Ask IH: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

For Citationsy I spent around 10 minutes every evening combing through Twitter for people complaining about my competitors products (really easy to do with saved searches in TweetBot). I’d then fav their complaints, or @ reply and tell them about Citationsy. As long as you’re not overly sell-y or sound like a marketer I think that can work.

My experience is more with customers than users, however happy to jump in on this one:

E-commerce jewellery store:

• first 15 customers were friends (before even creating a site)
• customers 15-130 were via a crowdfunding campaign (with site, without spending any money on stock/product)

B2B SaaS application (targeted at SMEs):

• first 15 customers direct sales based on personal trust and a promise (product not yet built)
• customers 15-30 the same but slightly easier as product already in market
• customers 30-100+ direct sales basically following the predictable revenue playbook

I've done some other projects which either failed or were discontinued before reaching 100 paying customers.

My key lessons learned are:

• The founder needs to do the first 15+ sales themselves
• The first sales should be done before the product is live (in most cases)
• The best way to get the first few customers onboard is to do things that don't scale (like driving 1+ hours to visit a potential customers who will pay you $30/year)
• Somewhere between customer #5 and customer #50 your customer acquisition process needs to change to become more scalable and replicable

This list might come in handy Robin :) : https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/a-list-of-places-to-promote-your-startup-at-the-very-beginning-de9ad1417c

Here are a few sources that have worked for me in the past!

• Slack groups
• Reddit groups
• Twitter
• BetaList
• Friends (word of mouth)
• Attend tech events with other IndieHackers
• Product Hunt
• IndieHackers 😉
• Hacker News
• Medium post

For Tettra.co, we did a few things in this order:

• Emailed everyone we knew and asked them to talk with us. I went through all my LinkedIn connections and made a list of people, then did individualized reach outs. Don't mass send these. You want them to show some effort because then people are more likely to respond to you.

• Reddit + Quora: We posted threads on Reddit and answered questions on Quora related to what we were exploring. Here's an example of a thread I posted in the first couple of weeks after starting the company https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/3o4vv8/what_are_you_using_for_wikiinternal_knowledge/

• Network with our local press in Boston and got them to write an article about us https://www.americaninno.com/boston/first-look/wiki-software-for-teams-tettra-slack-app-from-hubspot-alums/

• Got listed in the Slack App Directory very early on. That was HUGE for us. Being early on a platform can give you a big boost of potential customers and a steady stream of prospects in the early days when the competition isn't as tough. I wrote a post about how Building on Slack Saved our Startup here with some extra advice on how not to get crunched by the platform: https://thinkgrowth.org/building-on-slack-saved-our-startup-94953fdaf27a

• Hyper optimized our site around one keyword, "wiki for Slack". This was probably the best thing we did in the early days because it drove a steady stream of sign ups and that term grew over time. Try to go after a keyword with a decent demand (500+ searches a month) and not much competition. Ahrefs is super handy for keyword research like this.

Hope that helps! Happy to answer more questions.

On a related note, the podcast Traction is really good and basically about this very topic. You should check it out: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/traction-how-startups-start-nextview-ventures/id989228163?mt=2

My first product was a php app ran on XAMPP, didn't reached 100 users, reached about 10 or so.
My second product is a wordpress plugin, got my first 100 and first 1000 from wordpress.org directory :D

Do pre-launch subscribers count? If so, from pitching my product idea right here on Indie Hackers 🙌

For www.CryptoDa.sh (Crypto Edu Newsletter) I have done the following:

• IndieHackers post - 0 effect. I pretty much launched here but since obviously no one knows me and I have 0 authority, I got no results.
• ProductHunt - 2 subscribers. Was my first launch and I did it on European time, literally got 2 upvotes and subscriptions, another fail.
• HackerNews - 0 subscribers. Didn't have any expectations.
• FB friends announcement - 50 subscribers. Got lots of support, mostly friends interested in crypto.
• Linkedin network status - 50 subscribers. Probably my biggest channel right now, I have around 5000 connections from my bizdev days, so utilised that the most.
• Twitter - wrote a viral post about podcasts (got retweeted by Naval): https://twitter.com/sokirill/status/948227465222279168
  this got me really excited that its possible to put out good content even on twitter. I used a small trick though with a podcast thread.
• Medium posts - probably the biggest disappointment. Unless you have an audience, medium is pretty useless for content discovery.
• Reddit - 10 subscribers

This got me started well, what helped a lot further down the road is posting an article with a bit controversial name: "how to survive a crypto market crash" on LinkedIn + Reddit with some links to my newsletter.

I am slowly getting to 200 subs these days but all channels are still pretty fuzzy, nevertheless open & click rates are amazing! :)

Don't think my example can help much for enterprise startups, but I just posted a link to my app on Facebook to friends and family, got 200+ users, of course it was much harder to move on after that.

For ChirpyHire (https://www.chirpyhire.com) I got my first 100 users through two channels:

• Speaking and Sponsoring Niche Conferences
• Reseller and Affiliate relationships

Hey Robin! Great question. We acquired our first 100 customers through SEO and word of mouth.

We were early(ish) to the market and there was less competition back then for great keywords. There's a lot more competition now so we are looking at different channels.

What are you working on?