Ask HN: Founders, what was the major sourcing channel for your first 100 users?

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.

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.

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 you’re getting qualified traffic and can’t convert, you could try a freemium model.

Product Hunt generated exactly zero sales for me. I won't bother next time.

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.

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.

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.

+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.

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

what are some good resources to learn about how to do this?

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.

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.