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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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)

Building something that people truly need - might not lead to huge sales right away, but I believe this to be a good long-term strategy. Sprint vs marathon.

Just keep on pushing on it, and it will eventually work out.

Building something that people do not need might not lead to sales right away either.

Maybe it will work out, at low growth rate... in 180 years, when it does not matter anyways. Extremely low grow rates are functionally indistinguishable from death.

And even successful great products will not be used by anybody, ... if nobody even knows about it.

Think of Facebook or Apple hiding somewhere in corner vs screaming about themselves in Times Square billboards and streets storefronts in rural India.

Marketing, Distribution, Discovery is important for to-be great products too, just as it is important for crap-ware. (unfortunately later makes bad name and bad look for the whole industry).

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.

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.

Built xonboard, employee onboarding tool for Xero: https://www.xonboard.com.au/

Got our first 100 users through the Xero App Store.

Now getting well over 100 per month via that channel. No longer our biggest channel, but it was until we started actively marketing our product.

The App Store model can work just fine, if you have a compelling value proposition that genuinely adds value to the users of that product.

There’s always the threat of being copied, but that’s everywhere.

Look at what larger products you could complement via integration. Make sure they have a channel for you (some are useless, Xero is great)

Xero App Store: https://apps.xero.com/au/app/xonboard

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)

Without knowing what the vertical is, hard to say whether a masterclass like that would provide good results. I know for some verticals things like free webinars etc can provide decent results, but that's usually b2b

So, usually paid experiments won't really give you a return at an early stage, but occasionally they can if you get lucky, but at least they'll give you an idea of what your CAC can be, and give you a starting point to start optimising it

My product is a bit different as it is free.

Here is what I did:

1. Write a medium article. This helped Google index the name of the product quickly.

2. Post about it on Reddit and HN (neither got massive visitors, but again, SEO helps).

3. Post in any directory I could find.

It's a slow, organic process. For now, getting ~70 unique visitors, with a conversion rate of 15%.

Find a way to make it free to start.

This is how Firebase, Supabase and friends work.

Getting 100 people to sign up for a free service is still work, but significantly less.

Making it 100X harder to get them to pay for it subsequently. "If you’re good at something, never do it for free" - Joseph Joker MBA JD.

If not, then you are in the ad business.

Depends on the problem being solved, and where that audience hangs out.

I would go find the audience it was built for.