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

Personal network to get the first 20 - literally going to meet people and helping them set up over coffee, then marketing for the rest. The audience were SaaS founders mostly, since it's a marketing tool for SaaS SMEs.

What's important is after you get the first N customers, the way you acquire customers will likely change. You'll exhaust your personal network eventually. Knowing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is important and so is having a good understanding that the value/price of your product dictates what kind of sales/marketing you can do.

Things like cold emailing are fine for your first few customer development calls, but generally if your deal size is less than $1-2,000/year then (with exceptions) you should stop doing this after you get the first customers.

I run a low price point SaaS for SMEs (avg price is <$100/month), so this required switching from just messaging people I knew, to getting SEO, word of mouth, and the viral loop working. Outbound/inbound sales is not economical at that price point.

can you explain why i would want to stop cold emailing after the first customers? i know little about this, but i would think the opposite for low revenue per customer, because it's a lower customer acquisition cost? they don't make you enough to spend a lot so low cost efforts like cold email seem like a decent strategy?

I also think along the similar lines. Plus meeting prospects physically isn't always possible, especially when you are selling outside own country. So well-targeted emails seem good strategy to generate inbound interest. Less intrusive than calls or texts.

Cold email by definition is not inbound interest.

You can still do cold email don’t get me wrong. But generally for a low ARPA service (<$2k) you want the product to be simple, self-serve, and for customer acquisition to be mostly inbound (ergo from marketing efforts, not outbound emails). Low price points require low CAC, and outbound sales is generally not.

From Apollo, which sells an outbound sales tool: “As a benchmark, try to achieve at least a 20%-30% win rate by closing 2-5 deals per month per rep”. If you have a full time sales rep chasing 5 $100/year deals per month they will close $6k/year. At $1k ARPA they might close $60k/year - after paying salaries you’re not making a profit.

Obviously this doesn’t apply in the early stages, but after you have N customers. Chasing outbound sales for a low price point product is just a recipe for low/slow growth.

that makes sense. thanks for explaining!

You are right. I used "inbound" wrongly.

Thanks for detailed explanation. Do you have some ideas on how to determine N?

Depends why you are doing outbound for a low ARPA product.

What problem is cold email solving, and will it eventually solve it? If the product is good enough for the initial customers, I’d switch to marketing and inbound sales.

One reason to stick with cold email is if the product is not good enough yet, so you need to chase people to talk to you and get them to help you improve it

That's helpful. Appreciate it.