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Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

559 points amanchanda | 2 comments | 13 May 25 08:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.406s | source

I am building a B2C AI SaaS with $50/month price. How would you go about getting with first 100 users and then the next 500 users.

What we are currently doing: 1) Cold outreach to power users - to convert them into affiliates. 2) Cold outreach to individuals who have target ICP communities. 3) SEO for more long term (not for the first 500)

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reverseblade2 ◴[13 May 25 11:51 UTC] No.43971861[source]▶
I have built this 3d bin packer. https://3dpack.ing Despite my best attempts didn’t take off:(
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1. PostOnce ◴[13 May 25 12:07 UTC] No.43971979[source]▶
What did you try? It might be worth talking about here to try to gain some insight.

B2B products, unless miraculous, do not generally "take off" without a lot of hard work, meetings, trade shows, client demos, etc, at least so far as I have seen.

To make any sales at all, it seems like you'd have to already know a lot of people in the industry, and it would have to outcompete not only other products, but just the old "we'll load all the shit we can into the truck/container based on human intuition".

In fact, ideally, you'd ask someone you know (or even better, they'll ask you) if this is a problem you can solve for them. If you can't sell it to people you already know, it'll be even harder to sell to people you don't, presumably.

Plus it will be very hard to articulate to an AI "you can't sit that on top of that!", but it's obvious when looking at it.

I'm in the midst of wading into B2B, alone, and low on capital, myself. My "success" so far is mostly due to dumb luck and being available to talk to.

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2. reverseblade2 ◴[14 May 25 05:57 UTC] No.43981277[source]▶
I had face to face meetings with some clients. Well to be fair 3d packing is also relatively competed area there are few popular products. Is my product better than them for some aspects yes. Hard to say what is wrong but perhaps me or the product isn’t seriously taken, yet it does add real value by solving a real problem by some means better than others.