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

For my SaaS, the first 100 users were almost too easy. I partnered with a company sitting on thousands of clients and offered my tool—free—to just 10% of their list. But I didn’t sell features. I asked what their clients hated most, then built a fix for that. One well-placed feature, and the doors swung open. Real users, real feedback—and we’re still building on that foundation.

Then there’s my blog. A creative sandbox, no overlap with my day job. No built-in audience. No distribution. Still waiting on subscriber #1 (Mom, seriously—now would be a good time).

Takeaways:

    Partner with someone who already has meaningful reach.

    Solve a real, hair-on-fire problem.

    Offer something free to earn early trust.

    Knock on doors, pitch relentlessly, repeat. And hope the gods of luck are listening.

As for the writing side—different beast. Slower burn, no roadmap, no shortcuts. Still wandering in the woods, but enjoying the walk. Open to ideas—and subscribers. (Mom… last chance.)

My wife cold-called about 60% of all businesses in our niche within our city. Meanwhile, I literally walked into CEOs' offices, asked politely for meetings, and pitched face-to-face. Conversion was around 1%, but that gave us our first collision with reality—and our first paying customers. Also half of my clients came from Google search ads. But it was absolutely terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were people trying to talk to chatGPT

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.

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

Comment from `amanchanda`, i.e. the OP.

Nice hustle writing an Ask HN post to then plug your own product, but you have to make sure to respond to questions with your _other_ account `nicooo`. ;)

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/

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.

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.

2 things worked well for NotionBackups:

* SEO - I started way before I launched the product. I wrote an article on how to back up a Notion workspace using their (then newly-launched) API. It still brings in traffic to this day. Granted, there was almost no competition when I started

* r/Notion subreddit - only in relevant threads when someone is looking for a solution. After some time, some of my customers began recommending this tool to others

I'm building mailwip.com (and my second saas right now)

My strategy is too simple, I don't think it will works but It work good enough for me.

- Just engage in the community. In early day, I helped on the cloudflare forum. I just help generic about anything related to email, explain concept and here and there try to introduce my service. I always introduce my service last. Give people free option first, always, even if the free option is my competitor. But I do explain pros/confs of my service

- Build plugin that may drive traffic: For me, CloudFlare offers plugin ability so I built a CloudFlare app for that. It may not benefit me directly but get my name out there

I shared my revenu and publish update on indiehacker https://www.indiehackers.com/product/hanami/revenue

When I built my little side project (B2C iPhone app, not a SaaS [1]), I documented the development process on LinkedIn with short "developer diary" videos. That has led to a good amount of engagement at launch, which briefly lifted the app into the top-paid section on the App Store for a short time. That was enough to reach the first 100 users within a few days.

Since it's a side project, I haven't worked on the app in a while, but recently picked up development again. So if you have any ideas or suggestions, they are very welcome.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/app/dorepeat-checklists-todos/id15615...

For my newsletter[0], I just reached 231 subscribers in 5 months. Getting to this point has involved posting to as many channels as possible (without wearing out my welcome in any of them)

My first 40 subscribers came from direct friends and my LinkedIn network.

I got about 150 subscribers from a single popular post on Hacker News, posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43461618

The remainder have come from regular posting on BlueSky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Substack notes, and starting to get search traffic from Google.

I've gotten no traction from Reddit (wow, the programming subreddits are so much angrier than every other subreddit where I contribute!) Twitter (seems like it's pay to play, which I won't do) or IndieHackers (I post milestones just for fun, but it hasn't amounted to anything).

I've found that I need to post twice a week to grow. I had a period where I was sick and was putting less effort into posts, and another period where I was dealing with a mortgage and had to post only once a week, and my subscriber growth treaded water instead of gradually growing. Even casual visitors to the site can tell the difference between moderate and minor effort.

[0] https://www.clientserver.dev/

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.

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!

Cold calling seems the be the prevalent approach, which is also mine. Though I am struggling with time. On one hand, I know I need to reach out to potential customers, on the other hand I need/want to work on the product. So not only is my time limited but also I don't like to shift my focus elsewhere.

I wonder if it would make sense to hire someone, some student, to do the outreach for me. Paid per contact and then some bonus for subscription.

Has anyone tried it? I mean, it's still just cold calling but I am wondering whether I should entrust such an important process to someone that is not familiar or invested with the product? After all, you can make the first impression only once.

Not 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.

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.

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.

Interview 20 people who -could- be customers, but not pitch them.

Get their honest take on what sucks about their current solution/process. Ask for their expertise.

Build the thing that emerges from the 20 interviews. Not the thing they ask for, but the thing they truly need.

Craft a solid pitch from the common themes of the 20 interviews, focused on being a painkiller, not a vitamin.

Go to the place where you found those initial 20, except this time, talk about the thing you made. Not in a salesy way.

If people 1. Aren't interested; 2. Aren't converting to customers, then the thing that was built didn't properly address the pain

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).

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)

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

It really all depends on the business itself and it is hard to help you without know much more. B2C is too broad. Your getting to 100 users at 50/month is obviously a massive goal. let alone 500. 25k/month revenue is huge if this is bootstrapped. What is the business? Just share a link.

I posted on HN about Foqos: https://www.foqos.app/ and got a few hundred downloads that same day which is awesome. I still continue to reach out to creators in Youtube and tiktok who have reviewed similar products to see if they would give any feedback. Usually since they have a larger online presence than I do, I noticed the publicly started recommending the app to others on Reddit, Threads, etc...

I've been also posting on threads after each update. I have over a 1000 downloads now, I don't have tracking but getting a consistent download rate of about 30 a day

Zero marketing and its been a ton of fun so far. Hope that helps!

A while back I wrote some stock market algorithms and charting software I use in my own DYOR daily stock analysis. I decided to offer up that daily information to others. I changed my SaaS delivery approach idea to be a daily Substack newsletter instead. It is a stock market info newsletter called StockQuakes ( https://stockquakes.substack.com ) . With Substack my newsletter grew by using the Substack Recommendations feature as well as their Notesfeature. Substack takes care of the signups, etc. via Stripe. You have to have value above and below the paywall line in the newsletter to keep users. And you have to have a free version in addition to the paid version. I also put up a separate website to drive SEO traffic to the newsletter ( https://stockquakes.com ). And I post on BlueSky, Threads, and X/Twitter daily in addition to Substack Notes. Have 600 users, 5000 followers.

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.

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

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

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

I'm building an AI product management co-pilot (https://magical.pm) that helps PMs write requirements faster.

Here is my approach:

1. Engineering-As-Marketing: Building features that have the potential to create word-of-mouth growth (e.g., the AI will write product requirements in Shakespearean sonnets: https://www.magical.pm/?goofballModal=true).

2. Programmatic SEO: Sitemap has over 1,000 keyword-rich pages (no AI). To accomplish this, I leverage my app's Templates feature and tools that pair well with my app (Jira, Linear, Asana, etc).

3. Blog: Product management blog, designed to find traction in product management communities.

While my SEO grows, I'm improving the product's usefulness. Once it is ready, I will launch it via ProductHunt and begin a bigger marketing push (increased content marketing, community outreach, etc).

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

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.

If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading the Mom Test book [0]. It talks a lot about product market fit, as well as how to get your first customers in order to build the right product.

The Path to First SaaS Customers via The Mom Test:

1. Talk to 10–30 people who might face the problem.

2. Don’t mention your idea—dig into their experiences instead.

3. If the pain is real, pitch only after confirming they care.

4. Look for commitment—not compliments.

5. Build just enough to turn their problem into a usable product and keep iterating.

[0] https://www.momtestbook.com

I run a marketplace buy-sell type SaaS app that is pretty niched down.

Cold outreach is key. We have a handful of competitors so really focused on "building a better mouse trap" then just reach out directly to sellers on competing platforms. Especially for the first couple dozen it's a hard sell, we had to basically give it away for free. Once there's an actual audience though it's easier to tell someone about it and just send them to the normal sign up flow with a discount code.

You can't get away from cold outreach though, especially at the beginning. I'm not sure you'd want to even if you could? The feedback for us has been invaluable.

Built a free product (https://heymeta.com) to solve my own problem and posted it here on HN and Reddit as well as Product Hunt (that was in 2018 when it was still relevant).

Currently getting 15k/unique/month (it has dropped a bit less, but steadily getting up after the rewrite and bigfixes).

When the website doesn't have sponsors, I promote my other free macOS tool (https://dockey.publicspace.co) (with a donation option) that get quite a nice flow of visitors from it.

I'd call this a success, although it's not enough to pay the bills or anything :)

I wrote about this fairly extensively:

TL;DR: Email sign ups before launch via a boosted IG post.

Non TL;DR: https://www.swiftjectivec.com/the-first-100-subscribers/

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.

Instead of an affiliate program I would offer my ten biggest customers a steep discount in exchange for an interview. You really need to understand what consumer is spending $50/mo on AI. The better you understand them, the easier finding 490 people like them will be.

My product is a bit different as it is free.

Here is what I did:

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

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

3. Post in any directory I could find.

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

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

Got our first 100 users through the Xero App Store.

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

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

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

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

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

When I had a restaurant in Taipei, every time I posted in the Taiwan subreddit even tangentially mentioning it, we'd get 2-3 customers the next day in off that post, and a couple more throughout the week.

So, niche subreddits, especially for geographies, could work well.

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

> target ICP communities

Insane Clown Posse? Now I'm interested!

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.

My project is bitecritic.com, and its free. I try multiple stuff and in 2 months there are only 60 users.

Producthunt, tinystartups -> garbage, no value, no users Reddit -> Mods block you on many topics, no signups from there

Tiktok -> AI generated video 1000 views. Tiktok Ads -> 2k views per video 3 euros -> 5 signups Instagram -> Most of the users are coming from here. Friends and Family -> My real users :D

I'm scratching my itch and I'm part of multiple communities with people in this industry/domain (audio, music production, etc).

I started promoting it in a forum I've been part of for years and from there it's growing organically. I'm close to reaching the first 100 users with no ads and only the marketing website:

https://wavekit.app/

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Dumb idea of the day: can't one buy a free product and use it for promotion similarly to building one yourself?

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.

At TableCheck (Japan's answer to Resy, Tock, Sevenrooms, etc.) our first 100 customers were definitely the hardest. It took us nearly two years, and many times I came close to giving up. Even though we had built a solid MVP, in Japan's risk-averse culture, no restaurant wanted to be the first to use our product. The question was always "Who else is using it?"--basically a deadlock.

After a lot of cold-calling, we found a 120-year old sukiyaki and shabu-shabu restaurant chain. They told us they always survived by adopting the latest technology, and were willing to try our product. Most of their staff were elderly women in kimonos, many of whom had not touched an iPad before. We were worried they would struggle, but after a few training sessions they got the hang of it--soon they were greeting and seating customers with no problem.

12 years on, we are at 13,000 restaurants on our platform and adding a few hundred more each month!

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.

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

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

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

I 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.

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.

I mean, this is the whole state of the industry.

If you wrote something nice (you believe it could be valuable to user) - and tried to show it here in Show HN - you will get close to 0 upvotes.

If you build something excellent (unique, wow factor, etc) - you will get the votes. But this is going to be an exception.

The question is, how the OP got 228 points (at the time) on this "Ask HN" topic? Obviously the OP is working on SEO, and probably has ability to upvote their topics (fake users, large follow base on X, Mastodon or Emails)?

And to answer your question. The best place to get your first 50/100 users is to show them at the place where your users hang out. Reddit? Obviously it is getting harder, because a lot of subreddits don't allow self-promotions. So ads, if you are lucky enough and your users don't block ads. And the best place is to actually use the Marketplaces/AppStore where your users are going to search for a solution. App Store in case of Apple, Google Store in case of Android.

I have found the best way is to actually keep your own newsletter, and respect the users, don't post there too much, only post, when you see you can offer something valuable. I have about 2000 users in my newsletter, and that helps to get first 100 users of my new products/apps.

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

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.

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.

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

Mostly, begging.

Try to launch in ProductHunt and Appsumo , Good sites

Anyone using Podcasts or social marketing?

try to reach people related to your niche on LinkedIn

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

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

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

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

I would go find the audience it was built for.

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.

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?

We’re building a SaaS analytics tool aimed at helping founders better understand their subscription metrics: https://metricster.com

We had ~100 early signups during initial testing, but it’s been much harder lately to get visibility — especially with the AI noise everywhere.

Tried:

Reddit and Facebook groups

Cold outreach to founders

Slowly investing in SEO for the long term

Still figuring out what actually drives conversions.

dumb luck and a good product

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 :)

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.

Experiment alot!

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.

let me know when you figure out