Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
145 comments
·May 13, 2025pc86
I run a marketplace buy-sell type SaaS app that is pretty niched down.
Cold outreach is key. We have a handful of competitors so really focused on "building a better mouse trap" then just reach out directly to sellers on competing platforms. Especially for the first couple dozen it's a hard sell, we had to basically give it away for free. Once there's an actual audience though it's easier to tell someone about it and just send them to the normal sign up flow with a discount code.
You can't get away from cold outreach though, especially at the beginning. I'm not sure you'd want to even if you could? The feedback for us has been invaluable.
pier25
I'm scratching my itch and I'm part of multiple communities with people in this industry/domain (audio, music production, etc).
I started promoting it in a forum I've been part of for years and from there it's growing organically. I'm close to reaching the first 100 users with no ads and only the marketing website:
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/
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?
econ
Now we need a corporate chat bot that talks about pain points on social media.
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?
0xsnowcrash
Do you have numbers?
i.e. what the "success" was like in each of the outreaches?
pbronez
Heh how meta.
Makes sense though. I’ve been thinking of creating a very similar tool; delighted that it might already exist!
conductr
This is inception level promotion, I’m not even mad at ya lol
gardnr
Is this comment part of the grift?
pc86
I don't think it's a grift in the negative sense but this is absolutely a marketing comment. They're doing exactly what they say to do in the comment. They're on HN where at least some of their target market is. They have a product that is relevant (right down to the headline/CTA). They didn't just post the link but put it at the end of an informational comment.
10/10 meta-promotion IMO
morkalork
Maybe, maybe amanchanda is too.
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
Thanks for your feedback and for validating the pricing model! We see it the same way.
Most property management systems charge campground owners several thousand dollars upfront, before they can even try the software. That’s where our approach stands out: we offer a low barrier to entry paired with a modern user experience. Many competitors started over 15 years ago, and you can tell by how outdated their products feel.
Taking just a 1% cut can pay off if it helps capture more market share, this was my thinking too. We’re not quite there yet, as not all of the 250 campgrounds on our platform have adopted online payments. Still, it’s both exciting and a bit terrifying to see some of them already processing over $250,000 in annual bookings through our system.
I’ve had a few sleepless nights, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend building a marketplace product to everyone. Once real money flows through your platform at that scale, things get intense fast.
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.
silvester23
Was there any particular reason you stopped making music?
I'm listening to one of your mixes right now and I'm wondering if you were influenced by Klangkarussell at all (or maybe the other way around?) or if that was just the general 2014 vibe.
rwieruch
I’d say it was mostly the general 2014 vibe. But yes, I listened to Klangkarussell and many other German producers. I was probably most influenced by Alle Farben, who was known for his mixtapes before he started producing his own tracks (which I wasn’t really a fan of). But I also showcased a darker side in some of my mixtapes (like "Der schwerste Gang einer Ente" where I used artists like Burial).
I saw myself more as a consumer than a producer. I mainly created mixtapes because I was constantly discovering and consuming new music. When I had the chance to play at a club or an open-air event (I tried it once), I quickly realized I wasn’t too comfortable performing in front of an audience :)
Around that time, I had just started learning to code and built my first little automations to help me discover even more music on SoundCloud. So I noticed this was another (more lucrative with the similar level of passion) career path where I didn't had to be in front of an audience.
thenthenthen
Thanks for the flashback! My first coding assignment in highschool was to build a camping management tool in Visual Basic. This is what got my into coding.
rwieruch
Good for you that it was just a coding assignment! I naively jumped into building this SaaS without realizing how many features a modern property management system actually needs :)
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?
rwieruch
Not ignorant at all.
I'm not sure if they’ve added any monetization features over the years. Back then, it was arguably the best platform for getting discovered as a producer or DJ. When I stopped making music, I was getting a lot of requests to play at clubs across Germany and Europe.
At the time, I preferred to stay anonymous, so I never made the leap into the professional or public scene. Still, I was in touch with some producers early in their careers on SoundCloud when they had 1000 followers, like Robin Schulz and Felix Jaehn, if those names ring a bell.
So yes, I’d say it was (is?) definitely a launchpad for artists. But as far as I know, there was never a real way to monetize on the platform.
Unfortunately, when I stopped paying for the Pro version, they removed almost all of my music. Only 5 mixes are still up :')
Applejinx
Might be fortunate instead: they're setting up to be able to train AI on specifically you and then, if needed, make music AS you undercutting you. Such is the way of things these days.
I dropped Soundcloud paid version too, and migrated to just YouTube. Currently YouTube is trying very hard to learn to reply to my fans AS me, but through pushing buttons to immediately supply AI-generated responses. I'm sure anyone else with a substantial YouTube presence has seen this too.
So far, they are not self-pressing the button and taking over replying to my fans for me, against my will. So far. They'd also be looking at some challenges in AIing my content as it's weekly open source software development serving a specialized audience, though they would have a considerably easier time AIing my thumbnails, as those are a very predictable pattern and reproducible.
Regarding OP, and in the light of what I've said, maybe ask yourself in what way you can disambiguate yourself from any random AI-powered startup in targeting what for the other startup will be an arbitrary or shotgun selection of customer targets. Is there an audience you can work specifically for, and is there a way you can signal to that audience that you're particularly aware of them and interested in working for them?
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.
vanschelven
As it stands I'm on the other side of the scalability issues wrt support-based growth: although I do have paying customers, I'd rather have more
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.
vanschelven
Is there any word of mouth ("virality") among your existing user-base?
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.
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
stevoski
I'd wager that paying customers really don't care whether the images look AI-generated or not.
They care much more about whether this product solves a problem they have.
This is based on my 17 years of running first a successful B2C product then a successful B2B SaaS.
Minor changes to one's home page tend to have little observable change in numbers of trial signups, the rate of conversion to paid customer, and so on.
conductr
I also think those images are not super aesthetically pleasing but I also don’t care about the sink metaphor they’re using so I instantly ignore them and just focus on the text
theshrike79
Still a tiny bit better than the "massive limbs bendy people" corporate style.
sebstefan
It's called Corporate Memphis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis)
Might be soulless and ugly too, but at least it doesn't make your customer think "Hold on is this a scam?"
bwb
wow I didn't see it that way at all, they looked good to me.
wahnfrieden
They are very obviously "AI generated genre" which many still don't pick up on
MobileVet
> It's immediately obvious to me that the illustrations are AI slop
I don't believe this qualifies as AI Slop. They are all consistent in their style and thus 'on brand' for what they are trying to convey. While visuals are fairly subjective and these may not speak to you, they don't have 'obvious slop characteristics' eg 6 fingers or 3 eyes imho.
sebstefan
If you can tell immediately that an illustration is AI-made, for me it already qualifies as slop. It gives low quality, lack of effort, "Is this website legit or is this some guy running a scam from their bedroom in Malaysia" type vibe
calmoo
Cool concept but AI slop photos are really offputting, this would steer me away from your product (as a naive first viewer).
helloplanets
Yes, just use a crisp screenshot related to the use case. Especially when it's a product aimed at developers.
vanschelven
This comment is a bit puzzling to me given that this is literally the very top thing at the homepage.
curiousigor
Built a free product (https://heymeta.com) to solve my own problem and posted it here on HN and Reddit as well as Product Hunt (that was in 2018 when it was still relevant).
Currently getting 15k/unique/month (it has dropped a bit less, but steadily getting up after the rewrite and bigfixes).
When the website doesn't have sponsors, I promote my other free macOS tool (https://dockey.publicspace.co) (with a donation option) that get quite a nice flow of visitors from it.
I'd call this a success, although it's not enough to pay the bills or anything :)
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.
kruxigt
[dead]
rylan-talerico
I'm building an AI product management co-pilot (https://magical.pm) that helps PMs write requirements faster.
Here is my approach:
1. Engineering-As-Marketing: Building features that have the potential to create word-of-mouth growth (e.g., the AI will write product requirements in Shakespearean sonnets: https://www.magical.pm/?goofballModal=true).
2. Programmatic SEO: Sitemap has over 1,000 keyword-rich pages (no AI). To accomplish this, I leverage my app's Templates feature and tools that pair well with my app (Jira, Linear, Asana, etc).
3. Blog: Product management blog, designed to find traction in product management communities.
While my SEO grows, I'm improving the product's usefulness. Once it is ready, I will launch it via ProductHunt and begin a bigger marketing push (increased content marketing, community outreach, etc).
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.
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.
hi_hi
Are you able to share. I would love to see real world success stories of LLM use cases and integrations, beyond the common ones you see often (code gen, story gen, automated summaries, etc)
abdullin
Of course.
Most of the AI cases (that turn out to be an actual success) focus around a few repeatable patterns and a limited use of "AI". Here are a few interesting ones:
(1) Data extraction. E.g. extracting specs of electronic components from data-sheets (it was applied to address a USA market with 300M per year size). Or parsing back Purchase Order specs from PDFs in fragmented and under-digitized EU construction market. Just a modern VLM and a couple of prompts under the hood.
(2) French company saved up to 10k EUR per month on translators for their niche content (they do a lot of organic content, translating it to 5 major languages). Switched from human translators to LLM-driven translation process (like DeepL but understanding the nuances of their business thanks to the domain vocabulary they through in the context). Just one prompt under the hood.
(3) Lead Generation for the manufacturing equipment - scanning a stream of newly registered companies in EU and automatically identifying companies that would actually be interested in hearing more about specific types of equipment. Just a pipeline with ~3-4 prompts and a web search under the hood.
(4) Finding compliance gaps in the internal documents for the EU fintech (DORA/Safeguarding/Outsourcing etc). This one is a bit tricky, but still boils down to careful document parsing with subsequent graph traversal and reasoning.
NB: There also are tons of chatbots, customer support automation or generic enterprise RAG systems. But I don't work much with such kinds of projects, since they have higher risks and lower RoI.
expensive_news
That last point (compliance gaps in fintech) sounds fascinating. Is there a place that I could read more about this?
nikolayasdf123
why no ads though? don't they give you reach and discovery to people? for so as long your profits are higher than ads cost, you are profitable, so why not?
abdullin
There are way too many ads around "AI". Everybody else does that, frequently overwhelming people with too many promises of quick wins.
I prefer to distinguish from this hype and reach people through other channels - good content, word of mouth and interesting collaborative events (like our last Enterprise RAG Challenge). This might lead to slower sales in the short term, but I think the long-term value to the brand is worth it.
EDIT: fixed typo
nikolayasdf123
yeah, this is much slower growth... danger must be it is so slow it must be non-existent. but I am with you on same boat, there are too many AI ads for crappy apps
but I guess it speaks to flood of crap-ware, and flood bad content in social networks
^not meaning about you, of course (those folks must not be even on HN)
ozim
Ok now we move goal posts how to build first 100 community members
abdullin
When I was starting my community, I joined other similar communities and tried to be helpful there. No ads or links, just answering questions and supporting. People that were genuinely interested to learn more about the topic - opened my profile and followed the links there.
This and interesting content was enough to grow community organically to 14k subscribers over 2 years.
Another approach to speed up the growth - organise some fun event that benefits the entire community, highlights and showcases the participants.
E.g. when I organised last Enterprise RAG challenge, we got 350 submissions from the teams around the world. Plus IBM joined as a sponsor. People were mostly participating not for the prises, but because of the approachable challenge and ability to push state of the art. Plus some were hired away because of the good leaderboard scores.
Article of the winner (just google "Ilya Rice: How I Won the Enterprise RAG Challenge") is considered by some companies as one of the best resources on building document-based AI systems. And the entire community sees it as the result of their work together - further reinforcing the spirit of the collaboration.
People tend to share and spread fruits of their labor and love.
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.
stanislavb
You can give a go to submitting to software directories or marketplaces - e.g. https://www.saashub.com/submit/list
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)