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

274 points jainvivek | 2 comments | 16 Oct 24 18:43 UTC | HN request time: 1.008s | source

Please also share target audience to correlate better.
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jbredeche ◴[16 Oct 24 19:21 UTC] No.41862805[source]▶
Targeted Google ads (for the type of product we were building) pointing to a landing page where we collected email addresses.
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ezekg ◴[16 Oct 24 19:32 UTC] No.41862923[source]▶
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.

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turtlegoal ◴[18 Oct 24 00:35 UTC] No.41875264[source]▶
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?

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1. bag_boy ◴[19 Oct 24 00:52 UTC] No.41884770[source]▶
If you’re getting qualified traffic and can’t convert, you could try a freemium model.
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2. jainvivek ◴[19 Oct 24 08:09 UTC] No.41886411[source]▶
+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.