How do you get your first 500 users without Product Hunt?

I think too that you should wait before using the "PH magic card".

At least wait to have some traction to maximize conversion

I launched https://StumbleMe.com in public from 1st March to today.

I got 558 visitors.

What I tried is -

1. Submit it to the small dictionary.
2. Try IH to post minor updates about your product.
3. Keep an eye on when people create Twitter threads about sharing your product.
4. Have a social network presence. Even 100 followers add a link to your bio.
5. Create small resources to help your target audience and add your main product link on the top or create this resource on your product domain.
6. Try HN and Subreddits, tooo. Don't wait for perfect timing and high karma.

When I wait for the perfect time, I never get any visitors for my projects and take exits.

Hi!
I agree. It's still worth gaining an audience before launching.
We made channels on Telegram and started Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. We made different kinds of content. We used the purchase of advertising and the standard ways of free promotion.

We can't forget about Reddit communities, our IH favorite. We regularly wrote on Hacker News. I also saw some excellent stuff here on recruiting users through different channels. Check out the Marketing group.

I was doing exactly what you are planning: building an audience first before launching on PH.

Where to do this depends on your target audience. If you can find them on Reddit or Twitter, those are good places to start!

Reddit works great even if you don't have a following yet. That's where I got my first 1000 subscribers. On Twitter, you gotta build an audience first before you can actually generate traffic.

If I could go back in time, I'd start on Reddit again but at the same time focus on building an account on the other platforms aswell. Depending on your customers, that could be Twitter, Insta, FB, TikTok, etc.

Hey there! We used Twitter for about 90% of our startup.
Some things we have learned that might help!

-Find your target audience and tweet content that resonates with them.

-Giveaways that require users to follow you AND retweet are the best ways to grow.

-We had success with posting positive posts like "Take a mental day for yourself" or "Don't focus on numbers, as long as you are happy, that's all that matters, etc" Basically, don't just self promote, let your followers see that you care about them and their feedback isn't going to a robot...

-Schedule tweets a few hours apart and tweet at least 4 times per day. Don't want to be spammy, but you do want to play to the algorithm.

Those are a few things we learned. Hope they help!

We are in the same position - trying for our first 500 users. This is what we're doing:

1. Ask all our friends to use the product - we've exhausted that approach now 😂
2. Setup sessions on Meetup that are educational but where we do a bit of promotion as well.
3. Google Ads - but this gets expensive and we switched it off for now.
4. Blog Posts on topics related to our product to drive organic traffic.

Our Blog posts are our main focus at the moment. They take a lot of work especially at first but we're getting better at it 🙂

How did you arrive at the figure of 500 users?

Depends on the market! B2B or B2C?

The most reliable way to get your first customers is by doing direct sales. This also allows you to talk to the (potential) customers directly. Also following the advice of Paul Graham's essay "Do things that don't scale".

Simultaneously you can start making content for your target audience which in time will be a good SEO investment.

Once you've got some users, assuming you have a paid service, you can experiment with re-investing that revenue into ads, sponsoring newsletters, etc.

Actually that's my question too.

I don't want to launch on ProductHunt for now and I'm curious how to do that, I mean in a practical way.

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