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

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.

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.

  Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.

Maybe too anecdotal, but inflation has hit everyone I know really hard in the last year. Especially in tech.

Subscriptions, insurance, bills have skyrocketed. I believe many are taking a step back and rethinking necessities.

Awesome! Followed you on X. Can you elaborate more on what you mean by "viral social loops"?

    > 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.

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.

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.

> 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?

    > 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.

This might be the reminder bot

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?

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

A.k.a. the marketplace (the literal one) 50 years ago!

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.

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.

Older, almost certainly. The discovery of advertising murals and graffiti in Hereculum makes me smile a little. Humans have been humans all along.

You read the spam in my inbox today?

You got the initial product invite from the GP?

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 :)

Yes, I generally build new products around my current audience.

It's good to see these success stories, but is also important to account for survivor bias before blindly following their rule book.