17
28 Comments

How did you get your first 1000 Users?

First 0-100
100-500
500-1000

Would love to hear your stories :)

  1. 4

    From analysing hundred of projects it seems to be...

    1. Engaging in specfic Communities like Indie Hackers

    2. Enage in social communities: Reddit, FB Groups, Slack, Discord

    3. Twitter growth

    4. Marketplaces like AppSumo that can get your product in front of a lot of people

    1. 1

      Thanks :)Reddit can be though
      so far i've leveraged twitter only

  2. 3

    It wasn’t easy but my app ClusterStack finally reached 1.1k users. It’s was an effort to discover how to advertise it but a takeaway from what I’ve discovered:

    • Facebook groups is a good place to advertise it. Find groups that where your niche is concentrated and you’ll have more people down to use it.
    • Reddit is good too, I’ve posted about my app on r/reactnative and got a lot of support and downloads. But , again, if it’s not your niche , those users won’t go back.
    • Twitter and Instagram are good too if you use proper hashtags.
    • Facebook ads didn’t worked properly for me. I believe I need to spend more time studying it to make it work
    • Google cpc works really nice , but more expensive , I’ll use it more once I’ve more budget for that.
    1. 2

      Not tried buying ads yet.

      Thanks for sharing :)

  3. 3

    i'm sure more great answers will keep coming in from others, but meanwhile, you can check out this roundtable post i did with successful founders on how they found their first users.

    1. 2

      Thanks for sharing, How did IH get its first 1000 Users?

      1. 2

        we published founder interviews and distributed them to hacker news. back in those early days it seems like 1 in 5 interview articles would make it to HN's front page. we'd then capture much of that website traffic in our newsletter. by month two, we'd hit 1,000 subs.

        the next month, courtland built this forum. it would be many months of grinding before we'd hit 1,000 registered user accounts on the site. by "grinding" i mean things like:

        • we both created a few fake user accounts to create the illusion of a busy early forum
        • we continued to write and publish interviews and newsletters
        • courtland launched a podcast
        • etc.
        1. 2

          This is so insightful, So you built an email list first before the main forum.
          Nowadays it seems like only programming news make it to the front page of HN.

          So IH didn't experience any "viral growth" i mean a spike in users or was it a slow 5 users, 20 users, 3 users, 1 user, 60 users, 0 users , 100 users per day?

  4. 2

    I happened to create a post to the r/webdev subreddit and within a day over 1000 people signed up. Proof

    1. 1

      Makes you a marketing legend, What was the post like

  5. 2

    We released the free version of our first product Shade, (a collection of free & premium HTML landing page templates) on ProductHunt, and we were immediately on the top 3 on that day and ended up with #2 PRODUCT OF THE DAY. This actually gave us first 300+ users within first 10-12 days.

    After that we got some quick backlinks from other websites and twitter and those links brought us 1000+ users within 40-45 days.

    1. 1

      When launching on PH did you have a previous following or got a Hunter?

      Was the retention of the pH users good?

      1. 2

        I had some subscribers on my list who initially helped to push this on the top. I also shared this on some Facebook groups after submitting on PH. That also helped.

        1. 1

          Oh, Never found success with PH will try again at some point

    1. 1

      Huge Noah kogan fan on YT

      Its a saas?

      1. 2

        Better Sheets? no. it's a course, a community, products...
        BetterSheets.co👀

        1. 1

          Seen it.

          Thought appsumo was for only paid saas

            1. 1

              Oh ok

              So appsumo got you your first 1000 Users?

              1. 2

                yes.

                first 7 users: Posting on Indiehackers, &own socials
                From 7 to 2,250: AppSumo Marketplace

                1. 1

                  Thanks for sharing :)
                  Really appreciate :)

  6. 1

    People wanted to export to mobile in a competing product, but it didn't support it. So I made a blog post on how to export to mobile in this competing product. Which it couldn't of course, and then guided them to mine :).

    Google picked this up and so all people searching for that ended up on my blog.

    I knew users wanted this because of the many questions on forums and reddit.

    1. 1

      So content marketing worked for you

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 16 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments