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

274 points jainvivek | 1 comments | 16 Oct 24 18:43 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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cageface ◴[19 Oct 24 02:18 UTC] No.41885147[source]▶
Product Hunt generated exactly zero sales for me. I won't bother next time.
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1. jainvivek ◴[19 Oct 24 08:02 UTC] No.41886388[source]▶
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.