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

[amanchanda]

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)

[rwieruch]

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.

[nielsole]

I like the simplicity of pricing on CloudCamping.

* It includes price differentiation. Grounds that want to save the last penny can do so by handling payments themselves. I guess camping grounds are very price sensitive.

* It grows with size of the value provided

* Grounds can start using the tool without paying anything. Thus low barrier of entry

* It seems unlikely anyone can win over existing customers based on undercutting your price.

* 1% of revenue of a business sector can make up a nice indie business.

[rwieruch]

If anyone wants to check out these things:

- CloudCamping (still only German market for now) https://www.cloud-camping.com/

- The Road to Next (fully launched last month) https://www.road-to-next.com/

- Music https://soundcloud.com/schlenkermitturnbeutel

Feel free to AMA.

[robertlagrant]

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

Pardon my ignorance - does SoundCloud let you monetise, or is it purely it being cool that people are listening to your tracks?

[nicbou]

I had a good chuckle at postcard marketing working well in Germany. Of course it does.

[jasondigitized]

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?

[diordiderot]

CloudCamping's UI is beautiful.

Did you use a UI framework or css library?

How do you handle payments while only taking 1%? Stipe charges at least 1.5%.

[vanschelven]

Grown way past 100 users with:

• Make a great product. Everyone tells you "build it and they will come" is not working anymore, but it's working _for me_.

• Outreach via your network. Talk to people with the intent of learning, not selling.

• I'm personally on a freemium model. But that's in the developer-to-developer market, which is vastly different from your B2C

EDIT:

https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may give an idea of what we're doing.

[meander_water]

Cool product! How much time would you say you spend on support per week? I've always heard that it's harder to scale when you're reliant on income via support.

[90s_dev]

I've been struggling with choosing a model to make enough to keep the lights on with my upcoming project. Has freemium actually gotten enough paid users for you?

[amanchanda]

Make a great product. -- > this is an iterative process as per me. Unless users come and try it out, you won't know what a great product looks like.

The need is real, and the problem is real. I am one of the users myself. I built it because I felt the need myself. I ran the MVP with 15 others in my network with similar profiles. Quesiton is how to scale beyond that.

[coolcase]

It is as if there is no formula for startup success and you have to experiment. Like if there was a formula everyone would follow it and it would become the only way. A bit like chat up lines- these 10 words and you always get a date. Like there is no counterforces like competition and attention against a cookie recipe for startups.

[herbst]

Same here. When I create a product I try to build something that makes a good impression and if done well everything kinda goes from there.

My first SaaS was basically traffic kick-started from a single comment on the digital ocean blog, that described a complicated solution to the problem I 'solved'. No freemium either.

[calmoo]

Cool concept but AI slop photos are really offputting, this would steer me away from your product (as a naive first viewer).

[sebstefan]

> https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may give an idea of what we're doing.

It's immediately obvious to me that the illustrations are AI slop

You should invest 20 bucks into getting some pictures of a guy in a datacenter, or 200 to pay some dude on Fiverr to draw you some sinks, instead of having these be the first thing customers see when checking out your product

[netrap]

nice website..

[Soupy]

I also run a small B2C company (https://pastmaps.com). Here's what worked for me:

First 1000 users: daily manually done reddit posts. Very time-consuming and annoying, but it gets the job done. Just make sure the content drives users back to the site and is actually relevant, interesting, and valuable

Next 100K users: programmatic long-tail SEO. obviously this is unique to my own product, but I realized that people were organically already searching for the data contained within the maps I host. By focusing on organizing that data and making it understandable to Google, I started a traffic flywheel that's paid off massively.

I'm now exploring programmatic social media marketing as the next lever for the next 1M users as it directly drives even further benefits on the SEO side

One last thought - whatever growth channel you pick should really align with the product you are building. Some products are a great fit for SEO, others not. Some are awesome for Tiktok/Reels, others not. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution.

Good luck!

[blairanderson]

> daily manually done reddit posts

Can you link to an example?

[Aniket-N]

Which communities did you post in? I got banned when I wasn’t even blatantly promoting. I answered questions and said I built something for this.

[miros_love]

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

[nicooo]

I’ve had success twice using targeted social media outreach — specifically by joining relevant subreddit discussions and commenting on YouTube videos where my target audience was already active.

Instead of simply promoting your service right away (it often feels spammy), I recommend genuinely engaging in conversations until the right opportunity comes up.

I ended up turning that process into its own product: https://sparkflow.ai/

[arewethereyeta]

This seems like that sort of marketing where the OP creates a question for himself to answer from another account.

[pbronez]

Heh how meta.

Makes sense though. I’ve been thinking of creating a very similar tool; delighted that it might already exist!

[_QrE]

> I ended up turning that process into its own product: https://sparkflow.ai/

That implies that the product is ready, which it does not seem to be? The product does seem interesting, what do you do to differentiate yourself from different offerings that do basically the same? E.g. you mention Discord on the website - are you finding all the relevant discord channels for me, or do I have to join them myself, and you just monitor my account?

[conductr]

This is inception level promotion, I’m not even mad at ya lol

[0xsnowcrash]

Do you have numbers?

i.e. what the "success" was like in each of the outreaches?

[pj_mukh]

Interesting product! One problem: I want to get a handle on the quality of online conversations you flag. Do you know that on the free tier, the top 5 you flag are the best of your filter?

[johncole]

I went to sign up and got sent to a typeform telling me thanks for my email address. Did I fall for the hustle?

[econ]

Now we need a corporate chat bot that talks about pain points on social media.

[joeguilmette]

I signed up for the waitlist, please approve me

[helro]

I got 20k+ downloads for my app by posting on Reddit. It's an app/website blocker for iPhone & Mac, so I focused on relevant communities like r/digitalminimalism and r/dumbphones with genuine, non-spammy posts: https://www.atten.app

I also tried "apps gone free" campaigns by posting on Reddit and using sites like AppRaven. These were very effective for visibility, the launch is currently the #5 all-time post on r/macapps (https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/top/?t=all). While these campaigns drove a strong spike in downloads, retention was low, so they weren’t as useful for building a long-term user base.

[jakevoytko]

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/

[mountainriver]

What is happening with the Reddit programming subs? They are totally insane

[guywithahat]

The thing about twitter is once you do pay for a checkmark, you get a ton of traction and boost. And there is a certain amount of logic to it; if you're willing to pay $8 how badly do you really want to grow your reach.

It is frustrating though, because it makes it slightly harder to find communities of people who just want to have fun but it's better for people trying to grow a service.

[cosbgn]

I run a small but fairly successful "embed chatGPT on your site" widget https://rispose.com

I'm acquiring customers by:

- Offer a 100% free unlimited solution (with branding) I get a lot of daily clicks from people coming from my customer's website

- Offer a really good price. My competitors are about 5X more expensive. I'll eventually maybe raise my price, but for now I have a lot of people switching to my tool

- Affiliates. This is something new I'm still testing.

In summary a good free product which links back to you get's you millions of requests per month!

[abhisek]

Not sure if it’s relevant because you specifically mentioned about B2C.

For cyber security product, we took the open source route. We build our core technology in public as open source project.

https://github.com/safedep/vet

The commercial SaaS is for scaling and management. Our entire funnel is based on OSS. Folks who have already found value and is looking to scale their deployment.

This model works for us especially at our current stage where we are 100% engineering led.

[meander_water]

Kudos, this looks like a great product. I'm going to try it out today. Is there a reason why you only consume OSV and not CVE data?

[psviderski]

What's your approach with getting users for your OSS product?

[abdullin]

I have a course on building AI solutions in business (based on success stories from companies in Europe/USA). Sold ~400 seats so far, mostly through my community and word of mouth. No external ads or cold outreach.

The process was classical. Over two years I created a community to sharing cases and insights from building LLM-driven systems. We focused on creating good non-toxic and collaborative atmosphere. No ads or SEO to grow it, standing out by sharing real-world cases and helping others.

Thanks to the community, got 100 customers within the beta-testing period. Then 300 more came over the last 4 months, after opening the sales.

[mtremsal]

> We have a free version. For now, we have kept it invite-only. Question is TOFU.

Comment from `amanchanda`, i.e. the OP.

Nice hustle writing an Ask HN post to then plug your own product, but you have to make sure to respond to questions with your _other_ account `nicooo`. ;)

[phlsa]

When I built my little side project (B2C iPhone app, not a SaaS [1]), I documented the development process on LinkedIn with short "developer diary" videos. That has led to a good amount of engagement at launch, which briefly lifted the app into the top-paid section on the App Store for a short time. That was enough to reach the first 100 users within a few days.

Since it's a side project, I haven't worked on the app in a while, but recently picked up development again. So if you have any ideas or suggestions, they are very welcome.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/app/dorepeat-checklists-todos/id15615...

[jrvarela56]

First 100 users, meet them one by one wherever you can (forums, friends, ex-coworkers) and call them to talk to them and help them out with onboarding if needed. Straight up cold outreach and warm intros. Next 500 will most likely come from referrals if these first 100 users are happy.

Apply this logic to the jump from 20 to 100 if it makes the task less daunting for you.

[magneticmonkey]

We relied heavily on network effects early on starting with our friend group and encouraging word-of-mouth growth. We built a multiplatform app called dateit(https://dateit.com/), which is kind of like Facebook Events but with a better user experience.

Obviously, our product is very different from yours, but one thing that worked well for us was focusing on building momentum within small communities first rather than trying to appeal to everyone immediately. Tight-knit groups tend to generate stronger early engagement, which can give you the traction (and feedback) you need to grow.

Another thing we learned: making it dead simple for users to share made a big difference. Even small friction points kill word-of-mouth, so optimizing for effortless sharing really amplified our reach. In your case remove as much friction as possible whatever that is.

[mvkel]

Interview 20 people who -could- be customers, but not pitch them.

Get their honest take on what sucks about their current solution/process. Ask for their expertise.

Build the thing that emerges from the 20 interviews. Not the thing they ask for, but the thing they truly need.

Craft a solid pitch from the common themes of the 20 interviews, focused on being a painkiller, not a vitamin.

Go to the place where you found those initial 20, except this time, talk about the thing you made. Not in a salesy way.

If people 1. Aren't interested; 2. Aren't converting to customers, then the thing that was built didn't properly address the pain

[piker]

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.

[awaseem]

I posted on HN about Foqos: https://www.foqos.app/ and got a few hundred downloads that same day which is awesome. I still continue to reach out to creators in Youtube and tiktok who have reviewed similar products to see if they would give any feedback. Usually since they have a larger online presence than I do, I noticed the publicly started recommending the app to others on Reddit, Threads, etc...

I've been also posting on threads after each update. I have over a 1000 downloads now, I don't have tracking but getting a consistent download rate of about 30 a day

Zero marketing and its been a ton of fun so far. Hope that helps!

[jmstfv]

2 things worked well for NotionBackups:

* SEO - I started way before I launched the product. I wrote an article on how to back up a Notion workspace using their (then newly-launched) API. It still brings in traffic to this day. Granted, there was almost no competition when I started

* r/Notion subreddit - only in relevant threads when someone is looking for a solution. After some time, some of my customers began recommending this tool to others

[dudeinjapan]

At TableCheck (Japan's answer to Resy, Tock, Sevenrooms, etc.) our first 100 customers were definitely the hardest. It took us nearly two years, and many times I came close to giving up. Even though we had built a solid MVP, in Japan's risk-averse culture, no restaurant wanted to be the first to use our product. The question was always "Who else is using it?"--basically a deadlock.

After a lot of cold-calling, we found a 120-year old sukiyaki and shabu-shabu restaurant chain. They told us they always survived by adopting the latest technology, and were willing to try our product. Most of their staff were elderly women in kimonos, many of whom had not touched an iPad before. We were worried they would struggle, but after a few training sessions they got the hang of it--soon they were greeting and seating customers with no problem.

12 years on, we are at 13,000 restaurants on our platform and adding a few hundred more each month!

[mpeg]

B2C is hard...

Long term, only paid ads and SEO will work (and SEO can be fickle)

Short term, run some paid experiments (knowing you will probably not get positive return yet) and maybe some influencer marketing (they'll cost money, but not as much as paid ads depending on the niche)