1. First one I started 10 years ago. I built a bot that auto DMed people in various internet forums. My first 100 users came from that. The product is highly shareable, so it quickly grew. Now it's 1.6M users (most of them free).
2. Second started 3.5 years ago. My first 100 users came from simply emailing the newsletter list from my first company. This product has no free plan, so it became profitable instantly.
3. Third started 1 month ago. And it's been a struggle. I got 10k free users just by emailing my list, but 0 paying users. So I tried ads and had similar results from the ads. Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.
Summary: once you have an email list and viral social loops built-in, marketing gets easier.
1. I made an app for the colorblind in 2015 and got my first 100 (and more) users from the r/colorblind subreddit.
2. I made a breathing app in 2017 and got my first users from r/breathing, r/breathwork, and r/meditation subreddits.
3. I recently made a productivity app for the mac and got my first users from r/macapps subreddit.
Reddit is incredibly powerful if you are building something niche and are already a part of the community. Also, the results are compounding because some of my posts get good SEO traffic so I still get a handful of users from Reddit every day.
Whether you can rank for a specific thing people are searching and looking for is also a good litmus test of 1) is there demand for your thing ... are there people searching Google for your solution, and 2) is the market not so extremely saturated with competitors that you're able to rank?
I run a translation company, so when we started the target was not "website translation" .. it was "website translation for squarespace" (and similar niche use cases which our product worked equally well for). A the company grew, so did the breadth of our use cases.
Our first 500 users were people paying $10/mo to translate their squarespace site. The next 500 users were enterprise companies paying many orders of magnitude more to translate everything/anything you can imagine.
And as for "the first" customer... that would be the company I was working for while developing the MVP. Who actually paid me $20/mo for the product while I was working for them! (And yes, the employment contract said they owned all my IP for side projects, and no it wasn't difficult to get them to sign a simple letter negating those terms since I was open and honest about my side projects - people on HN go bonkers with legalities of contracts when in reality people tend to operate on good faith)
The 2nd customer was a cold outreach where I offered to basically do all of the work manually if the solution I was offering didn't work off the shelf. Essentially I was offering them free professional services.
The 3-10th customer came through the SEO scheme.
I wrote on this exact topic (literally - how I got my first 100 paying users) here: https://swiftjectivec.com/The-First-100-Subscribers/
Maybe a dozen of those became customers right away, and then it was word of mouth from there.
Another commenter mentioned finding relevant forums on Reddit, it's the exact same idea.
This is all very fresh (as of 1 week ago)
- Show HN: Did quite well - Post to Reddit (r/sideprojects, r/saas, etc): Did better than expected. 40 sign-ups to our waitlist over 24 hours.
If you don't have a product ready (like us), have a Waitlist on your landing page. Ours is built using our own dev-tool, so we're showing off the product and collecting sign ups.
It also helped that our landing page looks really good!
We built up a partner network worldwide, so we had to find relevant partners who would help serve our potential customers in the relevant way that already had those customers. They are easyish to find and approach because they are trying to achieve a similar goal, although sometimes more generically if they are integrators (selling software, hardware and services). Sometimes they sell a competitive product so our USP had to be tight - such as not requiring a year of services to start up but maybe an hour or two.
Others were complimentary tech partners and very kindly helped spread the word, and got a foot in the door for direct engagement.
If each partner has 10 good customers, then thats 10 partners you have to engage with. We were more often than not involved with the relationship with the customer, and got direct knowledge of the customer problem, how well we fit solving the problem, identify UX issues, sales issues, support issues etc..
It’s been a successful way to start.
What's important is after you get the first N customers, the way you acquire customers will likely change. You'll exhaust your personal network eventually. Knowing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is important and so is having a good understanding that the value/price of your product dictates what kind of sales/marketing you can do.
Things like cold emailing are fine for your first few customer development calls, but generally if your deal size is less than $1-2,000/year then (with exceptions) you should stop doing this after you get the first customers.
I run a low price point SaaS for SMEs (avg price is <$100/month), so this required switching from just messaging people I knew, to getting SEO, word of mouth, and the viral loop working. Outbound/inbound sales is not economical at that price point.
https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/top-15-acquisition-channels...
Hacker News for the next 10,000.
Target audience was devs.
Next 50-100 was cold emails.
After that, mostly word-of-mouth.
Target audience was publishers (audience development/growth)
Ads also generate installs but since my app is a one-time sale the economics don't work out. If it costs ~$4 in ads to get an install and the one-time in-app purchase is $9 you're losing money.
Your channels are dependent on your product and market you're trying to serve. For us it's b2b enterprise customers in the United States. So email works well. If you are trying to sell to developers, or union carpenters in venezuela its going to be different per case.
Targeted Linkedin outreach: A specific class of professionals
I had a little bit of luck as well that someone shortly after I started the newsletter mentioned it here on Hacker News when on an Ask HN for cool newsletters that they followed and this brought a bunch of users as well at the beginning of my newsletter.
Today I barely do any active marketing for it, I believe mostly comes organically from word of mouth and also from newsletter directories/aggregators.
https://news.gipety.com/hn/41862332/k/175/s/ask-hn-founders-...
The podcast is quite convincing and entertaining but not as useful at bringing out all the key points as I'd hoped it would be. Still useful for getting a quick overview though.
I had absolutely zero intentions to market it, but seems like there was a niche need as other apps weren’t making it simple for the feature I was looking for. Gives you dopamine hits when you can see others using the app, especially when you know you’re doing it just for fun and no money is involved.
It was this Show HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980
That was before showing something on HN was called "Show HN" though.
Converting beta testers to paid users took a long time, but eventually it became a profitable business.
If you make something people want, it's easy and you need very little marketing.
To get 1,000, we used SEO.
Our product helps people get ready for the Duolingo English Test, so our target audience was well-defined from the beginning.
I don't know my icp and I'm prepmf.
How can I find people to try it?
How can I find people that could actually bring end users to my b2b product? I need people with existing distribution
Second startup: word of mouth