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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: 0.859s | 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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rwieruch ◴[13 May 25 09:42 UTC] No.43971211[source]▶
Not sure if my "products" compare to yours, but I’ve seen some success with a few of them over the years, maybe there are some takeaways (or pitfalls to avoid) for you:

CloudCamping (PMS): 250+ Businesses, 2023

- Positioned as more modern, more accessible, and more affordable than the competition

- Limited competition due to the complexity of the product

- Personally visited campgrounds to demo the product

- Sent physical postcards (old school!) to campgrounds with product updates and announcements

- Due to limited competition, it is now ranking very high in the German marked on SEO

The Road to React & The Road to Next: 1000+ Users, 2024

- Gave away The Road to React for free in exchange for an email, grew the mailing list this way

- Benefited from early timing (luck!), it was the first book on the topic

- Initial version wasn’t polished, but I kept iterating and improving it each year

- In 2025, released the paid course The Road to Next to my audience, now over 1,000 students enrolled

SoundCloud (DJ/Producing as “Schlenker mit Turnbeutel”)

- Active from 2010–2015 as a hobby, grew to 10,000+ followers (a lot for the time)

- SoundCloud allowed 1,000 direct messages per track

- Carefully selected 1,000 high-engagement listeners in my music niche and personally messaged them to check out new tracks

So yeah, a mix of timing/luck, outreach that does not scale, being better than the competition I'd say.

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1. jasondigitized ◴[13 May 25 17:54 UTC] No.43975745[source]▶
Would love to hear more about the postcards you sent. Did you send these to cold prospects? Did they work? What do they look like?
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2. rwieruch ◴[13 May 25 20:13 UTC] No.43977186[source]▶
Hey Jason, just saw your email and wanted to reply here.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the postcards really worked. We sent them to various regions across Germany, but my guess is they ended up in a pile at the campground reception and never reached the actual owners.

That said, we manually scraped around 500 campgrounds near us, designed postcards that highlighted CloudCamping’s key selling points, and sent them out using a different mailing service. Since we didn’t hear back from anyone specifically mentioning the postcards, I assume they didn’t convince anyone in the end.

Still, it was a fun experiment, and who knows, it might work better in a different context!

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3. fullStackOasis ◴[16 May 25 13:34 UTC] No.44005348[source]▶
I used to run a SaaS, and I also used postcards to try to promote it! Why not use emails? I was sure that emails would get spam-collected, but physical postcards might get some attention.

I don't know if the tactic worked.

These days, if I were mailing postcards, I'd make sure to add a special QR code to them. That way, if someone went to my sales page using the QR code, I'd have an idea that the postcard had been seen by the right person. Postcards are rather expensive (both the postcard and the stamp). Who wants to keep trying that without knowing it was successful?