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

559 points amanchanda | 3 comments | 13 May 25 08:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.763s | 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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piker ◴[13 May 25 10:18 UTC] No.43971390[source]▶
Managed to scale my legal tech B2B product Tritium (https://tritium.legal) through an existing professional network. It's technically B2B but B2C in the sense that it's marketed directly to the end-user, not the enterprise. Probably not yet at a hundred users, but it's heading there. I'm using these initial users to flesh out the frequently asked questions and produce the introduction artifacts to hopefully transition to something more product-led.
replies(1): >>43971821 #
quibono ◴[13 May 25 11:45 UTC] No.43971821[source]▶
I'm not your intended audience but I've had a play with the web preview and I really like it! Is it using WASM for that?
replies(1): >>43971879 #
piker ◴[13 May 25 11:54 UTC] No.43971879[source]▶
Thanks a ton. Yes it's WASM. Check out the desktop build! :) It's free unless you want to use it in your practice.

[NOTE: Windows build phones home for updates; others don't yet.]

replies(1): >>43971952 #
quibono ◴[13 May 25 12:04 UTC] No.43971952[source]▶
Thank you, just downloaded the binary :) As a +1 data point it's performing really well on my machine (although I don't think the dark theme toggle works). Like I said, not the target audience but wishing you good luck with the product! Do you mind sharing the stack you used to build it?
replies(1): >>43972011 #
1. piker ◴[13 May 25 12:11 UTC] No.43972011[source]▶
Not at all. It's Rust using egui for the UI framework with custom text layout and shaping. It uses PDFium for rendering PDFs.
replies(1): >>43974267 #
2. mixmastamyk ◴[13 May 25 15:51 UTC] No.43974267[source]▶
It’s neat but I’m wondering why the immediate mode gui for a word processor?
replies(1): >>43975114 #
3. piker ◴[13 May 25 17:00 UTC] No.43975114[source]▶
It's a great question and primarily for the snappiness, but in the end there isn't much difference since the heavy stuff (shaping, layout, rasterizing, etc.) is cached anyway. It's inspired by Zed which also has an obsessive (disciplining) focus on FPS.

Technically, using immediate mode avoids a ton of callbacks/listeners or something else which allows for hundreds of docs to be held in memory usefully without hogging resources. That's an actual use case for this.