I'm a founder of 3 small saas companies that I run by myself, generating about $1M ARR.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>Summary: once you have an email list and viral social loops built-in, marketing gets easier.
Reddit.<p>1. I made an app for the colorblind in 2015 and got my first 100 (and more) users from the r/colorblind subreddit.<p>2. I made a breathing app in 2017 and got my first users from r/breathing, r/breathwork, and r/meditation subreddits.<p>3. I recently made a productivity app for the mac and got my first users from r/macapps subreddit.<p>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.
SEO.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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)<p>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.<p>The 3-10th customer came through the SEO scheme.
Targeted Instagram Ads —> Landing Page —> Email sign up<p>I wrote on this exact topic (literally - how I got my first 100 paying users) here: <a href="https://swiftjectivec.com/The-First-100-Subscribers/" rel="nofollow">https://swiftjectivec.com/The-First-100-Subscribers/</a>
So this was a service based online business, not software, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Got about a hundred hot leads in the first day from a single Facebook post. It was something like "If you're interested in [service], comment below for a free sample." The comments boosted the visibility of the post exponentially, so we had about 100 replies a few hours later, all hot leads. Took a day or two to fulfil the free samples, and it led to years of passive income.<p>Maybe a dozen of those became customers right away, and then it was word of mouth from there.<p>Another commenter mentioned finding relevant forums on Reddit, it's the exact same idea.
We just launched a platform to 1-click deploy React apps, among other things, so our target audience are Devs.<p>This is all very fresh (as of 1 week ago)<p>- 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.<p>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.<p>It also helped that our landing page looks really good!<p><a href="https://hypership.dev" rel="nofollow">https://hypership.dev</a>
I find it interesting the number of responses that had success after gathering e-mails. If your 'Show HN' asks for an e-mail here, everyone gets incredibly angry and lets you know they stopped looking at your product right away.
B2B founder, selling a software product and as little as possible services.<p>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.<p>Others were complimentary tech partners and very kindly helped spread the word, and got a foot in the door for direct engagement.<p>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..<p>It’s been a successful way to start.
Linkedin for a B2P product. I posted a few questions asking if anyone had similar issues, and got directly in touch with about 20 people who responded to involve them in customer research, then kept in touch with them as I was developing the product for feedback. Those 20 by word of mouth led to a bunch more people trying it out. It's difficult to put a specific number on whether that was 100 or a bit more or fewer, but a few cycles of word of mouth from happy users got me over the 100 users easily.
Personal network to get the first 20 - literally going to meet people and helping them set up over coffee, then marketing for the rest. The audience were SaaS founders mostly, since it's a marketing tool for SaaS SMEs.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
This is a great article where somebody systematically analyzed indie hackers interviews to figure out the best channels for user acquisition:<p><a href="https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/top-15-acquisition-channels-that-work-consistently-for-getting-new-users-d1253db0ae27" rel="nofollow">https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/top-15-acquisition-channels...</a>
First 5-10 clients was emails to friends of friends.<p>Next 50-100 was cold emails.<p>After that, mostly word-of-mouth.<p>Target audience was publishers (audience development/growth)
I've seen some founders have success by connecting with enterprise champions and decision-makers through networks like the one at <a href="https://buildrappo.com/founders" rel="nofollow">https://buildrappo.com/founders</a>
Engaging in relevant sub-reddits has worked out well for me.<p>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.
Cold out reach via email. It was so useful we pivoted and now have a product to help with it.<p>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.
I have a curated gaming content-related newsletter called The Gaming Pub (thegamingpub.com) and most of my initial users came from promoting on Reddit on relevant subreddits. However, most of them do not allow self-promotion, so it's not the best place to be honest.<p>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.<p>Today I barely do any active marketing for it, I believe mostly comes organically from word of mouth and also from newsletter directories/aggregators.
This post has become so popular I decided to create a podcast discussion of it using notebooklm. You can find the audio at the top of this page:<p><a href="https://news.gipety.com/hn/41862332/k/175/s/ask-hn-founders-what-was-the-major-sourcing-channel-for-your-first-100-users" rel="nofollow">https://news.gipety.com/hn/41862332/k/175/s/ask-hn-founders-...</a><p>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.
Profitable? None. For fun? Well, I made a stupid app for myself (showing all routes I’ve walked through in my city, that gets data from HealthKit), got pressured by friends to share my walking progress in a local subreddit which went semi viral, and people started asking what app I was using.<p>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.
Social listening on HN, Reddit, X...
I used <a href="https://kwatch.io" rel="nofollow">https://kwatch.io</a> and jumped into the relevant conversations to mention my product.
Hacker News :)<p>It was this Show HN:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980</a><p>That was before showing something on HN was called "Show HN" though.
B2B SaaS founder - Direct sales (contacts, LinkedIn, in-person industry events). Client advocates voluntarily promoting the product within the industry.
I cold emailed a blogger that I learnt a lot from and showed him my app. He liked it, mentioned it, asked a friend with lots of followers to link it. Then it spread by word of mouth, and a few weeks later I had 1000 beta testers.<p>Converting beta testers to paid users took a long time, but eventually it became a profitable business.<p>If you make something people want, it's easy and you need very little marketing.
Idk other platforms but you can try Rappo <a href="https://www.buildrappo.com/…" rel="nofollow">https://www.buildrappo.com/…</a> I tried LinkedIn to reach out customers but the response rate is way low. I don’t want to spend too much on customer research so I tried Rappo as one of my colleague referred to me.
Not a successful founder but successful at creating traffic. Technical blog posts worked super well for me, in terms of SEO and spotlight (> 100K visitors in just 2 months). HN frontpage does help a lot, finding the right subreddit too, being featured in technical newsletters was really key though.
Cold messaging on Facebook + word-of-mouth growth. We found people in one large Facebook group.<p>To get 1,000, we used SEO.<p>Our product helps people get ready for the Duolingo English Test, so our target audience was well-defined from the beginning.
We are working on engaging the first 100 users. Focus more on organic users, <a href="https://powtain.com" rel="nofollow">https://powtain.com</a>
I'm looking for help on the same topic, my product is <a href="https://ProsGPT.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ProsGPT.com/</a><p>I don't know my icp and I'm prepmf.<p>How can I find people to try it?<p>How can I find people that could actually bring end users to my b2b product? I need people with existing distribution