←back to thread

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

560 points amanchanda | 3 comments | 13 May 25 08:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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)

Show context
jakevoytko ◴[13 May 25 14:46 UTC] No.43973566[source]▶
For my newsletter[0], I just reached 231 subscribers in 5 months. Getting to this point has involved posting to as many channels as possible (without wearing out my welcome in any of them)

My first 40 subscribers came from direct friends and my LinkedIn network.

I got about 150 subscribers from a single popular post on Hacker News, posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43461618

The remainder have come from regular posting on BlueSky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Substack notes, and starting to get search traffic from Google.

I've gotten no traction from Reddit (wow, the programming subreddits are so much angrier than every other subreddit where I contribute!) Twitter (seems like it's pay to play, which I won't do) or IndieHackers (I post milestones just for fun, but it hasn't amounted to anything).

I've found that I need to post twice a week to grow. I had a period where I was sick and was putting less effort into posts, and another period where I was dealing with a mortgage and had to post only once a week, and my subscriber growth treaded water instead of gradually growing. Even casual visitors to the site can tell the difference between moderate and minor effort.

[0] https://www.clientserver.dev/

replies(2): >>43974716 #>>43989317 #
1. mountainriver ◴[13 May 25 16:30 UTC] No.43974716[source]▶
What is happening with the Reddit programming subs? They are totally insane
replies(2): >>43975308 #>>43976830 #
2. jakevoytko ◴[13 May 25 17:16 UTC] No.43975308[source]▶
It's kinda always been this way (I just turned to dust thinking about this, but I've been posting to it for like 18 years), but it's worse now.

r/programming is the only subreddit I regularly visit where there are a bunch of posts with 0 upvotes in the top 30. There are 16 right now on the Hot view.

3. antisthenes ◴[13 May 25 19:41 UTC] No.43976830[source]▶
Reddit is a self-perpetuating AI-engagement machine.

Seems like 90% of the content there is now either reposts from Reddits first decade (2008-2018), engagement rage-bait, or really low-effort posts from newly registered users (who might be real, but they are normies so they ask really mundane boring questions that could be googled in seconds).

I truly believe it now exists only to serve as training data for the highest bidder to pay out the initial investors, everything else be damned.

I wouldn't use it for anything important.