going to just be giving the basic software away for free and accepting donations instead of having a structured subscription model. At the same time though, we've had massive pull from enterprise customers for consulting to go alongside the tool to help them do really good internal collaboration and culture change to a more distributed leadership model, as well as facilitate constituent and stakeholder collaboration. That's been a significant source of income for us. Overall, the commitment to "pay what you can" has been core to our model and our values, and we're sticking with it, but we're experimenting with interpreting it in different ways. It's very important to us to both be independently financially sustainable, and to give our tool to groups doing great stuff in their communities regardless of their financial means.

shasa 13y ago

Back in Dec 2012, when we were planning to launch TripTern we were bootstrapped and didn't have any money for marketing. So we relied heavily on Facebook for promotion. One thing that we used to spread the word was to create promotional material based on movie posters ( see the links below). It helped us in getting the initial signups and also was instrumental in us getting featured on Mashable. https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.386831684726346.90214.336934619716053/386831691393012/ https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.38683168472634... https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.386831684726346.90214.336934619716053/388076751268506/ https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.38683168472634... https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.386831684726346.90214.336934619716053/389555237787324/ https://www.facebook.com/useTripTern/photos/a.38683168472634... You can see the entire album here https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.386831684726346.90214.336934619716053 https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.386831684726346.90...

blase40 13y ago

I struck up a partnership with the owner of the largest forum in my vertical. I just published this blog post about the whole process a few days ago: How One Strategic Partnership Generated Hockey Stick Growth For Our Online Community http://justinblase.quora.com/How-One-Strategic-Partnership-Generated-Hockey-Stick-Growth-For-Our-Online-Community?srid=jII&share=1 http://justinblase.quora.com/How-One-Strategic-Partnership-G...

MarkIceberg 13y ago

HN got me the first 260 users for http://crushify.org http://crushify.org (Reddit was a no show.)

vetleen 13y ago

There are a lot of great answers here already, however if you just do everything at once, you have no idea what works and not. Therefore, my advice is to take all of the great strategies mentioned here and write them down in “column A” in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Then write todays date in “column B”. Then choose one of the strategies in the list, preferably one you believe in. In the intersection between the date and the strategy write “Procedure: <exactly how you plan to proceed>, Measure: <exactly how you plan to measure the result, i.e. pageviews, signups etc.>, Result: <the results per metric>, Comments: <any comments that you think you’d like to remember when you read this in three months> ”. Then do exactly what you planned to do, measure the results and write them down in the designated field. Next day (or when the first strategy is done) pick a new strategy and repeat the process. I work with a lot of startups, and one of the things we keep learning is that it is a lot harder to get customers than it is to build something. Therefore try to think of marketing as a puzzle, a challenge to be solved. The key is to keep experimenting, and measure everything until you find something that works, then keep experimenting and measuring.

vetleen 13y ago

I work with a startup that sells education games to elementary schools in Norway. We did a survey, where we sent out 600 forms to teachers and got 154 responses. At the end of the form we had an extremely short description of the concept and a check-box for “yes, I would like to try this product together with my students”. We got 94 signups from that.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

junglhilt 13y ago

At Jungl VPN we do the following: 1) Personally craft a unique, thoughtful reply to every sales question. 2) Use our own VPN ourselves on a daily basis so we can empathize with our customers and improve our product 3) Provide stellar support for our product. For example remotely troubleshooting issues on customers computers or setting up a custom VPN server temporarily if customers are in a pinch. 4) Reward our influential customers by offering a referral fee. www.jungl.me

elgrito 13y ago

We don't have budget for marketing at http://www.cloquo.com http://www.cloquo.com so the only way we can do in order to promote our platform is by inviting bloggers, related with our service, to try out what we have develop so far, and we got some good feedback and reviews. Other way we are experimenting is to listen on twitter what kind of upcoming events people is interesting to not miss out and we add some value to them by sharing an alarm to easily activate it and being reminded when time comes. As a Google Mentor told me once, is better to reach first your primary audience instead going mad to be reviewed at big tech media. Maybe our experience can help others...

trevordev 13y ago

I created a website chatleap.com about a month ago and I had moved on since I was unable to get people to use it. I saw the twitch plays pokemon post and realized that it was hard to chat in the twitch chat due to all the people spamming commands so I decided to post my website there in hopes to get 1 or two people to visit my lonely chat. I ended up getting around 130 people and even had others posting my link in the twitch chat. So thats how I got my first 100 users but I am afraid they wont stay for long.

wuhha 13y ago

We had a idea for a group messenger tool to bridge teams and their customers (http://peer.im http://peer.im). Then we signed up an advisor to help us on sales and marketing. His is a sales director so he started used this tool in his team. Then we had a media press covered which brings us several dozen of real users who can give us feedback and iterate on features.

isadeal 13y ago
I checked out your site. The product looks very promising.

Disruptive_Dave 13y ago

Quick background on Collabo (www.letscollabo.com) for some context - we're a bootstrapped startup aimed at creating a safe environment for freelancers, solopreneurs, and work-from-homers to video chat about anything they want. No selling, just camaraderie. We're very much in the P/M fit stage and wanted to test our theories that we can build and sustain and engaged community of peers willing to share/learn/give/seek with each other. So, here's what we did to get our first 100: 1. When users sign up for our email drip campaign (which consists of drive-to's for our blog), they also receive an invite to a private Facebook Group. We manually approve every person in the Group, and use the Group to learn about our customers, connect them with each other, survey new ideas, and build a sense of community. The Group has been wildly key to our building process. We're seeing about 55-60% of our email sign-ups join the Group, with about 20% being active participants. 2. My co-founder and I put out an offer to all our customers/readers to meet us for a cup of coffee, on us. We're in Portland and NYC, so only for those folks. 3. Sent personal emails to our networks promoting Collabo and asking them for feedback. 4. I manually scraped the follower lists of our competitors and industry big dogs on Twitter and followed them, which yielded some really good results, mostly in terms of gaining targeted followers. 5. Lots of time spent offering advice and sharing stories/knowledge on communities like r/startups and r/freelance. 6. In the process of guest blogging on sites that serve our niche market.

phinett 13y ago

Similar to what others have said...when I setup my DJ mixes website for electronic dance music back in 2008 (http://www.house-mixes.com http://www.house-mixes.com), I literally jumped on to like-minded forums asking if people would be willing to trial it out, there was only a handful of competitors at the time which helped I suppose, but today we have over 550,000 registered users and an extremely active site.

raghavb 13y ago

Bunkmate.in told a few friends about it in college and . Grew from there.