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

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.

Where did you get the email addresses from?

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.

Mainly apollo. We do some high level searches based on market factors and then purchase some emails from them.

How do you majorly engage them?

What were the other tools you used in your pipeline? And what kind of email sequence did you use? Would be awesome to know

>Cold out reach via email.

In other words SPAM.

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!

Any email sequencing tools that are free? I looked at clay, instantly and others but damn they are super expensive for early stage startups.

Check out Mautic. You can self host and connect to AWS SES for a very low cost solution.

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.

...yes?

Clay is expensive for sure. To clarify, it’s more of a data enrichment tool than a sequencing tool.