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

559 points amanchanda | 9 comments | 13 May 25 08:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.431s | source | bottom

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)

1. miros_love ◴[13 May 25 14:53 UTC] No.43973639[source]▶
My wife cold-called about 60% of all businesses in our niche within our city. Meanwhile, I literally walked into CEOs' offices, asked politely for meetings, and pitched face-to-face. Conversion was around 1%, but that gave us our first collision with reality—and our first paying customers. Also half of my clients came from Google search ads. But it was absolutely terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were people trying to talk to chatGPT
replies(1): >>43973830 #
2. jnovek ◴[13 May 25 15:12 UTC] No.43973830[source]▶
> But it was absolutely terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were people trying to talk to chatGPT

I don't totally follow, probably because I don't tend to run ad campaigns and I'm not up with whatever shenanigans advertisers are doing these days. What do you mean when you say that they were "trying to talk to chatGPT"?

replies(3): >>43973963 #>>43974198 #>>43974210 #
3. TZubiri ◴[13 May 25 15:24 UTC] No.43973963[source]▶
Super curious about this one, I'm about to get into a google search campaign so wondering what to avoid.
4. Zenbit_UX ◴[13 May 25 15:43 UTC] No.43974198[source]▶
My guess is that the GP put a AI chat bot on their site, and people started asking it for things completely unrelated to his business as a way to get free access to chatgpt without an account.

It’s actually quite fun, whenever you see an ai chat bot asking you if you have any questions ask it for its favorite cupcake recipe. If it answers its a poorly configured LLM.

replies(1): >>43974947 #
5. miros_love ◴[13 May 25 15:45 UTC] No.43974210[source]▶
Indeed, it was written in a rather unclear way. I have AI in the name of my company and I left a form on the site to fill out.

My site, due to a cold start, began to appear in the search results for people from different countries who misspelled "ChatGPT for free" and stuff like that. They went to the site, saw my form, filled out the required fields and wrote "Make me an essay on the topic...". No stop words can cover such behavior.

Importantly, all real clients did not use this form, but immediately went through convenient communication channels.

replies(1): >>43974593 #
6. talldatethrow ◴[13 May 25 16:19 UTC] No.43974593{3}[source]▶
What do you mean by "cold start"? I can't figure it out, but are you saying because your site was very new google gave it more weight for those search terms and that's why you were ranking well on that competitive search terms?
replies(1): >>43974653 #
7. miros_love ◴[13 May 25 16:25 UTC] No.43974653{4}[source]▶
Quite the opposite. A new site that Google is afraid to show for any normal queries. There is too much competition there. But there is a lot of space in the unique garbage results.
replies(1): >>43976929 #
8. grepfru_it ◴[13 May 25 16:48 UTC] No.43974947{3}[source]▶
Mate that was a big jump to a conclusion..
9. talldatethrow ◴[13 May 25 19:50 UTC] No.43976929{5}[source]▶
That's what I would think. But then I don't really understand what the OP was saying.