Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

167 amanchanda 112 5/13/2025, 8:41:25 AM

I am building a B2C AI SaaS with $50/month price. How would you go about getting with first 100 users and then the next 500 users.

What we are currently doing: 1) Cold outreach to power users - to convert them into affiliates. 2) Cold outreach to individuals who have target ICP communities. 3) SEO for more long term (not for the first 500)

Comments (112)

nicooo · 3m ago

I’ve had success twice using targeted social media outreach — specifically by joining relevant subreddit discussions and commenting on YouTube videos where my target audience was already active.

Instead of simply promoting your service right away (it often feels spammy), I recommend genuinely engaging in conversations until the right opportunity comes up.

I ended up turning that process into its own product: https://sparkflow.ai/

rwieruch · 3h ago

Not sure if my "products" compare to yours, but I’ve seen some success with a few of them over the years, maybe there are some takeaways (or pitfalls to avoid) for you:

CloudCamping (PMS): 250+ Businesses, 2023

- Positioned as more modern, more accessible, and more affordable than the competition

- Limited competition due to the complexity of the product

- Personally visited campgrounds to demo the product

- Sent physical postcards (old school!) to campgrounds with product updates and announcements

- Due to limited competition, it is now ranking very high in the German marked on SEO

The Road to React & The Road to Next: 1000+ Users, 2024

- Gave away The Road to React for free in exchange for an email, grew the mailing list this way

- Benefited from early timing (luck!), it was the first book on the topic

- Initial version wasn’t polished, but I kept iterating and improving it each year

- In 2025, released the paid course The Road to Next to my audience, now over 1,000 students enrolled

SoundCloud (DJ/Producing as “Schlenker mit Turnbeutel”)

- Active from 2010–2015 as a hobby, grew to 10,000+ followers (a lot for the time)

- SoundCloud allowed 1,000 direct messages per track

- Carefully selected 1,000 high-engagement listeners in my music niche and personally messaged them to check out new tracks

So yeah, a mix of timing/luck, outreach that does not scale, being better than the competition I'd say.

nielsole · 4m ago

I like the simplicity of pricing on CloudCamping.

* It includes price differentiation. Grounds that want to save the last penny can do so by handling payments themselves. I guess camping grounds are very price sensitive.

* It grows with size of the value provided

* Grounds can start using the tool without paying anything. Thus low barrier of entry

* It seems unlikely anyone can win over existing customers based on undercutting your price.

* 1% of revenue of a business sector can make up a nice indie business.

rwieruch · 46m ago

If anyone wants to check out these things:

- CloudCamping (still only German market for now) https://www.cloud-camping.com/

- The Road to Next (fully launched last month) https://www.road-to-next.com/

- Music https://soundcloud.com/schlenkermitturnbeutel

Feel free to AMA.

silvester23 · 16m ago

Was there any particular reason you stopped making music?

I'm listening to one of your mixes right now and I'm wondering if you were influenced by Klangkarussell at all (or maybe the other way around?) or if that was just the general 2014 vibe.

rwieruch · 6m ago

I’d say it was mostly the general 2014 vibe. But yes, I listened to Klangkarussell and many other German producers. I was probably most influenced by Alle Farben, who was known for his mixtapes before he started producing his own tracks (which I wasn’t really a fan of).

I saw myself more as a consumer than a producer. I mainly created mixtapes because I was constantly discovering and consuming new music. When I had the chance to play at a club or an open-air event (I tried it once), I quickly realized I wasn’t too comfortable performing in front of an audience :)

Around that time, I had just started learning to code and built my first little automations to help me discover even more music on SoundCloud. So I noticed this was another (more lucrative) career path where I didn't had to be in front of an audience.

thenthenthen · 26m ago

Thanks for the flashback! My first coding assignment in highschool was to build a camping management tool in Visual Basic. This is what got my into coding.

robertlagrant · 1h ago

> SoundCloud (DJ/Producing as “Schlenker mit Turnbeutel”)

Pardon my ignorance - does SoundCloud let you monetise, or is it purely it being cool that people are listening to your tracks?

rwieruch · 1h ago

Not ignorant at all.

I'm not sure if they’ve added any monetization features over the years. Back then, it was arguably the best platform for getting discovered as a producer or DJ. When I stopped making music, I was getting a lot of requests to play at clubs across Germany and Europe.

At the time, I preferred to stay anonymous, so I never made the leap into the professional or public scene. Still, I was in touch with some producers early in their careers on SoundCloud when they had 1000 followers, like Robin Schulz and Felix Jaehn, if those names ring a bell.

So yes, I’d say it was (is?) definitely a launchpad for artists. But as far as I know, there was never a real way to monetize on the platform.

Unfortunately, when I stopped paying for the Pro version, they removed almost all of my music. Only 5 mixes are still up :')

Applejinx · 3m ago

Might be fortunate instead: they're setting up to be able to train AI on specifically you and then, if needed, make music AS you undercutting you. Such is the way of things these days.

I dropped Soundcloud paid version too, and migrated to just YouTube. Currently YouTube is trying very hard to learn to reply to my fans AS me, but through pushing buttons to immediately supply AI-generated responses. I'm sure anyone else with a substantial YouTube presence has seen this too.

So far, they are not self-pressing the button and taking over replying to my fans for me, against my will. So far. They'd also be looking at some challenges in AIing my content as it's weekly open source software development serving a specialized audience, though they would have a considerably easier time AIing my thumbnails, as those are a very predictable pattern and reproducible.

Regarding OP, and in the light of what I've said, maybe ask yourself in what way you can disambiguate yourself from any random AI-powered startup in targeting what for the other startup will be an arbitrary or shotgun selection of customer targets. Is there an audience you can work specifically for, and is there a way you can signal to that audience that you're particularly aware of them and interested in working for them?

vanschelven · 3h ago

Grown way past 100 users with:

• Make a great product. Everyone tells you "build it and they will come" is not working anymore, but it's working _for me_.

• Outreach via your network. Talk to people with the intent of learning, not selling.

• I'm personally on a freemium model. But that's in the developer-to-developer market, which is vastly different from your B2C

EDIT:

https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may give an idea of what we're doing.

meander_water · 2h ago

Cool product! How much time would you say you spend on support per week? I've always heard that it's harder to scale when you're reliant on income via support.

90s_dev · 2h ago

I've been struggling with choosing a model to make enough to keep the lights on with my upcoming project. Has freemium actually gotten enough paid users for you?

amanchanda · 3h ago

Make a great product. -- > this is an iterative process as per me. Unless users come and try it out, you won't know what a great product looks like.

The need is real, and the problem is real. I am one of the users myself. I built it because I felt the need myself. I ran the MVP with 15 others in my network with similar profiles. Quesiton is how to scale beyond that.

vanschelven · 3h ago

Is there any word of mouth ("virality") among your existing user-base?

herbst · 3h ago

Same here. When I create a product I try to build something that makes a good impression and if done well everything kinda goes from there.

My first SaaS was basically traffic kick-started from a single comment on the digital ocean blog, that described a complicated solution to the problem I 'solved'. No freemium either.

sebstefan · 1h ago

> https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may give an idea of what we're doing.

It's immediately obvious to me that the illustrations are AI slop

You should invest 20 bucks into getting some pictures of a guy in a datacenter or a 200 to pay some dude on Fiverr to draw you some sinks instead of having these be the first thing customers see when checking out your product

theshrike79 · 13m ago

Still a tiny bit better than the "massive limbs bendy people" corporate style.

bwb · 36m ago

wow I didn't see it that way at all, they looked good to me.

wahnfrieden · 22m ago

They are very obviously "AI generated genre" which many still don't pick up on

bwb · 7m ago

shrug, i don't mind, looks good

MobileVet · 1h ago

> It's immediately obvious to me that the illustrations are AI slop

I don't believe this qualifies as AI Slop. They are all consistent in their style and thus 'on brand' for what they are trying to convey. While visuals are fairly subjective and these may not speak to you, they don't have 'obvious slop characteristics' eg 6 fingers or 3 eyes imho.

sebstefan · 1h ago

If you can tell immediately that an illustration is AI-made, for me it already qualifies as slop. It gives low quality, lack of effort

calmoo · 1h ago

Cool concept but AI slop photos are really offputting, this would steer me away from your product (as a naive first viewer).

helloplanets · 57m ago

Yes, just use a crisp screenshot related to the use case. Especially when it's a product aimed at developers.

abhisek · 54m ago

Not sure if it’s relevant because you specifically mentioned about B2C.

For cyber security product, we took the open source route. We build our core technology in public as open source project.

https://github.com/safedep/vet

The commercial SaaS is for scaling and management. Our entire funnel is based on OSS. Folks who have already found value and is looking to scale their deployment.

This model works for us especially at our current stage where we are 100% engineering led.

helro · 1h ago

I got 20k+ downloads for my app by posting on Reddit. It's an app/website blocker for iPhone & Mac, so I focused on relevant communities like r/digitalminimalism and r/dumbphones with genuine, non-spammy posts: https://www.atten.app

I also tried "apps gone free" campaigns by posting on Reddit and using sites like AppRaven. These were very effective for visibility, the launch is currently the #5 all-time post on r/macapps (https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/top/?t=all). While these campaigns drove a strong spike in downloads, retention was low, so they weren’t as useful for building a long-term user base.

No comments yet

littlerbooks · 10m ago

I have a lot of bullet point summaries of nonfiction that I share on https://littlerbooks.com. I got my first hundred users mostly by just mentioning in it in social media posts where appropriate.

welder · 8m ago

From this post right here! Sign up: https://wonderful.dev - the social network for devs

stanislavb · 42m ago

You can give a go to submitting to software directories or marketplaces - e.g. https://www.saashub.com/submit/list

dcchambers · 35m ago

B2C @ $50/month from an unknown company is a HUGE ask.

tonyhart7 · 20m ago

lmao yeah lol, I mean claude/chatgpt etc didnt cost that much at the start

maybe they use image generation, thats why launch price is so expensive

jrvarela56 · 3h ago

First 100 users, meet them one by one wherever you can (forums, friends, ex-coworkers) and call them to talk to them and help them out with onboarding if needed. Straight up cold outreach and warm intros. Next 500 will most likely come from referrals if these first 100 users are happy.

Apply this logic to the jump from 20 to 100 if it makes the task less daunting for you.

amanchanda · 3h ago

Ok. Makes sense. So basically, what we are doing, you want us to scale that. Correct?

abdullin · 3h ago

I have a course on building AI solutions in business (based on success stories from companies in Europe/USA). Sold ~400 seats so far, mostly through my community and word of mouth. No external ads or cold outreach.

The process was classical. Over two years I created a community to sharing cases and insights from building LLM-driven systems. We focused on creating good non-toxic and collaborative atmosphere. No ads or SEO to grow it, standing out by sharing real-world cases and helping others.

Thanks to the community, got 100 customers within the beta-testing period. Then 300 more came over the last 4 months, after opening the sales.

hi_hi · 3h ago

Are you able to share. I would love to see real world success stories of LLM use cases and integrations, beyond the common ones you see often (code gen, story gen, automated summaries, etc)

abdullin · 3h ago

Of course.

Most of the AI cases (that turn out to be an actual success) focus around a few repeatable patterns and a limited use of "AI". Here are a few interesting ones:

(1) Data extraction. E.g. extracting specs of electronic components from data-sheets (it was applied to address a USA market with 300M per year size). Or parsing back Purchase Order specs from PDFs in fragmented and under-digitized EU construction market. Just a modern VLM and a couple of prompts under the hood.

(2) French company saved up to 10k EUR per month on translators for their niche content (they do a lot of organic content, translating it to 5 major languages). Switched from human translators to LLM-driven translation process (like DeepL but understanding the nuances of their business thanks to the domain vocabulary they through in the context). Just one prompt under the hood.

(3) Lead Generation for the manufacturing equipment - scanning a stream of newly registered companies in EU and automatically identifying companies that would actually be interested in hearing more about specific types of equipment. Just a pipeline with ~3-4 prompts and a web search under the hood.

(4) Finding compliance gaps in the internal documents for the EU fintech (DORA/Safeguarding/Outsourcing etc). This one is a bit tricky, but still boils down to careful document parsing with subsequent graph traversal and reasoning.

NB: There also are tons of chatbots, customer support automation or generic enterprise RAG systems. But I don't work much with such kinds of projects, since they have higher risks and lower RoI.

expensive_news · 39m ago

That last point (compliance gaps in fintech) sounds fascinating. Is there a place that I could read more about this?

nikolayasdf123 · 3h ago

why no ads though? don't they give you reach and discovery to people? for so as long your profits are higher than ads cost, you are profitable, so why not?

abdullin · 3h ago

There are way too many ads around "AI". Everybody else does that, frequently overwhelming people with too many promises of quick wins.

I prefer to distinguish from this hype and reach people through other channels - good content, word of mouth and interesting collaborative events (like our last Enterprise RAG Challenge). This might lead to slower sales in the short term, but I think the long-term value to the brand is worth it.

EDIT: fixed typo

nikolayasdf123 · 2h ago

yeah, this is much slower growth... danger must be it is so slow it must be non-existent. but I am with you on same boat, there are too many AI ads for crappy apps

but I guess it speaks to flood of crap-ware, and flood bad content in social networks

^not meaning about you, of course (those folks must not be even on HN)

abdullin · 2h ago

Building something that people truly need - might not lead to huge sales right away, but I believe this to be a good long-term strategy. Sprint vs marathon.

Just keep on pushing on it, and it will eventually work out.

nikolayasdf123 · 2h ago

Building something that people do not need might not lead to sales right away either.

Maybe it will work out, at low growth rate... in 180 years, when it does not matter anyways. Extremely low grow rates are functionally indistinguishable from death.

And even successful great products will not be used by anybody, ... if nobody even knows about it.

Think of Facebook or Apple hiding somewhere in corner vs screaming about themselves in Times Square billboards and streets storefronts in rural India.

Marketing, Distribution, Discovery is important for to-be great products too, just as it is important for crap-ware. (unfortunately later makes bad name and bad look for the whole industry).

ozim · 2h ago

Ok now we move goal posts how to build first 100 community members

abdullin · 2h ago

When I was starting my community, I joined other similar communities and tried to be helpful there. No ads or links, just answering questions and supporting. People that were genuinely interested to learn more about the topic - opened my profile and followed the links there.

This and interesting content was enough to grow community organically to 14k subscribers over 2 years.

Another approach to speed up the growth - organise some fun event that benefits the entire community, highlights and showcases the participants.

E.g. when I organised last Enterprise RAG challenge, we got 350 submissions from the teams around the world. Plus IBM joined as a sponsor. People were mostly participating not for the prises, but because of the approachable challenge and ability to push state of the art. Plus some were hired away because of the good leaderboard scores.

Article of the winner (just google "Ilya Rice: How I Won the Enterprise RAG Challenge") is considered by some companies as one of the best resources on building document-based AI systems. And the entire community sees it as the result of their work together - further reinforcing the spirit of the collaboration.

People tend to share and spread fruits of their labor and love.

magneticmonkey · 1h ago

We relied heavily on network effects early on starting with our friend group and encouraging word-of-mouth growth. We built a multiplatform app called dateit(https://dateit.com/), which is kind of like Facebook Events but with a better user experience.

Obviously, our product is very different from yours, but one thing that worked well for us was focusing on building momentum within small communities first rather than trying to appeal to everyone immediately. Tight-knit groups tend to generate stronger early engagement, which can give you the traction (and feedback) you need to grow.

Another thing we learned: making it dead simple for users to share made a big difference. Even small friction points kill word-of-mouth, so optimizing for effortless sharing really amplified our reach. In your case remove as much friction as possible whatever that is.

mpeg · 3h ago

B2C is hard...

Long term, only paid ads and SEO will work (and SEO can be fickle)

Short term, run some paid experiments (knowing you will probably not get positive return yet) and maybe some influencer marketing (they'll cost money, but not as much as paid ads depending on the niche)

amanchanda · 3h ago

Have you seen results with paid experiments at this early stage? One thing we are considering is to do a paid masterclass (low ticket) and run paid ads for that. Bring them in the funnel and get them signed up to use the product.

mpeg · 3h ago

Without knowing what the vertical is, hard to say whether a masterclass like that would provide good results. I know for some verticals things like free webinars etc can provide decent results, but that's usually b2b

So, usually paid experiments won't really give you a return at an early stage, but occasionally they can if you get lucky, but at least they'll give you an idea of what your CAC can be, and give you a starting point to start optimising it

carlosjobim · 1h ago

I've found B2C much easier than B2B, and much more pleasant too.

SEO is extremely easy: Write in very clear prose what you are selling and give potential clients as much information as possible. This is all you need for SEO, apart from purely technical stuff like load times.

Turning your SEO efforts into real sales is also easy: State your price(s) very clearly on the website and then make it as easy as possible for customers to make a purchase. Get out of their fucking way when they have their wallet out.

If you insist on using paid ads and influencers, by God connect the campaigns to specific discount offers so that you know exactly how many sales origin from each channel you are paying to market in.

cosbgn · 2h ago

I run a small but fairly successful "embed chatGPT on your site" widget https://rispose.com

I'm acquiring customers by:

- Offer a 100% free unlimited solution (with branding) I get a lot of daily clicks from people coming from my customer's website

- Offer a really good price. My competitors are about 5X more expensive. I'll eventually maybe raise my price, but for now I have a lot of people switching to my tool

- Affiliates. This is something new I'm still testing.

In summary a good free product which links back to you get's you millions of requests per month!

jwblackwell · 1h ago

Your site would look way better with mx-auto max-w-7xl :)

The content is far too wide on big screens

cosbgn · 1h ago

thanks, fix is already live!

Etheryte · 2h ago

I've seen a number of products like this and I'm somewhat curious: how do you handle the security side of things? Do you have a server to shield the API keys and proxy all requests?

cosbgn · 2h ago

Yes, all requests pass by our server.

reverseblade2 · 1h ago

I have built this 3d bin packer. https://3dpack.ing Despite my best attempts didn’t take off:(

PostOnce · 59m ago

What did you try? It might be worth talking about here to try to gain some insight.

B2B products, unless miraculous, do not generally "take off" without a lot of hard work, meetings, trade shows, client demos, etc, at least so far as I have seen.

To make any sales at all, it seems like you'd have to already know a lot of people in the industry, and it would have to outcompete not only other products, but just the old "we'll load all the shit we can into the truck/container based on human intuition".

In fact, ideally, you'd ask someone you know (or even better, they'll ask you) if this is a problem you can solve for them. If you can't sell it to people you already know, it'll be even harder to sell to people you don't, presumably.

Plus it will be very hard to articulate to an AI "you can't sit that on top of that!", but it's obvious when looking at it.

I'm in the midst of wading into B2B, alone, and low on capital, myself. My "success" so far is mostly due to dumb luck and being available to talk to.

qareena · 33m ago

With our product (https://schezy.com/), we're experimenting with SEO and content marketing while also tapping into school admin communities. For your B2C AI SaaS, maybe try micro-influencers or community-led growth to get quality users, not just traffic.

greatNespresso · 1h ago

I'd say go where your users hang out. For me it was LinkedIn and reddit. Don't spend money on ads, it's simply not worth it at the beginning. Cold outreach works, the not so secret is that the message should be appealing. If you get bored reading your own outreach message, there's a high chance your audience will be too and you'll end up in spam as fast as I eat a chocolate tablet.

rorylaitila · 2h ago

I start by building products for myself that I know solve my problem, so at least I have a user of 1. Then I try to get to 10 users personally through my personal network. This helps me validate how easy acquisition and onboarding will be. Then to get from 10 to 100 I post more widely about the product on social media. My current product https://humancrm.io is at 16 users. I am adding about a user a week currently. All the while I work on SEO and backlinks. Once I get to 100 users then I'll probably start more bulk marketing to get to 1000.

0xsnowcrash · 40m ago

My product, TestSmithy (https://testsmithy.com/ ), automates testing AI-generated code (e.g. Vibe coding).

The way I'm acquiring customers is to offer a free Pro subscription worth over $100 to the first 100 early adopters.

criddell · 1h ago

> target ICP communities

Insane Clown Posse? Now I'm interested!

blitzar · 2h ago

Bot farm in India, VC's didn't notice.

leosanchez · 2h ago

Is it true or you forgot /s ?

janosch_123 · 2h ago

In 4 months I published:

  - 22 YouTube videos

  - two LinkedIn posts a week

It has to be said that I was well plugged in to niche forums and subreddits.

Now I have:

  - 100 signups

  - 28 demo completions

  - 500 subscribers on YouTube

The product is: https://foxev.io (learn about electric car tech like you learn languages with duolingo).

nikolayasdf123 · 1h ago

so much media content and only 100 user… damn thats tough

janosch_123 · 37m ago

I am quite happy with this to be honest - I am hoping for a viral post of course, but I do get noise out of it and (previously) strangers are looking at what I do.

Like, how else should it work? There is of course always Google Ads but that strikes me as more short-sighted than building a backlog of content to refer back to.

chiffre01 · 49m ago

I made an onsite/offsite tracking platform with a project kanban system. The idea was to make it affordable, simple and lightweight, but it failed to get any traction.

SaaS a crowded field for this kind of thing, and like everyone says, 20 percent of the effort is building it, the rest is marketing and support.

greekanalyst · 1h ago

I would suggest the following simple process:

(1) Talk to your existing users: If your product has a free version, reach out to all of them and make sure you speak with as many of your freemium users as possible. If your product only offers a paid version, again reach out to all of them. Anyone who has already voted with their credit card is a very important person to talk to.

(2) Maximize learning: Understand what are the biggest pain-points you are helping your customers solve. Drill down on their psychographic profiles. Map everything out.

(3) Identify your optimal paid ICP: This is a best guess effort. Do not worry about nailing it 100%. Just make sure it is as close to your current full understanding as possible

(4) Go after them. The HOW is not as important as long as you understand the WHO.

RileyJames · 3h ago

Built xonboard, employee onboarding tool for Xero: https://www.xonboard.com.au/

Got our first 100 users through the Xero App Store.

Now getting well over 100 per month via that channel. No longer our biggest channel, but it was until we started actively marketing our product.

The App Store model can work just fine, if you have a compelling value proposition that genuinely adds value to the users of that product.

There’s always the threat of being copied, but that’s everywhere.

Look at what larger products you could complement via integration. Make sure they have a channel for you (some are useless, Xero is great)

Xero App Store: https://apps.xero.com/au/app/xonboard

piker · 2h ago

Managed to scale my legal tech B2B product Tritium (https://tritium.legal) through an existing professional network. It's technically B2B but B2C in the sense that it's marketed directly to the end-user, not the enterprise. Probably not yet at a hundred users, but it's heading there. I'm using these initial users to flesh out the frequently asked questions and produce the introduction artifacts to hopefully transition to something more product-led.

quibono · 1h ago

I'm not your intended audience but I've had a play with the web preview and I really like it! Is it using WASM for that?

piker · 1h ago

Thanks a ton. Yes it's WASM. Check out the desktop build! :) It's free unless you want to use it in your practice.

[NOTE: Windows build phones home for updates; others don't yet.]

quibono · 1h ago

Thank you, just downloaded the binary :) As a +1 data point it's performing really well on my machine (although I don't think the dark theme toggle works). Like I said, not the target audience but wishing you good luck with the product! Do you mind sharing the stack you used to build it?

piker · 55m ago

Not at all. It's Rust using egui for the UI framework with custom text layout and shaping. It uses PDFium for rendering PDFs.

podnami · 3h ago

Make a cool product video. It’s easier for people to grok the basic value prop for a product (and it forces you to think about it) vs needing to read product specs. It’s definitely worthwhile using a professional to get it created as it can be used for fundraising/sales etc

smohnot · 1h ago

Good post from Lenny Rachitsky on how to acquire your first users

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/consumer-business-find-fi...

pontes · 2h ago

Well, I am trying to do it right now through a Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971523

It is supposed to be a fun demo, let's see if it works

jwblackwell · 1h ago

Initially, I just posted my latest product, Quizgecko on HN and then manually DMd a few hundred people on Linkedin etc. That was enough for 100+ users.

I think if you have a relatively novel idea, that is quick to try out, then people will naturally share.

After that, I submitted to various AI tool directories. They drove a bit of traffic and helped Google find the product. Then some landing pages I made started to rank and it has snowballed from there.

starbase3496 · 4h ago

The YC Startup School series on YouTube is pretty good! There’s a video dedicated to the topic: https://youtu.be/hyYCn_kAngI?si=cSCikwHVu5e0NGf5

999900000999 · 3h ago

Find a way to make it free to start.

This is how Firebase, Supabase and friends work.

Getting 100 people to sign up for a free service is still work, but significantly less.

CrulesAll · 2h ago

Making it 100X harder to get them to pay for it subsequently. "If you’re good at something, never do it for free" - Joseph Joker MBA JD.

If not, then you are in the ad business.

sillystu04 · 1h ago

To play devil's advocate, many successful developer focused companies have gone down this route successfully. Neon, Cloudflare, Firebase, Github and many more have all made free tiers work.

I suspect there's a special dynamic for developers. I'm usually more willing to try out new things on personal projects, but I also don't like paying for things on personal projects. At work I don't care how much things cost, but I'll definitely advocate for tools that worked well on personal projects.

amanchanda · 3h ago

We have a free version. For now, we have kept it invite-only. Question is TOFU.

rikkipitt · 2h ago

I'm 40% through getting my first 100 users for https://www.kruh.ltd. So far, I've only added a "banner" announcement on two of my products and mentioned it at the bottom of newsletters to their subscribers. It's taken a couple of months to get this far. I will probably launch in two phases of cohorts. I.e. in blocks of 50.

Oras · 3h ago

My product is a bit different as it is free.

Here is what I did:

1. Write a medium article. This helped Google index the name of the product quickly.

2. Post about it on Reddit and HN (neither got massive visitors, but again, SEO helps).

3. Post in any directory I could find.

It's a slow, organic process. For now, getting ~70 unique visitors, with a conversion rate of 15%.

tifa2up · 2h ago

Founder of https://agentset.ai here. We found lots of success posting on the r/RAG subreddit. We've been working with RAG for sometime so have enough experience to answer other people's questions and establish credibility by dropping our link.

VladVladikoff · 54m ago

Cold calling. Combined with email, texting, and conventions.

90s_dev · 2h ago

My only plan is to announce my project to HN and reddit when it's done (hopefully this week or next!) and hope for the best. I figure that if it's as exciting as I think it is, then it will organically spread by word of mouth, even if slowly.

reillyse · 3h ago

The basic (marketing) problem is find where your users hang out and go meet them there. Usually for these kinds of products your customers will congregate somewhere online, reaching them though can be very tough. Try and drill down super narrow (if you can’t find a large community together ). Don’t try to convert new people, find people who are searching for a solution.

CrulesAll · 2h ago

Education marketing is the trench warfare of marketing. Unless you are a big conglomerate, this is a terrible strategy. "Finding people who are searching for a solution" is maneuver warfare. It's the best strategy, and the only one that should be employed by SMEs. OP is looking for 100 people when in reality they should be looking for 5 people who already know they want the solution you are offering. If the product/service works, these five people will become sales reps for you. NB. The trick is not selling the product to these five people. It is finding these five people.

herbst · 3h ago

This is what I do before I spend a single minute on building anything. If you don't know how to reach your audience any product will fail

wahnfrieden · 17m ago

Product: Manabi Reader https://reader.manabi.io

Japanese language learners congregate in a bunch of online discussion boards and subreddits. Some of my competitors have forums that are open to anyone posting about their own self-made tools, in addition to users discussing learning resources unrelated to the host's products. So I simply posted about my service on several of these and quickly gained thousands of early users.

I had more luck than others who try the same because my product solves pain points and offers features that competition don't or don't as nicely, ie quality and value. I also attract users with friendly pricing: a standard pricing tier and an unverified student / low-income pricing tier for the same service level.

deadsec-sea · 3h ago

In the spirit of “engineering as marketing” I’ve built a number of tools for clients for lead gen. There’s a surprising number of low hanging fruit keywords that suit simple calculators or forms that solve a simple problem, leading the user to the larger problem that the business in question solves.

sph · 1h ago

A Show HN post works really well, if you win the front page lottery.

rrr_oh_man · 1h ago

I posted itter.sh on hackernews and got 400-ish really friendly people to check it out :)

ignoramous · 42m ago

Give out the MVP as free or freemium.

Leave a link to join WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, or Subreddit in the MVP.

Engage with the early adopters there and figure out what it is they need.

Move to address that as soon as you can.

Repeat?

the_arun · 2h ago

Anyone using Podcasts or social marketing?

nikolayasdf123 · 1h ago

finally! surprised to scroll so much on HN to find this comment. do SWEs on HN are really so bad at marketing?

psmyrdek · 3h ago

Share stuff for free, build credibility, start charging for extra services.

nikolayasdf123 · 1h ago

obviously!

oulipo · 25m ago

I'm doing a hardware startup (the first repairable e-bike battery, https://gouach.com if you're interested) and we got users by doing an Indiegogo :)

naman5a · 2h ago

Try to launch in ProductHunt and Appsumo , Good sites

alpha_trion · 46m ago

ProductHunt is like 90% bots these days

ramijames · 1h ago

Mostly, begging.

j45 · 3h ago

Depends on the problem being solved, and where that audience hangs out.

I would go find the audience it was built for.

mkbkn · 1h ago

Forget the usual SEO and focus on high-quality, in-depth textual and video content.

Build your list for email marketing.

Paid ads (FB, Google) to drive targeted traffic. PS - I do that.

nicman23 · 3h ago

dumb luck and a good product

ngangaga · 1h ago

Do people not have the work ethic to commit a small amount of fraud anymore? Smh, kids these days.

quantumwoke · 1h ago

I started free, and then upsold to a freemium version after a few years. In the free years, built the best product in the space and hustled to 20,000 DAUs.

coolcase · 3h ago

Experiment alot!

deekshaaashaaa · 4h ago

let me know when you figure out