Ask HN: Where and how do you find your early adoptors?

I&#x27;ve been in your shoes many times. I worked for many months, solving a problem that I thought needed solving, and then sought users to pay for it. All of those attempts never resulted in success. My most current project though, I am doing things differently. I talked to people and listened to what they needed. I saw an opportunity in what they were asking for, so I started building, while letting them use it as soon as it was even a tiny bit functional. I only invested my time building when there was a positive signal that people would pay for it.<p>I know this probably isn&#x27;t what you want to hear, and you&#x27;ve probably heard this advice before. I was like that too, and I ignored it. But it really does seem to work.

Relevant subreddits have worked for me. Some posts got to a few thousand upvotes and were shared on Twitter and by some weekly substack newsletters and then picked up by small news sites. Eventually it ended up in a New York Times newsletter and was syndicated to a lot of news sites around the world.<p>My general takeaway is that popular Reddit posts now fuel a portion of traditional journalism.

I&#x27;ve had a lot of success with this!<p>Run highly targeted advertisements, and specifically include in the advertisement that you are looking for beta test users to talk to - and what kind of users you are looking for.<p>The most success we had was with LinkedIn Lead Gen forms. We got meetings with about 50 people at $25-$50 a pop. Be very personal and transparent - there are lots of somewhat bored professionals out there who would love nothing more than try out your app and give you feedback.<p>Another option is to sponsor a professional mixer event in your area. Depending on the event, you might be able to get a 5 minute speaking spot for less than a few hundred bucks.

This site documents how several startups did it. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;read.first1000.co&#x2F;archive" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;read.first1000.co&#x2F;archive</a>

Find your biggest &quot;competitor&quot;. Ideally a community that hacks an existing product to do what your project does. People who are already spending their time and money to do what your project has done.<p>I got over 1000 users with just some sharing to a small FB group; this was mostly from them sharing the app to their friends as well. We did some paid marketing to the same group and got 3000+ users, about 3% of whom were willing to pay.<p>If your biggest competitor is already well funded then you might want a niche that&#x27;s below their radar.<p>For example, I didn&#x27;t like Asana because it was too slow and had too many team features I didn&#x27;t need - I just wanted some checklists that were fast and used keyboard shortcuts. I ended up using Sublime Text plugins do this. Later, Workflowy fit the bill perfectly.

Old school advice but worked really well in my previous startup –(i) conferences and (ii) snow-ball interviewing.<p>(i) In your case you need to somehow find this high density potential early user in-person gatherings. You can for instance hang out in a non-generic co-working space where you know it is the choice for digital nomads etc. in your city.<p>(ii) This is somewhat under-rated but you really can <i>crawl</i> the network of people you know ad infinitum. You only need few people you know who are productivity obsessed to start with. And then always ask them &quot;who should I chat for 15 mins. to get feedback on this etc. (I would suggest crafting this ask really well so that it doesn&#x27;t come off as demanding. Try to genuinely give value at every interaction, that&#x27;s how I enjoyed the process as a hardcore introvert.). I spoke to about 5-10 people every week and ended up with a decent community of early users in &lt;3 months.

This question boils down to &quot;How do you market something?&quot; Ideally, talk to an experienced marketer who knows the domain. They&#x27;re going to give you much better advice than randoms on HN (although, HN being what it is, the founder of a successful productivity app company might reply... :) )<p>More generally, if anyone has an idea for a side project or a startup that they&#x27;re thinking about at the moment, and they don&#x27;t have an answer to the question of &quot;What&#x27;s the route to market for this?&quot; then you should seriously consider answering that before writing a single line of code or designing a single screen. Thousands of amazing startups run out of money and shut down because they couldn&#x27;t answer this question every year. It&#x27;s important to figure it out as early as possible. It&#x27;s the source of all your customers, your feedback from real users, and the life blood of your business - <i>revenue</i>.

Found early adopters for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;divjoy.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;divjoy.com</a> by tweeting out some screenshots of the private beta to my ~1k or so followers at the time and asking if anyone wanted early access. Also started writing some short blog posts about React.js (related to my product) and tweeted those out as well + cross-promoted from the blog to my product.<p>You&#x27;re going to need to get 1000+ people to hit your site to get 100 beta users so just try to get some exposure in any relevant community you can. Asking for advice is a great way to share your product without coming off as too spammy, so I&#x27;d update your post with a link to your product ASAP!

There are a couple of books out there.<p>The first one is The Mom Test[0] which has already been mentioned here. But it&#x27;s more about customer interviews which you usually do before you even start doing something.<p>And the second one is Traction[1] written by Gabriel Weinberg founder of DuckDuckGo and Justin Mares. This book is highly relevant for a situation where you already have something and need to find your first customers. The great thing about this book is that it gives you a framework and a finite list of strategies that you can prioritise and execute one by one until you get traction.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1492180742" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;Mom-Test-customers-business-everyon...</a><p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Customer&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0241242533&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-...</a>

Being an early adopter, this is how I &quot;discovered&quot; a few products (step by step)<p>1. HN or Reddit front page.<p>2. When I left a comment, no matter how stupid it was OP respnded positively.<p>3. I looked them up and followed on Twitter.<p>4. From time to time I will ask them more stupid things (aka advanced feature requests on beta products). Yet, they are consistently kind to me.<p>5. Because they are good people, I will plug their products whenever I can.<p>---<p>On point 1.<p>Understand the culture of where you are posting. I saw in a twitter thread where the founder spent several months building a product, even wrote their own programming language for it but when they posted on HN it barely got any votes. Then another HN user just posted the language aspect of the product and it made it to the FP. There is some definite patterns of success in places like HN and reddit.<p>Making it to FP isn&#x27;t enough you have to have a discussion surrounding it.

Rough ideas I&#x27;ve played with over the last 18 months of running my business<p>- Writing content for your (potential) audience<p>- Hanging out and talking about the topic on reddit&#x2F;Discord&#x2F;Slack&#x2F;HN&#x2F;Twitter<p>- Setting my hotspot name to my project&#x27;s domain name whenever I&#x27;m around techies or on long train trips<p>- Find any and all directories that might list products like yours<p>- Meetups<p>- Online ads<p>- Side projects as marketing (little tools that your audience might use, for free)<p>- Linkedin, talk to people you&#x27;ve worked with before

How about right here? Post a link, share it with people? Have you done that? What was the feedback?<p>If it isn&#x27;t right for the HN audience, you should know who your audience are, and how to find them.<p>You can&#x27;t build if you don&#x27;t know who you are building for, so that should be your starting point.

If you want to spend some time to read a book I found <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zerotosold.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zerotosold.com</a> to be very helpful.<p>It talks about how to find a group of people for your product early on and how to iterate from there instead of building it in the dark and then hoping that people will come once it&#x27;s done and polished.

Productivity adjacent discussions and communities are great places to strike up a conversation and find like-minded people that could benefit from your tool.<p>Asking how others are currently solving the problem your tool does is a good entryway. You can follow their answer with a suggestion to try your product if it sounds like it could be useful.<p>For more of a shotgun approach you can post on betalist, reddit &#x2F;startups Share Your Startup thread, ShowHN, etc.

I posted my MVP to the Mac App Store and had a sale the next day in the… Caribbean… thousands of miles away. Fast forward 4 years and I’m selling my indie electron app across the world.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;label.live&#x2F;features&#x2F;app&#x2F;trusted-worldwide" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;label.live&#x2F;features&#x2F;app&#x2F;trusted-worldwide</a>

IndieHackers[0] worked really well for me. I wrote an article that got traction, reaching around 2.5k views, which lead to over 50k people visiting the landing page[1] in the past two months.<p>From what I&#x27;ve seen, productivity tools go down fairly well over there, so it may potentially be worth checking out.<p>I will point out that users don&#x27;t seem to enjoy people who are _only_ there to sell to them, I&#x27;d recommend at least participating a little before you post. However, your mileage may vary.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;</a><p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;feetr.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;feetr.io</a> (yes, of course I&#x27;m going to shill it)

Let me share my recent story<p>It took me 176 days to sign up 100 people to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skilledup.life" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skilledup.life</a> as Volunteers, which will help them to gain real Experience to improve their career prospects.<p>I started SkilledUp Life all by myself and went live on 1st Aug 2020. Then hired Mithun in Nov, when I really struggled to get traction.<p>I was only spending few hours per day on SkilledUp Life back then. Even with a full time employee, we could not get the numbers. Then we started to use our own Volunteers and started to build a team.<p>We had a simple goal of convincing 1000 people to sign up in the first 12 months. We achieved this task with great difficulty with 24 hours to go. We could not have achieved this without our volunteers. From month 10 to 12, we had a team of about 7 to 8 Volunteers if I recall, from Brazil to Philippines.<p>Today, we have 7,555 Volunteers from 85 countries. You can subscribe to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skilledup.life" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skilledup.life</a> for £30&#x2F;month. Once subscribed, all talent is free.<p>You can then build a user acquisition team that could approach your target customers&#x2F;users one to one to get the 100. Whilst they are working on this, you can add more volunteers to improve your website, write content, SEO, social media marketing, etc.<p>Your founder journey no longer needs to be as hard as mine was. All the best.

Depends on the product. I found my early adopters within my close network of friends and colleagues and in my neighbourhood. Dont hesitate to reach out and keep in touch , find them wherever you can. One good way to reach out which almost always worked in my case was taking some time out for discussion on your idea and then gently asking them if they can use it and give you some feedback.

I&#x27;m going through this challenge right now too. In my case I&#x27;m creating content to help improve the skills of Engineering Managers and I&#x27;m really stubborn about a few things like needing to ship the entire most-loveable-product (as I imagine it from my armchair) and not the minimum-viable-product (as proven by real customers).<p>I am a bit lucky to have some product skills to identify the mental biases and traps that I fall into, and some friends help pull me back too. Other commenters have pointed out some of those problems:<p>- Look for positive signal from real flesh-and-blood customers who will give you real money. I printed out my content and had lunch with former colleagues to pick their brains on the topic. I kept doing small tests to check one single area of the final concept.<p>- Downscale. Downscale. Downscale. You might conjure up 100s of reasons why you can&#x27;t dare approach the market with a faint shadow of your final vision but you need to do it to test that you aren&#x27;t making a huge mistake. They will not love it. You will not make money. But you also will not waste time doubling down on a fantasy. Gumroad is good for this but I&#x27;m doing it on Shopify just by reducing my product to 10% of the content and printing 1% of the order quantity I need to make a real profit (so I will lose a few hundred, but I will validate if I should spend a few thousand)<p>- Figure out how to market. You want to do this because this is a form of your &quot;sales funnel&quot; and how you will actually identify who you want to attract, how to do it, where to go, etc. I&#x27;m highly unskilled in this topic but I&#x27;m using a book called &quot;The 1‑Page Marketing Plan&quot; which helped me structure a lot of things that I had observed in life and start to build a proper plan in steps that was logical and connected. It&#x27;s not the best book ever, but it is good enough to get oriented and do something logical.

I&#x27;m currently developing an app that <i>I personally want</i>, and I&#x27;m having a blast! I got the idea after reading a plethora of negative app store reviews for competitor apps.<p>I certainly hope others will want to use it and pay for it, but it&#x27;s liberating not focusing too much on what other people want (or claim they want).

For GetMyMFA I ended up surprising myself seeing that people would discover the product from tech forums and FAQs.<p>I’d therefore recommend thinking where your users are on the web &#x2F; what they are searching for and try to join active discussions where your product might be relevant.<p>PS: I just realized I’m trying to do exactly that in HN right now :D

I built a tool that streams all of Reddit and listens for a set of keywords in discussions related to topics associated with my project. Since those users are already talking about a related subject, my subsequent pitch is often received well, instead of the irrelevant spam you may see elsewhere on Reddit.<p>It’s worked quite well.

I think if you had a link in your profile, you could have probably reached half that number by now. Just look at all the comments!<p>In my case, most of the early adoption for my products have been through in-person interactions. Both B2B and B2C. I’m not sure what your product is, but to take a gander, I’d probably just ask friends who worked in startup or corporate jobs if I could stop by their office and show off what I was working on. Then I’d probably offer a trial to anyone who showed interest while I was there and offer to extend their trial if they find friends or colleagues who were interested in trying it out themselves. If you have a bit a flywheel effect through that, then you know you’re on to something.

I&#x27;m sorry. Could you include a bit less information so we could speculate more wildly?

A few ways.<p>- I post my projects on SideProjectors - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sideprojectors.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sideprojectors.com</a> - it&#x27;s a marketplace for selling side projects, but you can also showcase yours as well.<p>- I use Newsy - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsy.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsy.co</a> - and create content aggregators about my topics related to my projects - it gains SEOs and traffic and also finds users to sign up to newsletters and updates. Then I reach out to them.<p>- I use Tash - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tash.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tash.app</a> - and use my Twitter account to get followers and also get leads.

I believe OP is working on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.superusapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.superusapp.com&#x2F;</a> , &quot;A Visual Workspace For All Content and Tools&quot;<p>It&#x27;s their only other post on HN: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;submitted?id=zhangruinan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;submitted?id=zhangruinan</a><p>They discuss it at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.superus.space&#x2F;my-ideal-solution-to-information-overload-122fda2451a5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.superus.space&#x2F;my-ideal-solution-to-informatio...</a>

What is your product?<p>First off you need to put it in your profile if it&#x27;s ready for public view.<p>Don&#x27;t wait too long to put up a website.<p>Describe the features and add a early sign up form to collect email addresses.<p>Once I have more information, I can give more specific advice.

Step 1: have a lot of friends. You can usually spend a little politcal capital to get your first few users&#x2F;customers by talking to them directly. For products that are targeted towards businesses, you&#x27;ll need to call up your buddies from previous jobs and talk to them about it. After that, you&#x27;ll probably need to hire a BDR or an AE to start looking for the next few. For B2C, I am not familiar.

For me, it helped that I develop for a platform like the Google Workspace Marketplace.<p>That helped me get users from those (many individuals) who regularly browse such websites. In fact, there are others who develop for the mobile apps stores who have reported similar stories; the market looks &quot;ready-made&quot;.<p>In my case, this was enough to give Flookup the initial boost it needed.

Read The Mom Test. It will answer how, where, what, while explaining the tactics in detail.

&gt; With very limited time and resources<p>Finding your first users should be your #1 priority.<p>You should not have time for anything else but this.<p>Otherwise it looks like a hobby and why do you care finding users in the first place?

Product Hunt could get you some traction. If it’s a useful enough idea, you might get to 100, especially if you post right at midnight.

YouTube can be a great tool for this. Just make some videos about your niche and then post a video asking viewers to participate.

You could pay them to give you their thoughts or own that it is a crowded space and you will likely fail.

Hey @zhangruinan, could you show your product here? I can be your beta user :)

Interested in a solution for viral content? Looking for users for a free trial with my app <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atorable.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atorable.com</a>

facebook groups work for small niche, reddit or any forums where TA comes together to solve their problems, share etc

If you have read about technology diffusion [0], then you&#x27;d know well to target the <i>innovators</i> (who by definition are on the lookout for new things to try) and <i>early adopters</i> (who are actively looking for a novel solution to their fairly common problem as a competitive advantage &#x2F; differentiator).<p>ProductHunt, Hacker News, Sub Reddits are great avenues to find those groups. Another avenue is conferences.<p>&gt; <i>The definition of a market niche. This is one of the most important lessons I learned from reading &quot;Crossing the Chasm.&quot; It has a somewhat complicated definition of a niche, but since then I&#x27;ve had a lot of luck just taking the gist, roughly: If you can name a conference attended by a particular group of people, that group is a market niche. If there isn&#x27;t such a conference, it&#x27;s almost certainly not a niche. For example, let&#x27;s say you were making a web site to help people find a lawyer. &quot;People looking for lawyers&quot; is a market segment, right? Wrong. There&#x27;s no &quot;I&#x27;m looking for a lawyer&quot; conference. Lawyers are probably a market segment (although arguably, not all types of lawyers go to the same conferences). But everybody needs a lawyer eventually, and that&#x27;s not a niche, that&#x27;s everybody. &quot;Startups who need lawyers&quot; (lots of startups need lawyers and go to the same conferences, eg. StartupWeekend) are a market segment, as are building contractors and organized crime lords. Maybe you can help them find lawyers.</i><p>That said, you must definitely not build in a vacuum unless you have a <i>very good</i> intuition for what people want.<p>&gt; <i>Your competition is whatever customers would do if you didn&#x27;t exist. Let&#x27;s say you&#x27;re making software for producing cool graphs of statistical data. There&#x27;s already really powerful software that does this, but nobody in your market segment uses it for some reason; maybe it&#x27;s too hard to use or too expensive. That software is your competitor, right? Wrong! That software is irrelevant. Your customers don&#x27;t want it, so even if it&#x27;s competing with you, it&#x27;s already lost. Your customers are probably using either Microsoft Excel&#x27;s horrible chart features, or giving up and just not making charts at all. So your competitors are Microsoft and apathy, respectively. Apathy is probably going to be the tougher one. To find your list of competitors, just ask yourself what options your customers think they&#x27;re choosing between. Ignore everything else.</i><p>From: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apenwarr.ca&#x2F;log&#x2F;20111116" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apenwarr.ca&#x2F;log&#x2F;20111116</a><p>Most tech related products these days use Open Source as a means of marketing and generating demand. Innovators and early adopters come flocking to it, at which point their focus should shift to making their position count via carving out a market leadership position (with strong base already established in a narrow enough niche: think Cloudflare and DDoS; Amazon and books; AWS and Compute+Storage; Facebook and colleges; and so on). Also, consumer (marketing) and enterprise (sales) software require very different mode of customer acquisition, unless you can blend both those in (which is easier said than done [1])<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Diffusion_of_innovations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Diffusion_of_innovations</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;R7jqw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;R7jqw</a> (how our free plan stays free, tailscale.com)<p>See also: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done</a> (know your customers jobs-to-be-done)<p>Related discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29691811" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29691811</a>