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

274 points jainvivek | 3 comments | 16 Oct 24 18:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.819s | source

Please also share target audience to correlate better.
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buf ◴[19 Oct 24 04:56 UTC] No.41885732[source]▶
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.

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1. areoform ◴[19 Oct 24 08:16 UTC] No.41886439[source]▶

    > 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.

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2. buf ◴[19 Oct 24 08:29 UTC] No.41886490[source]▶
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.

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3. areoform ◴[19 Oct 24 09:04 UTC] No.41886618[source]▶

    > 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.