I'm a founder of 3 small saas companies that I run by myself, generating about $1M ARR.
1. First one I started 10 years ago. I built a bot that auto DMed people in various internet forums. My first 100 users came from that. The product is highly shareable, so it quickly grew. Now it's 1.6M users (most of them free).
2. Second started 3.5 years ago. My first 100 users came from simply emailing the newsletter list from my first company. This product has no free plan, so it became profitable instantly.
3. Third started 1 month ago. And it's been a struggle. I got 10k free users just by emailing my list, but 0 paying users. So I tried ads and had similar results from the ads. Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.
Summary: once you have an email list and viral social loops built-in, marketing gets easier.
> 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.
I looked at the product! And I think I know why you're struggling. (I am in your target demo)
It's just not worth the price. You're competing against CapCut by ByteDance & that's "good enough." Their platform is freemium, uploads directly to tiktok etc. & can get you serviceable subtitles quickly.
There are a bajillion and one ways to cut videos. And they're all extremely price competitive. You aren't competing against DaVinci's studio license. You're competing against the free one.
And at the stated price point, I might as well buy Adobe After effects for $23 & use it alongside DaVinci's free license.
I'm realizing this a bit too late I think. My only value over something like capcut is the API, which most users don't care about.
But I see products like submagic doing $1m arr and I'm at loss. How are they doing so well? It can't just be their editor.
So I think the way forward for my product, if any, is to just target b2b for API usage or target users who want long form video cut into viral clips automatically. I need to niche it down.
> How are they doing so well? It can't just be their editor.
Their B-roll feature is amazing. People often spend time hunting down B-roll and it seems they solve that. They make it easier to make videos by splicing in applicable B-roll + cleaning up audio so that it sounds nice.
Yes. Surprise surprise, most businesses generate most of their initial sales via cold calls/emails/DMs/other automated marketing. That’s the real world
And because they create so much noise, no option left for a new comer other than trying to shout louder than them. All-in-all a vicious cycle of spamming!
This is older than the ideas of the internet itself.
Channels get saturated and marketers start looking for new ones with les noise/competition.
The oldest that I can think of is old school markets where is shops yells to tell you how good of a deal you're gonna have if you buy from them. I think they date back to the middle ages, no?
What do you mean, 50 years ago? Go to any smallish town in German and you’ll find a farmers market about once a week, with people shouting at passerby’s to buy their cheap produce. Probably the same in most European countries, and I’d wager in many other parts of the world?
Am I correct to assume that each of these 3 businesses are roughly in the same problem space? I’m not sure how useful re-using an emailing list would be if each business was wildly different.
Any b2c product I build has huge incentive to share the product, creating more users.
In the product itself, social is part of the value. So the more they interact, the more value they get. Similar to any social network you see today.
I do this a number of ways, none original. Reactions, upvotes, achievements, streaks, creating summary videos (like Spotify year in review), public recommendations, etc
Not OP but there are more than one ways to tap in to the distribution channels that exists thanks to influencers (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Substack, Telegram). I, personally, don't see it any different than Nike hiring Lionel Messi or Uniqlo hiring Roger Federer. Where Nike is a global company, indie developers (especially the ones in Software) are smaller and thus could focus on just the right content creators, ie rely on marketing to boost sales.
This phenomenon isn't new. The book The Long Tail posited (way back) that even niche software could make millions now that the Internet had made it cheaper to reach just the right audience.
1. I made an app for the colorblind in 2015 and got my first 100 (and more) users from the r/colorblind subreddit.
2. I made a breathing app in 2017 and got my first users from r/breathing, r/breathwork, and r/meditation subreddits.
3. I recently made a productivity app for the mac and got my first users from r/macapps subreddit.
Reddit is incredibly powerful if you are building something niche and are already a part of the community. Also, the results are compounding because some of my posts get good SEO traffic so I still get a handful of users from Reddit every day.
> Reddit is incredibly powerful if you are building something niche and are already a part of the community
I generally agree with this but I will say (at least in my niche) that I’ve been pretty surprised recently with both how 1) anti ‘self-promotion’ some subreddits have become and 2) how brutal people will be if your thing is not fully free and open source. I understand where they’re coming from, but I’d recommend software founders know this when trying to use Reddit as a distribution channel.
I think it depends heavily on the sub. E.g. in some subs it's an instant permaban from the sub for self promotion, and in others they don't really care one way or the other. Either because there's so little promotional spam in that sub, or something else.
I think you're right. And this is one of the reasons I like HN so much. You're not seen as evil for sharing a software project that is paid and closed-source. It's much more friendly for this kind of stuff.
I know I'm getting old when I have to stop and check for satire at the mention of "a breathing app". That sounds like an Onion headline, to me. Glad you had success!
Furthermore, you would be surprised at how dysregulated one's breathing can become when using a computer all day, especially for gaming, or communicating using the keyboard, rather than having human conversations.
I have found that my breathing has become quite undisciplined and irregular. Also inadequate support, in terms of coming from the diaphragm and all. I sang in choirs for over 20 years. Well-regulated breathing is essential to our health in all respects.
You have to be a legitimate contributing member of the subreddit first and present something of value to them instead of just a link.
I too launched a business that got a large amount of customers from Reddit. In my case, it was a niche retail product for musicians who are into synthesizers. I was a longtime contributor to a few related subreddits and launched the product by producing a series of tutorials that featured the product, but didn’t really advertise it. Many thousands of people viewed the tutorials, noticed the product, and quickly figured out where to get it in the video description. People then bought the product and started using it in their own videos, so it spread quickly. This led to thousands of units sold on every continent (except Antarctica, of course).
Whether you can rank for a specific thing people are searching and looking for is also a good litmus test of 1) is there demand for your thing ... are there people searching Google for your solution, and 2) is the market not so extremely saturated with competitors that you're able to rank?
I run a translation company, so when we started the target was not "website translation" .. it was "website translation for squarespace" (and similar niche use cases which our product worked equally well for). A the company grew, so did the breadth of our use cases.
Our first 500 users were people paying $10/mo to translate their squarespace site. The next 500 users were enterprise companies paying many orders of magnitude more to translate everything/anything you can imagine.
And as for "the first" customer... that would be the company I was working for while developing the MVP. Who actually paid me $20/mo for the product while I was working for them! (And yes, the employment contract said they owned all my IP for side projects, and no it wasn't difficult to get them to sign a simple letter negating those terms since I was open and honest about my side projects - people on HN go bonkers with legalities of contracts when in reality people tend to operate on good faith)
The 2nd customer was a cold outreach where I offered to basically do all of the work manually if the solution I was offering didn't work off the shelf. Essentially I was offering them free professional services.
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.
Maybe a dozen of those became customers right away, and then it was word of mouth from there.
Another commenter mentioned finding relevant forums on Reddit, it's the exact same idea.
We just launched a platform to 1-click deploy React apps, among other things, so our target audience are Devs.
This is all very fresh (as of 1 week ago)
- Show HN: Did quite well
- Post to Reddit (r/sideprojects, r/saas, etc): Did better than expected. 40 sign-ups to our waitlist over 24 hours.
If you don't have a product ready (like us), have a Waitlist on your landing page. Ours is built using our own dev-tool, so we're showing off the product and collecting sign ups.
It also helped that our landing page looks really good!
Perfect example of form over function, although I like showing a much bigger version of our product screenshots for mobile users. I can't think of a better solution.
To add something else to my original comment: We're going to try Reddit ads very soon. Has anyone used Reddit ads and had a successful experience?
(Basically, we really like Reddit for finding the first x customers)
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.
I think too though for some submissions there's a discrepancy between readers vs commenters, I think in part because HN as a site is attractive to certain types of users (text only, more web 1.0-y and refreshing vs gamified forum experiences), which leads to some skew in the demographic of who choose to register as users and engage.
See for example the disproportionate number of comments on HN from users who disable Javascript and or (all) cookies and remark about a site experience based on it (can't read article, some aspect not working, etc), yet from general statistics represents a niche minority.
(Which isn't to say that any such critiques are invalid either, just an observation on perceived audience)
I just realized two implications of this HN demographic:
* Good: That side of HN is within the target for a little niche Web site I plan to launch in a few weeks.
* Bad: I used a Web framework that requires 10x the hosting resources that it should (resume-driven-development), so I might have to upgrade from free-tier hosting before HN mention, just to not be embarrassed by hug of death.
What framework? I'm getting into full stack and I was under the impression that all the shiny new stuff is focused on being more efficient, rather than less?
Asking for emails allows you to target people who are more likely to engage with your marketing, while people who find this annoying would probably be more critical of the product and in general are more picky. In the end they still give you engagement in a form of comments, so it's a win-win. Similar strategy is leaving easily spottable typos in your post so that nitpickers can't help but comment on it.
B2B founder, selling a software product and as little as possible services.
We built up a partner network worldwide, so we had to find relevant partners who would help serve our potential customers in the relevant way that already had those customers. They are easyish to find and approach because they are trying to achieve a similar goal, although sometimes more generically if they are integrators (selling software, hardware and services). Sometimes they sell a competitive product so our USP had to be tight - such as not requiring a year of services to start up but maybe an hour or two.
Others were complimentary tech partners and very kindly helped spread the word, and got a foot in the door for direct engagement.
If each partner has 10 good customers, then thats 10 partners you have to engage with. We were more often than not involved with the relationship with the customer, and got direct knowledge of the customer problem, how well we fit solving the problem, identify UX issues, sales issues, support issues etc..
I'm going for a similar strategy, rather with exclusive national distributors, any chance I could know more about how exactly you executed your partnership's creation?
Like, cold outreach with a pitch then a doc saying more, what would you recommend to be in the doc now that you have that experience and how did you filter and find your potential partners?
Could be over email too if you prefer.
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.
I just checked, and have about 9K connections on LinkedIn. I assume with the ability to pay for post promotion you could get a similar reach by paying linkedin a few bucks.
This was for a tool to speed up making educational videos, so I tried to reach out to people who were doing online courses and educational materials.
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.
What's important is after you get the first N customers, the way you acquire customers will likely change. You'll exhaust your personal network eventually. Knowing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is important and so is having a good understanding that the value/price of your product dictates what kind of sales/marketing you can do.
Things like cold emailing are fine for your first few customer development calls, but generally if your deal size is less than $1-2,000/year then (with exceptions) you should stop doing this after you get the first customers.
I run a low price point SaaS for SMEs (avg price is <$100/month), so this required switching from just messaging people I knew, to getting SEO, word of mouth, and the viral loop working. Outbound/inbound sales is not economical at that price point.
can you explain why i would want to stop cold emailing after the first customers? i know little about this, but i would think the opposite for low revenue per customer, because it's a lower customer acquisition cost? they don't make you enough to spend a lot so low cost efforts like cold email seem like a decent strategy?
I also think along the similar lines. Plus meeting prospects physically isn't always possible, especially when you are selling outside own country. So well-targeted emails seem good strategy to generate inbound interest. Less intrusive than calls or texts.
You can still do cold email don’t get me wrong. But generally for a low ARPA service (<$2k) you want the product to be simple, self-serve, and for customer acquisition to be mostly inbound (ergo from marketing efforts, not outbound emails). Low price points require low CAC, and outbound sales is generally not.
From Apollo, which sells an outbound sales tool: “As a benchmark, try to achieve at least a 20%-30% win rate by closing 2-5 deals per month per rep”. If you have a full time sales rep chasing 5 $100/year deals per month they will close $6k/year. At $1k ARPA they might close $60k/year - after paying salaries you’re not making a profit.
Obviously this doesn’t apply in the early stages, but after you have N customers. Chasing outbound sales for a low price point product is just a recipe for low/slow growth.
Depends why you are doing outbound for a low ARPA product.
What problem is cold email solving, and will it eventually solve it? If the product is good enough for the initial customers, I’d switch to marketing and inbound sales.
One reason to stick with cold email is if the product is not good enough yet, so you need to chase people to talk to you and get them to help you improve it
Article like this are less useful than they appear, because the best channel for your product depends on your audience. Aggregating all the anecdotal answers together is mildly interesting, but not actionable. Had they broken out the top X channels by the target audience and market, that would be far more useful.
It is better to actually read through all the anecdotes you can find, seek out the ones that match your audience, and compile your own data and conclusions.
Ads for me, too. Google, Capterra, Microsoft, and LinkedIn were my main ad channels.
Most new founders think that blasting your 'startup' to Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Twitter, etc. will result in first customers -- that that's 'marketing' -- but that's far from the truth for the majority of products. And contrary to popular belief, the chances your product is one of the exceptions is near-zero.
Those social media platforms bring in 'tire-kickers' and devs that value their time at $0, not customers. These aren't the first users that you should be listening to, because they will always complain about price, lack of niche functionality, etc., yet it's pointless to listen to them -- because they aren't buyers.
You want to market towards buyers, not just users, and ads are a good way to do that for early companies that have no brand awareness or distribution.
It is highly skewed for incumbents and big startups like Notion. And "winner takes all" setup would mean there is 95 percent chance you won't be visible in search results even if someone searched by exact keyword of your product name.
I would expect those channels (PH, HN…) would be helpful in getting early adopters to click around and point out what is wrong with app - not getting really customers.
For me personally PH would be more like ideas to copy from.
Finding bugs maybe sure. Further up this thread someone commented about “images getting cut off” on Hypership. It’s feedback but it’s not valuable. Feedback from real users who are actually trying to execute tasks with your product is valuable
I would say I agree because validating your product with early adopters also can lead to false conclusions that it is useful - when in reality early adopters would just like to use it to see what it is and leave it for next shiny thing as something pops up.
For that matter, even waitlists are not fully reliable as many of them might drop interest by the time you launch, or suggest whimsical features that they won't use/pay-for later.
Hence the importance of industry knowledge and gut feeling.
Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads (especially bootstrapped firms or solopreneurs), and in some way growing organically and slowly gives you more time to develop product better.
Having said that, I am in agreement with the essence of this reply.
My company is bootstrapped, and I'm a solo founder. If you don't have any money to grow your business, then you aren't going to be able to do much until you have some money. Hard truth, but it takes money to earn money -- either your money, or somebody else's. You have to get buyer's eyes on you, somehow.
>Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads
You can start with a small budget and build from there. For the first year I only spent £100 per month on Adwords.
The bigger problem is Google et al make it very easy to waste money on their ads. You have to pay a lot of attention to the detail and constantly fight against their defaults which are nearly always in their favour rather than yours.
Maybe someone else can advise as I don't have recent experience. Back then Google assisted us through a representative for a month. But it was mostly generic as they dont understand our business deep enough.
Best way is learning through practical experience by starting with small budget, and increasing slowly with refinements.
If I understand correctly, you are selling a B2B version of something where B2C options exist? In that case, suggestions:
- More sophisticated logins: Google/etc.
- Integrations
- Attestations (e.g. HIPAA compliance etc.)
- Team management functionality
- APIs
- Audit trails
- Offline communications & support. I'll add payment via invoice here. I have onboarded Enterprise customers who only needed Enterprise pricing because they needed to bay by check, and/or they wanted a phone number to call for help (which they tended to not use often).
I will say that if your market is well-covered in B2C offerings, you may want to either niche down further by adding core features businesses need. For example, can you help them enforce some kind of corporate standard (possibly via workflow)?
Or you may want to get into a different market altogether.
+1 for freemium. A lot of advice against it, but it is working for me. Right limit on usage/feature is the key to avoid abuse and maximize conversions.
When doing talks at meetups, do you present a version (mvp?) of your product or are you doing a talk on a topic that aligns with the meetup subject and at the end, oh by the way, I have this product you might like to try.
Personally I always found that just attending relevant events and using the audience question time to make (hopefully) interestimg remarks or addotional insights led to great conversations with interested attendees wich become potentiall customers.
I've seen some founders have success by connecting with enterprise champions and decision-makers through networks like the one at https://buildrappo.com/founders
Engaging in relevant sub-reddits has worked out well for me.
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.
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.
Cold out reach via email. It was so useful we pivoted and now have a product to help with it.
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.
Yeah we built a whole email pipeline using Apollo and some other tools. Maintaining high deliverability is really hard but it really makes a difference. If you're just using Apollo I can tell you that it's going to be really hard to make any outbound campaign work.
I'm probably in the same category of old school internet vets with strong negative opinions about spam, but I think that well-targeted, high- or at least some-effort commercial outreach is OK if it's done well and isn't annoying. What turns email into spam isn't just what it is, it's how it's done.
I've hired people who cold emailed me - in the right way. I delete without reading cold emails that seem to be bulk sent. There is a difference.
That's one point of view, but it works. Of course sender should research the audience properly, and provide one-click unsubscribe option right at the top.
My dictionary describes spam as "irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.."
Unsolicited messages sent over the internet is exactly what @twosdai is doing.
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.
I had a little bit of luck as well that someone shortly after I started the newsletter mentioned it here on Hacker News when on an Ask HN for cool newsletters that they followed and this brought a bunch of users as well at the beginning of my newsletter.
Today I barely do any active marketing for it, I believe mostly comes organically from word of mouth and also from newsletter directories/aggregators.
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.
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.
I built https://rockyai.me/ (chrome extension to chat with any webpage using LLMs) and just sending it my friends has gotten be a decent number of users that love the product!
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.
Converting beta testers to paid users took a long time, but eventually it became a profitable business.
If you make something people want, it's easy and you need very little marketing.
Good that it worked relatively easy for you, but it is more of an exception than norm.
In my industry, there is a clear want for a better product but that isn't sufficient for them to switch due to natural resistance to change. Hence significant marketing is needed through trusted channels to remove that fear-of-unknown from their minds.
I really like the concept of gnod. I started creating notebookLM audios of hacker news posts and realised it would be nice to have a directory of notebookLM audios generally.
Will send you an email shortly about this. Would be nice to find someone to collaborate with on this.
B2B SaaS founder - Direct sales (contacts, LinkedIn, in-person industry events). Client advocates voluntarily promoting the product within the industry.
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.
Idk other platforms but you can try Rappo https://www.buildrappo.com/… 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.
You should definitely work on the "what on earth is this" experience for first time users. I have no idea what I'm looking at. If I had to guess, I'd say someone's private Mastodon server.
I don’t really know. I don’t write posts to optimize for SEO (include FAQ at the end or something like that) and hope it’s just good content people will share.
There are also SEO pages which do not have any useful content. I think I should have more of them because my competitors have only SEO pages but I don’t have time for it as I have to focus on the product and customer support. Probably a good mix between useful content blog posts (maybe with SEO filling) and strictly SEO pages is best to bring traffic.
I'm a founder of 3 small saas companies that I run by myself, generating about $1M ARR.
1. First one I started 10 years ago. I built a bot that auto DMed people in various internet forums. My first 100 users came from that. The product is highly shareable, so it quickly grew. Now it's 1.6M users (most of them free).
2. Second started 3.5 years ago. My first 100 users came from simply emailing the newsletter list from my first company. This product has no free plan, so it became profitable instantly.
3. Third started 1 month ago. And it's been a struggle. I got 10k free users just by emailing my list, but 0 paying users. So I tried ads and had similar results from the ads. Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.
Summary: once you have an email list and viral social loops built-in, marketing gets easier.
It's just not worth the price. You're competing against CapCut by ByteDance & that's "good enough." Their platform is freemium, uploads directly to tiktok etc. & can get you serviceable subtitles quickly.
There are a bajillion and one ways to cut videos. And they're all extremely price competitive. You aren't competing against DaVinci's studio license. You're competing against the free one.
And at the stated price point, I might as well buy Adobe After effects for $23 & use it alongside DaVinci's free license.
The value just isn't there.
I'm realizing this a bit too late I think. My only value over something like capcut is the API, which most users don't care about.
But I see products like submagic doing $1m arr and I'm at loss. How are they doing so well? It can't just be their editor.
So I think the way forward for my product, if any, is to just target b2b for API usage or target users who want long form video cut into viral clips automatically. I need to niche it down.
> 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.
Isn't this by definition Spamming people as you were using bots to mass DM people?
Yes. Surprise surprise, most businesses generate most of their initial sales via cold calls/emails/DMs/other automated marketing. That’s the real world
And because they create so much noise, no option left for a new comer other than trying to shout louder than them. All-in-all a vicious cycle of spamming!
This is older than the ideas of the internet itself.
Channels get saturated and marketers start looking for new ones with les noise/competition.
The oldest that I can think of is old school markets where is shops yells to tell you how good of a deal you're gonna have if you buy from them. I think they date back to the middle ages, no?
Older, almost certainly. The discovery of advertising murals and graffiti in Hereculum makes me smile a little. Humans have been humans all along.
A.k.a. the marketplace (the literal one) 50 years ago!
What do you mean, 50 years ago? Go to any smallish town in German and you’ll find a farmers market about once a week, with people shouting at passerby’s to buy their cheap produce. Probably the same in most European countries, and I’d wager in many other parts of the world?
Sure. One difference.
I can't hear them here in Canada, and indeed, I can't hear everyone on the planet who is shouting.
Unlike spam.
You read the spam in my inbox today?
You got the initial product invite from the GP?
This might be the reminder bot
Subscriptions, insurance, bills have skyrocketed. I believe many are taking a step back and rethinking necessities.
Ripple effects of success! How do you manage customer support for so many users in 3 different companies alone?
I have them all wired up to helpscout. Then a contractor checks the inbox every 8 hours to clear them out. She covers the hours I'm asleep as well.
I also have it posting to a slack channel so we can quickly scan any urgent ones while I'm working.
Bugs pop in heavily on new feature launches but then it's the usual "my email didn't arrive" type of questions.
Am I correct to assume that each of these 3 businesses are roughly in the same problem space? I’m not sure how useful re-using an emailing list would be if each business was wildly different.
Yes, I generally build new products around my current audience.
Awesome! Followed you on X. Can you elaborate more on what you mean by "viral social loops"?
Any b2c product I build has huge incentive to share the product, creating more users.
In the product itself, social is part of the value. So the more they interact, the more value they get. Similar to any social network you see today.
I do this a number of ways, none original. Reactions, upvotes, achievements, streaks, creating summary videos (like Spotify year in review), public recommendations, etc
If you want some great reading material on this, I recommend Reforge's viral loops info. I believe it's free.
I checked, there is a membership to access the full content.
I see what you did there.
I thought they were still doing one free lesson. It's been a while since I was on Reforge though.
ha ha, i was just kidding :)
Not OP but there are more than one ways to tap in to the distribution channels that exists thanks to influencers (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Substack, Telegram). I, personally, don't see it any different than Nike hiring Lionel Messi or Uniqlo hiring Roger Federer. Where Nike is a global company, indie developers (especially the ones in Software) are smaller and thus could focus on just the right content creators, ie rely on marketing to boost sales.
This phenomenon isn't new. The book The Long Tail posited (way back) that even niche software could make millions now that the Internet had made it cheaper to reach just the right audience.
Teenagers, Zach Yadegari (calai.app) and Blake Anderson (apex.inc), who built million dollar app-based businesses in 6mo, plan to release a book on it: https://x.com/zach_yadegari/status/1845842051314614681 / https://archive.md/xXf9a
It's good to see these success stories, but is also important to account for survivor bias before blindly following their rule book.
Reddit.
1. I made an app for the colorblind in 2015 and got my first 100 (and more) users from the r/colorblind subreddit.
2. I made a breathing app in 2017 and got my first users from r/breathing, r/breathwork, and r/meditation subreddits.
3. I recently made a productivity app for the mac and got my first users from r/macapps subreddit.
Reddit is incredibly powerful if you are building something niche and are already a part of the community. Also, the results are compounding because some of my posts get good SEO traffic so I still get a handful of users from Reddit every day.
> Reddit is incredibly powerful if you are building something niche and are already a part of the community
I generally agree with this but I will say (at least in my niche) that I’ve been pretty surprised recently with both how 1) anti ‘self-promotion’ some subreddits have become and 2) how brutal people will be if your thing is not fully free and open source. I understand where they’re coming from, but I’d recommend software founders know this when trying to use Reddit as a distribution channel.
I think it depends heavily on the sub. E.g. in some subs it's an instant permaban from the sub for self promotion, and in others they don't really care one way or the other. Either because there's so little promotional spam in that sub, or something else.
> I think it depends heavily on the sub
I think you're right. And this is one of the reasons I like HN so much. You're not seen as evil for sharing a software project that is paid and closed-source. It's much more friendly for this kind of stuff.
I second that.
Ironically this post was flagged and got invisible within minutes of postings. However mod team was super helpful to restore it.
I know I'm getting old when I have to stop and check for satire at the mention of "a breathing app". That sounds like an Onion headline, to me. Glad you had success!
It's funny that your username is the exact name of my app
The modern smartphone user. Not only incapable of walking down the street without Maps guidance, now breathing requires prompting too.
May fate preserve us all from power outages.
Should be a movie.
You're minimizing this. That's like saying "you have legs that can move, yet you need someone to guide you through yoga!"
Lots of benefits can be gained from practicing disciplined breathing, and some people want an app.
Furthermore, you would be surprised at how dysregulated one's breathing can become when using a computer all day, especially for gaming, or communicating using the keyboard, rather than having human conversations.
I have found that my breathing has become quite undisciplined and irregular. Also inadequate support, in terms of coming from the diaphragm and all. I sang in choirs for over 20 years. Well-regulated breathing is essential to our health in all respects.
> Well-regulated breathing is essential to our health in all respects.
Absolutely. Including mental and spiritual health.
Startup idea to unlock phone/PC by a number of deep breaths as password?
But dont subreddits have rules against advertising and stuff
Answer is already there in this thread.
How do you avoid getting banned for posting a link to your business?
You have to be a legitimate contributing member of the subreddit first and present something of value to them instead of just a link.
I too launched a business that got a large amount of customers from Reddit. In my case, it was a niche retail product for musicians who are into synthesizers. I was a longtime contributor to a few related subreddits and launched the product by producing a series of tutorials that featured the product, but didn’t really advertise it. Many thousands of people viewed the tutorials, noticed the product, and quickly figured out where to get it in the video description. People then bought the product and started using it in their own videos, so it spread quickly. This led to thousands of units sold on every continent (except Antarctica, of course).
Key is not getting banned.
SEO.
Whether you can rank for a specific thing people are searching and looking for is also a good litmus test of 1) is there demand for your thing ... are there people searching Google for your solution, and 2) is the market not so extremely saturated with competitors that you're able to rank?
I run a translation company, so when we started the target was not "website translation" .. it was "website translation for squarespace" (and similar niche use cases which our product worked equally well for). A the company grew, so did the breadth of our use cases.
Our first 500 users were people paying $10/mo to translate their squarespace site. The next 500 users were enterprise companies paying many orders of magnitude more to translate everything/anything you can imagine.
And as for "the first" customer... that would be the company I was working for while developing the MVP. Who actually paid me $20/mo for the product while I was working for them! (And yes, the employment contract said they owned all my IP for side projects, and no it wasn't difficult to get them to sign a simple letter negating those terms since I was open and honest about my side projects - people on HN go bonkers with legalities of contracts when in reality people tend to operate on good faith)
The 2nd customer was a cold outreach where I offered to basically do all of the work manually if the solution I was offering didn't work off the shelf. Essentially I was offering them free professional services.
The 3-10th customer came through the SEO scheme.
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.
Maybe a dozen of those became customers right away, and then it was word of mouth from there.
Another commenter mentioned finding relevant forums on Reddit, it's the exact same idea.
Wow nice, what was the service to attract people so well?
Targeted Instagram Ads —> Landing Page —> Email sign up
I wrote on this exact topic (literally - how I got my first 100 paying users) here: https://swiftjectivec.com/The-First-100-Subscribers/
We just launched a platform to 1-click deploy React apps, among other things, so our target audience are Devs.
This is all very fresh (as of 1 week ago)
- Show HN: Did quite well - Post to Reddit (r/sideprojects, r/saas, etc): Did better than expected. 40 sign-ups to our waitlist over 24 hours.
If you don't have a product ready (like us), have a Waitlist on your landing page. Ours is built using our own dev-tool, so we're showing off the product and collecting sign ups.
It also helped that our landing page looks really good!
https://hypership.dev
Cool. Images don't seem responsive on mobile though.
Thanks for the heads up.
The images on the landing page are off center by design. It's supposed to be quirky/snazzy.
Oh ok. Right side was cut off, so I thought of unresponsive.
Valuable feedback, thank you.
Perfect example of form over function, although I like showing a much bigger version of our product screenshots for mobile users. I can't think of a better solution.
To add something else to my original comment: We're going to try Reddit ads very soon. Has anyone used Reddit ads and had a successful experience?
(Basically, we really like Reddit for finding the first x customers)
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.
I think too though for some submissions there's a discrepancy between readers vs commenters, I think in part because HN as a site is attractive to certain types of users (text only, more web 1.0-y and refreshing vs gamified forum experiences), which leads to some skew in the demographic of who choose to register as users and engage.
See for example the disproportionate number of comments on HN from users who disable Javascript and or (all) cookies and remark about a site experience based on it (can't read article, some aspect not working, etc), yet from general statistics represents a niche minority.
(Which isn't to say that any such critiques are invalid either, just an observation on perceived audience)
I just realized two implications of this HN demographic:
* Good: That side of HN is within the target for a little niche Web site I plan to launch in a few weeks.
* Bad: I used a Web framework that requires 10x the hosting resources that it should (resume-driven-development), so I might have to upgrade from free-tier hosting before HN mention, just to not be embarrassed by hug of death.
Even if you survive the hug, they'll probably complain anyway.
What framework? I'm getting into full stack and I was under the impression that all the shiny new stuff is focused on being more efficient, rather than less?
E*e*t*on, maybe.
Don’t forget about the comments regarding sites that hijack the scrolling.
Don't listen to what customers say, but look at what they do.
Asking for emails allows you to target people who are more likely to engage with your marketing, while people who find this annoying would probably be more critical of the product and in general are more picky. In the end they still give you engagement in a form of comments, so it's a win-win. Similar strategy is leaving easily spottable typos in your post so that nitpickers can't help but comment on it.
Need to keep annoyance balanced to avoid getting flagged/downvoted though.
Says a lot about the average HN reactionary commenter =)
B2B founder, selling a software product and as little as possible services.
We built up a partner network worldwide, so we had to find relevant partners who would help serve our potential customers in the relevant way that already had those customers. They are easyish to find and approach because they are trying to achieve a similar goal, although sometimes more generically if they are integrators (selling software, hardware and services). Sometimes they sell a competitive product so our USP had to be tight - such as not requiring a year of services to start up but maybe an hour or two.
Others were complimentary tech partners and very kindly helped spread the word, and got a foot in the door for direct engagement.
If each partner has 10 good customers, then thats 10 partners you have to engage with. We were more often than not involved with the relationship with the customer, and got direct knowledge of the customer problem, how well we fit solving the problem, identify UX issues, sales issues, support issues etc..
It’s been a successful way to start.
I'm going for a similar strategy, rather with exclusive national distributors, any chance I could know more about how exactly you executed your partnership's creation?
Like, cold outreach with a pitch then a doc saying more, what would you recommend to be in the doc now that you have that experience and how did you filter and find your potential partners? Could be over email too if you prefer.
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.
Inspiring, you must be having a good number of connections on LinkedIn. Target audience?
I just checked, and have about 9K connections on LinkedIn. I assume with the ability to pay for post promotion you could get a similar reach by paying linkedin a few bucks.
This was for a tool to speed up making educational videos, so I tried to reach out to people who were doing online courses and educational materials.
I see. LinkedIn promotions are not cheap, but the targeting can be extremely specific to maintain ROI.
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.
What's important is after you get the first N customers, the way you acquire customers will likely change. You'll exhaust your personal network eventually. Knowing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is important and so is having a good understanding that the value/price of your product dictates what kind of sales/marketing you can do.
Things like cold emailing are fine for your first few customer development calls, but generally if your deal size is less than $1-2,000/year then (with exceptions) you should stop doing this after you get the first customers.
I run a low price point SaaS for SMEs (avg price is <$100/month), so this required switching from just messaging people I knew, to getting SEO, word of mouth, and the viral loop working. Outbound/inbound sales is not economical at that price point.
can you explain why i would want to stop cold emailing after the first customers? i know little about this, but i would think the opposite for low revenue per customer, because it's a lower customer acquisition cost? they don't make you enough to spend a lot so low cost efforts like cold email seem like a decent strategy?
I also think along the similar lines. Plus meeting prospects physically isn't always possible, especially when you are selling outside own country. So well-targeted emails seem good strategy to generate inbound interest. Less intrusive than calls or texts.
Cold email by definition is not inbound interest.
You can still do cold email don’t get me wrong. But generally for a low ARPA service (<$2k) you want the product to be simple, self-serve, and for customer acquisition to be mostly inbound (ergo from marketing efforts, not outbound emails). Low price points require low CAC, and outbound sales is generally not.
From Apollo, which sells an outbound sales tool: “As a benchmark, try to achieve at least a 20%-30% win rate by closing 2-5 deals per month per rep”. If you have a full time sales rep chasing 5 $100/year deals per month they will close $6k/year. At $1k ARPA they might close $60k/year - after paying salaries you’re not making a profit.
Obviously this doesn’t apply in the early stages, but after you have N customers. Chasing outbound sales for a low price point product is just a recipe for low/slow growth.
You are right. I used "inbound" wrongly.
Thanks for detailed explanation. Do you have some ideas on how to determine N?
Depends why you are doing outbound for a low ARPA product.
What problem is cold email solving, and will it eventually solve it? If the product is good enough for the initial customers, I’d switch to marketing and inbound sales.
One reason to stick with cold email is if the product is not good enough yet, so you need to chase people to talk to you and get them to help you improve it
That's helpful. Appreciate it.
that makes sense. thanks for explaining!
This is a great article where somebody systematically analyzed indie hackers interviews to figure out the best channels for user acquisition:
https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/top-15-acquisition-channels...
Article like this are less useful than they appear, because the best channel for your product depends on your audience. Aggregating all the anecdotal answers together is mildly interesting, but not actionable. Had they broken out the top X channels by the target audience and market, that would be far more useful.
It is better to actually read through all the anecdotes you can find, seek out the ones that match your audience, and compile your own data and conclusions.
Reads like a recipe website, after 400 words of back and forth you finally get: "Without further ado, here are the top 15 acquisition channels:".
The list should go first then go on with "here's how we go to it" for those who want the details.
I guess there exists both set of readers.
First who are clear with their destinations, and simply want the best journey towards it.
Second who want to know different journeys to finalize their destinations.
Majority falls in first set, but the article is written for second.
Targeted Google ads (for the type of product we were building) pointing to a landing page where we collected email addresses.
Ads for me, too. Google, Capterra, Microsoft, and LinkedIn were my main ad channels.
Most new founders think that blasting your 'startup' to Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Twitter, etc. will result in first customers -- that that's 'marketing' -- but that's far from the truth for the majority of products. And contrary to popular belief, the chances your product is one of the exceptions is near-zero.
Those social media platforms bring in 'tire-kickers' and devs that value their time at $0, not customers. These aren't the first users that you should be listening to, because they will always complain about price, lack of niche functionality, etc., yet it's pointless to listen to them -- because they aren't buyers.
You want to market towards buyers, not just users, and ads are a good way to do that for early companies that have no brand awareness or distribution.
Product Hunt generated exactly zero sales for me. I won't bother next time.
It is highly skewed for incumbents and big startups like Notion. And "winner takes all" setup would mean there is 95 percent chance you won't be visible in search results even if someone searched by exact keyword of your product name.
I would expect those channels (PH, HN…) would be helpful in getting early adopters to click around and point out what is wrong with app - not getting really customers.
For me personally PH would be more like ideas to copy from.
Finding bugs maybe sure. Further up this thread someone commented about “images getting cut off” on Hypership. It’s feedback but it’s not valuable. Feedback from real users who are actually trying to execute tasks with your product is valuable
I would say I agree because validating your product with early adopters also can lead to false conclusions that it is useful - when in reality early adopters would just like to use it to see what it is and leave it for next shiny thing as something pops up.
For that matter, even waitlists are not fully reliable as many of them might drop interest by the time you launch, or suggest whimsical features that they won't use/pay-for later.
Hence the importance of industry knowledge and gut feeling.
Entrepreneurship is not for weak hearts.
Some harsh truths there.
Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads (especially bootstrapped firms or solopreneurs), and in some way growing organically and slowly gives you more time to develop product better.
Having said that, I am in agreement with the essence of this reply.
> especially bootstrapped firms or solopreneurs
My company is bootstrapped, and I'm a solo founder. If you don't have any money to grow your business, then you aren't going to be able to do much until you have some money. Hard truth, but it takes money to earn money -- either your money, or somebody else's. You have to get buyer's eyes on you, somehow.
Largely true. Lack of money in some cases can be compensated by investing more time and efforts.
What is your customer acquisition cost? Monthly spend on ads? Where are the ads?
>Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads
You can start with a small budget and build from there. For the first year I only spent £100 per month on Adwords.
The bigger problem is Google et al make it very easy to waste money on their ads. You have to pay a lot of attention to the detail and constantly fight against their defaults which are nearly always in their favour rather than yours.
> The bigger problem is Google et al make it very easy to waste money on their ads.
That's me in 2018. Spent a good amount of money in Google Ads and only attracted users that we did not want.
Just putting negative keywords wasn't sufficient, and even one miss was enough to waste all efforts.
That's why I eventually moved to LinkedIn and Capterra. It was a lot easier to get good results with their ad targeting.
Any recommended resources to learn about this to those starting out?
Maybe someone else can advise as I don't have recent experience. Back then Google assisted us through a representative for a month. But it was mostly generic as they dont understand our business deep enough.
Best way is learning through practical experience by starting with small budget, and increasing slowly with refinements.
Interesting. You seem to have good experience with b2b sales. I have to try ads.
How do you target ads when many B2C versions are trying same thing. For example, image editor that are targeted towards b2b.
I get initial interest but then people drag their feet for trials and paying after that.
Any thoughts how can I counter these drag and boost sales?
If I understand correctly, you are selling a B2B version of something where B2C options exist? In that case, suggestions:
- More sophisticated logins: Google/etc.
- Integrations
- Attestations (e.g. HIPAA compliance etc.)
- Team management functionality
- APIs
- Audit trails
- Offline communications & support. I'll add payment via invoice here. I have onboarded Enterprise customers who only needed Enterprise pricing because they needed to bay by check, and/or they wanted a phone number to call for help (which they tended to not use often).
I will say that if your market is well-covered in B2C offerings, you may want to either niche down further by adding core features businesses need. For example, can you help them enforce some kind of corporate standard (possibly via workflow)?
Or you may want to get into a different market altogether.
If you’re getting qualified traffic and can’t convert, you could try a freemium model.
+1 for freemium. A lot of advice against it, but it is working for me. Right limit on usage/feature is the key to avoid abuse and maximize conversions.
what are some good resources to learn about how to do this?
Talks at meetups for the first 100.
Hacker News for the next 10,000.
Target audience was devs.
When doing talks at meetups, do you present a version (mvp?) of your product or are you doing a talk on a topic that aligns with the meetup subject and at the end, oh by the way, I have this product you might like to try.
Personally I always found that just attending relevant events and using the audience question time to make (hopefully) interestimg remarks or addotional insights led to great conversations with interested attendees wich become potentiall customers.
Wow, what a combo of offline and online growth!
What made you prefer HN over dev platforms like StackOverflow or Github?
First 5-10 clients was emails to friends of friends.
Next 50-100 was cold emails.
After that, mostly word-of-mouth.
Target audience was publishers (audience development/growth)
Did you have emails of target audience already, or you bought that? If bought, from where?
I've seen some founders have success by connecting with enterprise champions and decision-makers through networks like the one at https://buildrappo.com/founders
Engaging in relevant sub-reddits has worked out well for me.
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.
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:
https://news.gipety.com/hn/41862332/k/175/s/ask-hn-founders-...
The podcast is quite convincing and entertaining but not as useful at bringing out all the key points as I'd hoped it would be. Still useful for getting a quick overview though.
Cool stuff!
Cold out reach via email. It was so useful we pivoted and now have a product to help with it.
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.
Have tried B2B for small businesses in USA using Apollo.io with limited success.
I guess businesses from outside USA would need bigger effort to generate trust.
Yeah we built a whole email pipeline using Apollo and some other tools. Maintaining high deliverability is really hard but it really makes a difference. If you're just using Apollo I can tell you that it's going to be really hard to make any outbound campaign work.
We mainly use it as a prospecting tool.
What were the other tools you used in your pipeline? And what kind of email sequence did you use? Would be awesome to know
How do you majorly engage them?
Any email sequencing tools that are free? I looked at clay, instantly and others but damn they are super expensive for early stage startups.
Clay is expensive for sure. To clarify, it’s more of a data enrichment tool than a sequencing tool.
Check out Mautic. You can self host and connect to AWS SES for a very low cost solution.
Where did you get the email addresses from?
Mainly apollo. We do some high level searches based on market factors and then purchase some emails from them.
>Cold out reach via email.
In other words SPAM.
I'm probably in the same category of old school internet vets with strong negative opinions about spam, but I think that well-targeted, high- or at least some-effort commercial outreach is OK if it's done well and isn't annoying. What turns email into spam isn't just what it is, it's how it's done.
I've hired people who cold emailed me - in the right way. I delete without reading cold emails that seem to be bulk sent. There is a difference.
That's one point of view, but it works. Of course sender should research the audience properly, and provide one-click unsubscribe option right at the top.
My dictionary describes spam as "irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.."
Unsolicited messages sent over the internet is exactly what @twosdai is doing.
That would mean all database providers are basically spam enablers!
...yes?
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.
I had a little bit of luck as well that someone shortly after I started the newsletter mentioned it here on Hacker News when on an Ask HN for cool newsletters that they followed and this brought a bunch of users as well at the beginning of my newsletter.
Today I barely do any active marketing for it, I believe mostly comes organically from word of mouth and also from newsletter directories/aggregators.
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.
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.
Niche Facebook Groups: Entrepreneurs and Investors.
Targeted Linkedin outreach: A specific class of professionals
New for me to see fun platform like Facebook to target business people.
I built https://rockyai.me/ (chrome extension to chat with any webpage using LLMs) and just sending it my friends has gotten be a decent number of users that love the product!
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.
Converting beta testers to paid users took a long time, but eventually it became a profitable business.
If you make something people want, it's easy and you need very little marketing.
Good that it worked relatively easy for you, but it is more of an exception than norm.
In my industry, there is a clear want for a better product but that isn't sufficient for them to switch due to natural resistance to change. Hence significant marketing is needed through trusted channels to remove that fear-of-unknown from their minds.
Social listening on HN, Reddit, X... I used https://kwatch.io and jumped into the relevant conversations to mention my product.
How can this listen on sites that are closed? Is it just using shady scraping techniques to bypass the defense or is it using some kind of API?
Target audience? And in what duration you got those 100 users just by conversations?
Hacker News :)
It was this Show HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980
That was before showing something on HN was called "Show HN" though.
I really like the concept of gnod. I started creating notebookLM audios of hacker news posts and realised it would be nice to have a directory of notebookLM audios generally. Will send you an email shortly about this. Would be nice to find someone to collaborate with on this.
Great!
B2B SaaS founder - Direct sales (contacts, LinkedIn, in-person industry events). Client advocates voluntarily promoting the product within the industry.
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.
Strange that it didn't work at that traffic level with zero CAC. Was product expensive to build/run?
For vocabuo.com, a language learning app with around 500 paying users, I've gotten most of my users from reddit and meta ads.
I am considering Reddit ads. What was your ROI from those? Any tips?
Idk other platforms but you can try Rappo https://www.buildrappo.com/… 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.
Sorry, I have shared a broken link. https://www.buildrappo.com/founders/ For founders
LinkedIn is indeed a tough place to have a talk with customers, even though it has great amount of people. This buildrappo sounds like a good option.
Answering the phone at all hours of the day.
How did you find those callers?
Cold messaging on Facebook + word-of-mouth growth. We found people in one large Facebook group.
To get 1,000, we used SEO.
Our product helps people get ready for the Duolingo English Test, so our target audience was well-defined from the beginning.
it has been reddit for the longest time, but now i see a lot of my friends building in public on X and getting momentum and traction.
Is there a common theme in their startups, or is it working for all types?
We are working on engaging the first 100 users. Focus more on organic users, https://powtain.com
You should definitely work on the "what on earth is this" experience for first time users. I have no idea what I'm looking at. If I had to guess, I'd say someone's private Mastodon server.
We will do a formal introduction on HackerNews when we finish the POC.
Nice! Hacker news is a great starting point :)
Twitter. Then Reddit and AI directories.
Target audience?
Content marketing - blog posts with useful content posted around the Internet. Most traffic from HN and Reddit.
Do you do much in terms of SEO on the post pages?
I don’t really know. I don’t write posts to optimize for SEO (include FAQ at the end or something like that) and hope it’s just good content people will share.
There are also SEO pages which do not have any useful content. I think I should have more of them because my competitors have only SEO pages but I don’t have time for it as I have to focus on the product and customer support. Probably a good mix between useful content blog posts (maybe with SEO filling) and strictly SEO pages is best to bring traffic.
I'm looking for help on the same topic, my product is https://ProsGPT.com/
I don't know my icp and I'm prepmf.
How can I find people to try it?
How can I find people that could actually bring end users to my b2b product? I need people with existing distribution
You would need to atleast have a rough idea of your ICP. Starting with blank canvas is too much trial and error, not practical for small startups.
Then you would approach them at their place of hanging out (Reddit, HN, Twitter are most common suggestions in this thread).
And hard to find distributors until you are able to prove PMF to them.
Makes sense! I wanted to chat about what you're working on as well, where can I contact you, do have an email/discord/X account?
Sure. Please DM me on X https://x.com/vivek_jain07
First startup: HN
Second startup: word of mouth
Target customers?
Yes.
I meant who you were targeting?
Hacker news and Reddit when someone encounters a problem my project tries to answer
Target audience? Did you use any tool to find relevant threads?
People who are searching for a place to move to. f5bot
App Store search.
What kind of app?
My CTO Newsletter
Target audience? And what was conversion ratio?
Target audience: CTOs - conversion ratio ~3%
I thought conversion from a newsletter community would be much higher than cold outreach, but that does not seem to be the case.
reddit! consumer healthcare website
Which subs? How did you avoid getting banned?
The trick is you don’t.
Reddit
Target audience?
x (formerly twitter)
Who did you target?
instagram dm
What type of audience?