Ads for me, too. Google, Capterra, Microsoft, and LinkedIn were my main ad channels.
Most new founders think that blasting your 'startup' to Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Twitter, etc. will result in first customers -- that that's 'marketing' -- but that's far from the truth for the majority of products. And contrary to popular belief, the chances your product is one of the exceptions is near-zero.
Those social media platforms bring in 'tire-kickers' and devs that value their time at $0, not customers. These aren't the first users that you should be listening to, because they will always complain about price, lack of niche functionality, etc., yet it's pointless to listen to them -- because they aren't buyers.
You want to market towards buyers, not just users, and ads are a good way to do that for early companies that have no brand awareness or distribution.
Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads (especially bootstrapped firms or solopreneurs), and in some way growing organically and slowly gives you more time to develop product better.
Having said that, I am in agreement with the essence of this reply.
My company is bootstrapped, and I'm a solo founder. If you don't have any money to grow your business, then you aren't going to be able to do much until you have some money. Hard truth, but it takes money to earn money -- either your money, or somebody else's. You have to get buyer's eyes on you, somehow.
>Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads
You can start with a small budget and build from there. For the first year I only spent £100 per month on Adwords.
The bigger problem is Google et al make it very easy to waste money on their ads. You have to pay a lot of attention to the detail and constantly fight against their defaults which are nearly always in their favour rather than yours.
Maybe someone else can advise as I don't have recent experience. Back then Google assisted us through a representative for a month. But it was mostly generic as they dont understand our business deep enough.
Best way is learning through practical experience by starting with small budget, and increasing slowly with refinements.
+1 for freemium. A lot of advice against it, but it is working for me. Right limit on usage/feature is the key to avoid abuse and maximize conversions.
If I understand correctly, you are selling a B2B version of something where B2C options exist? In that case, suggestions:
- More sophisticated logins: Google/etc.
- Integrations
- Attestations (e.g. HIPAA compliance etc.)
- Team management functionality
- APIs
- Audit trails
- Offline communications & support. I'll add payment via invoice here. I have onboarded Enterprise customers who only needed Enterprise pricing because they needed to bay by check, and/or they wanted a phone number to call for help (which they tended to not use often).
I will say that if your market is well-covered in B2C offerings, you may want to either niche down further by adding core features businesses need. For example, can you help them enforce some kind of corporate standard (possibly via workflow)?
Or you may want to get into a different market altogether.
It is highly skewed for incumbents and big startups like Notion. And "winner takes all" setup would mean there is 95 percent chance you won't be visible in search results even if someone searched by exact keyword of your product name.
I would expect those channels (PH, HN…) would be helpful in getting early adopters to click around and point out what is wrong with app - not getting really customers.
For me personally PH would be more like ideas to copy from.
Finding bugs maybe sure. Further up this thread someone commented about “images getting cut off” on Hypership. It’s feedback but it’s not valuable. Feedback from real users who are actually trying to execute tasks with your product is valuable
I would say I agree because validating your product with early adopters also can lead to false conclusions that it is useful - when in reality early adopters would just like to use it to see what it is and leave it for next shiny thing as something pops up.
For that matter, even waitlists are not fully reliable as many of them might drop interest by the time you launch, or suggest whimsical features that they won't use/pay-for later.
Hence the importance of industry knowledge and gut feeling.
I really like the concept of gnod. I started creating notebookLM audios of hacker news posts and realised it would be nice to have a directory of notebookLM audios generally.
Will send you an email shortly about this. Would be nice to find someone to collaborate with on this.
When doing talks at meetups, do you present a version (mvp?) of your product or are you doing a talk on a topic that aligns with the meetup subject and at the end, oh by the way, I have this product you might like to try.
Personally I always found that just attending relevant events and using the audience question time to make (hopefully) interestimg remarks or addotional insights led to great conversations with interested attendees wich become potentiall customers.
Cold out reach via email. It was so useful we pivoted and now have a product to help with it.
Your channels are dependent on your product and market you're trying to serve. For us it's b2b enterprise customers in the United States. So email works well. If you are trying to sell to developers, or union carpenters in venezuela its going to be different per case.
Yeah we built a whole email pipeline using Apollo and some other tools. Maintaining high deliverability is really hard but it really makes a difference. If you're just using Apollo I can tell you that it's going to be really hard to make any outbound campaign work.
That's one point of view, but it works. Of course sender should research the audience properly, and provide one-click unsubscribe option right at the top.
My dictionary describes spam as "irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.."
Unsolicited messages sent over the internet is exactly what @twosdai is doing.
I'm probably in the same category of old school internet vets with strong negative opinions about spam, but I think that well-targeted, high- or at least some-effort commercial outreach is OK if it's done well and isn't annoying. What turns email into spam isn't just what it is, it's how it's done.
I've hired people who cold emailed me - in the right way. I delete without reading cold emails that seem to be bulk sent. There is a difference.
You should definitely work on the "what on earth is this" experience for first time users. I have no idea what I'm looking at. If I had to guess, I'd say someone's private Mastodon server.
Linkedin for a B2P product. I posted a few questions asking if anyone had similar issues, and got directly in touch with about 20 people who responded to involve them in customer research, then kept in touch with them as I was developing the product for feedback. Those 20 by word of mouth led to a bunch more people trying it out. It's difficult to put a specific number on whether that was 100 or a bit more or fewer, but a few cycles of word of mouth from happy users got me over the 100 users easily.
I just checked, and have about 9K connections on LinkedIn. I assume with the ability to pay for post promotion you could get a similar reach by paying linkedin a few bucks.
This was for a tool to speed up making educational videos, so I tried to reach out to people who were doing online courses and educational materials.
Idk other platforms but you can try Rappo https://www.buildrappo.com/… I tried LinkedIn to reach out customers but the response rate is way low. I don’t want to spend too much on customer research so I tried Rappo as one of my colleague referred to me.
Engaging in relevant sub-reddits has worked out well for me.
Ads also generate installs but since my app is a one-time sale the economics don't work out. If it costs ~$4 in ads to get an install and the one-time in-app purchase is $9 you're losing money.
I find it interesting the number of responses that had success after gathering e-mails. If your 'Show HN' asks for an e-mail here, everyone gets incredibly angry and lets you know they stopped looking at your product right away.
I think too though for some submissions there's a discrepancy between readers vs commenters, I think in part because HN as a site is attractive to certain types of users (text only, more web 1.0-y and refreshing vs gamified forum experiences), which leads to some skew in the demographic of who choose to register as users and engage.
See for example the disproportionate number of comments on HN from users who disable Javascript and or (all) cookies and remark about a site experience based on it (can't read article, some aspect not working, etc), yet from general statistics represents a niche minority.
(Which isn't to say that any such critiques are invalid either, just an observation on perceived audience)
I just realized two implications of this HN demographic:
* Good: That side of HN is within the target for a little niche Web site I plan to launch in a few weeks.
* Bad: I used a Web framework that requires 10x the hosting resources that it should (resume-driven-development), so I might have to upgrade from free-tier hosting before HN mention, just to not be embarrassed by hug of death.
What framework? I'm getting into full stack and I was under the impression that all the shiny new stuff is focused on being more efficient, rather than less?
Asking for emails allows you to target people who are more likely to engage with your marketing, while people who find this annoying would probably be more critical of the product and in general are more picky. In the end they still give you engagement in a form of comments, so it's a win-win. Similar strategy is leaving easily spottable typos in your post so that nitpickers can't help but comment on it.
B2B founder, selling a software product and as little as possible services.
We built up a partner network worldwide, so we had to find relevant partners who would help serve our potential customers in the relevant way that already had those customers. They are easyish to find and approach because they are trying to achieve a similar goal, although sometimes more generically if they are integrators (selling software, hardware and services). Sometimes they sell a competitive product so our USP had to be tight - such as not requiring a year of services to start up but maybe an hour or two.
Others were complimentary tech partners and very kindly helped spread the word, and got a foot in the door for direct engagement.
If each partner has 10 good customers, then thats 10 partners you have to engage with. We were more often than not involved with the relationship with the customer, and got direct knowledge of the customer problem, how well we fit solving the problem, identify UX issues, sales issues, support issues etc..
I'm going for a similar strategy, rather with exclusive national distributors, any chance I could know more about how exactly you executed your partnership's creation?
Like, cold outreach with a pitch then a doc saying more, what would you recommend to be in the doc now that you have that experience and how did you filter and find your potential partners?
Could be over email too if you prefer.
I'm a founder of 3 small saas companies that I run by myself, generating about $1M ARR.
1. First one I started 10 years ago. I built a bot that auto DMed people in various internet forums. My first 100 users came from that. The product is highly shareable, so it quickly grew. Now it's 1.6M users (most of them free).
2. Second started 3.5 years ago. My first 100 users came from simply emailing the newsletter list from my first company. This product has no free plan, so it became profitable instantly.
3. Third started 1 month ago. And it's been a struggle. I got 10k free users just by emailing my list, but 0 paying users. So I tried ads and had similar results from the ads. Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.
Summary: once you have an email list and viral social loops built-in, marketing gets easier.
Any b2c product I build has huge incentive to share the product, creating more users.
In the product itself, social is part of the value. So the more they interact, the more value they get. Similar to any social network you see today.
I do this a number of ways, none original. Reactions, upvotes, achievements, streaks, creating summary videos (like Spotify year in review), public recommendations, etc
Not OP but there are more than one ways to tap in to the distribution channels that exists thanks to influencers (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Substack, Telegram). I, personally, don't see it any different than Nike hiring Lionel Messi or Uniqlo hiring Roger Federer. Where Nike is a global company, indie developers (especially the ones in Software) are smaller and thus could focus on just the right content creators, ie rely on marketing to boost sales.
This phenomenon isn't new. The book The Long Tail posited (way back) that even niche software could make millions now that the Internet had made it cheaper to reach just the right audience.
> Third started 1 month ago. And it's been a struggle. I got 10k free users just by emailing my list, but 0 paying users. So I tried ads and had similar results from the ads. Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.
I looked at the product! And I think I know why you're struggling. (I am in your target demo)
It's just not worth the price. You're competing against CapCut by ByteDance & that's "good enough." Their platform is freemium, uploads directly to tiktok etc. & can get you serviceable subtitles quickly.
There are a bajillion and one ways to cut videos. And they're all extremely price competitive. You aren't competing against DaVinci's studio license. You're competing against the free one.
And at the stated price point, I might as well buy Adobe After effects for $23 & use it alongside DaVinci's free license.
I'm realizing this a bit too late I think. My only value over something like capcut is the API, which most users don't care about.
But I see products like submagic doing $1m arr and I'm at loss. How are they doing so well? It can't just be their editor.
So I think the way forward for my product, if any, is to just target b2b for API usage or target users who want long form video cut into viral clips automatically. I need to niche it down.
> How are they doing so well? It can't just be their editor.
Their B-roll feature is amazing. People often spend time hunting down B-roll and it seems they solve that. They make it easier to make videos by splicing in applicable B-roll + cleaning up audio so that it sounds nice.
Yes. Surprise surprise, most businesses generate most of their initial sales via cold calls/emails/DMs/other automated marketing. That’s the real world
And because they create so much noise, no option left for a new comer other than trying to shout louder than them. All-in-all a vicious cycle of spamming!
This is older than the ideas of the internet itself.
Channels get saturated and marketers start looking for new ones with les noise/competition.
The oldest that I can think of is old school markets where is shops yells to tell you how good of a deal you're gonna have if you buy from them. I think they date back to the middle ages, no?
What do you mean, 50 years ago? Go to any smallish town in German and you’ll find a farmers market about once a week, with people shouting at passerby’s to buy their cheap produce. Probably the same in most European countries, and I’d wager in many other parts of the world?
Am I correct to assume that each of these 3 businesses are roughly in the same problem space? I’m not sure how useful re-using an emailing list would be if each business was wildly different.
I've seen some founders have success by connecting with enterprise champions and decision-makers through networks like the one at https://buildrappo.com/founders
1. I made an app for the colorblind in 2015 and got my first 100 (and more) users from the r/colorblind subreddit.
2. I made a breathing app in 2017 and got my first users from r/breathing, r/breathwork, and r/meditation subreddits.
3. I recently made a productivity app for the mac and got my first users from r/macapps subreddit.
Reddit is incredibly powerful if you are building something niche and are already a part of the community. Also, the results are compounding because some of my posts get good SEO traffic so I still get a handful of users from Reddit every day.
I know I'm getting old when I have to stop and check for satire at the mention of "a breathing app". That sounds like an Onion headline, to me. Glad you had success!
Furthermore, you would be surprised at how dysregulated one's breathing can become when using a computer all day, especially for gaming, or communicating using the keyboard, rather than having human conversations.
I have found that my breathing has become quite undisciplined and irregular. Also inadequate support, in terms of coming from the diaphragm and all. I sang in choirs for over 20 years. Well-regulated breathing is essential to our health in all respects.
You have to be a legitimate contributing member of the subreddit first and present something of value to them instead of just a link.
I too launched a business that got a large amount of customers from Reddit. In my case, it was a niche retail product for musicians who are into synthesizers. I was a longtime contributor to a few related subreddits and launched the product by producing a series of tutorials that featured the product, but didn’t really advertise it. Many thousands of people viewed the tutorials, noticed the product, and quickly figured out where to get it in the video description. People then bought the product and started using it in their own videos, so it spread quickly. This led to thousands of units sold on every continent (except Antarctica, of course).
> Reddit is incredibly powerful if you are building something niche and are already a part of the community
I generally agree with this but I will say (at least in my niche) that I’ve been pretty surprised recently with both how 1) anti ‘self-promotion’ some subreddits have become and 2) how brutal people will be if your thing is not fully free and open source. I understand where they’re coming from, but I’d recommend software founders know this when trying to use Reddit as a distribution channel.
I think it depends heavily on the sub. E.g. in some subs it's an instant permaban from the sub for self promotion, and in others they don't really care one way or the other. Either because there's so little promotional spam in that sub, or something else.
I think you're right. And this is one of the reasons I like HN so much. You're not seen as evil for sharing a software project that is paid and closed-source. It's much more friendly for this kind of stuff.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadTargeted Linkedin outreach: A specific class of professionals
Most new founders think that blasting your 'startup' to Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Twitter, etc. will result in first customers -- that that's 'marketing' -- but that's far from the truth for the majority of products. And contrary to popular belief, the chances your product is one of the exceptions is near-zero.
Those social media platforms bring in 'tire-kickers' and devs that value their time at $0, not customers. These aren't the first users that you should be listening to, because they will always complain about price, lack of niche functionality, etc., yet it's pointless to listen to them -- because they aren't buyers.
You want to market towards buyers, not just users, and ads are a good way to do that for early companies that have no brand awareness or distribution.
Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads (especially bootstrapped firms or solopreneurs), and in some way growing organically and slowly gives you more time to develop product better.
Having said that, I am in agreement with the essence of this reply.
My company is bootstrapped, and I'm a solo founder. If you don't have any money to grow your business, then you aren't going to be able to do much until you have some money. Hard truth, but it takes money to earn money -- either your money, or somebody else's. You have to get buyer's eyes on you, somehow.
You can start with a small budget and build from there. For the first year I only spent £100 per month on Adwords.
The bigger problem is Google et al make it very easy to waste money on their ads. You have to pay a lot of attention to the detail and constantly fight against their defaults which are nearly always in their favour rather than yours.
That's me in 2018. Spent a good amount of money in Google Ads and only attracted users that we did not want.
Just putting negative keywords wasn't sufficient, and even one miss was enough to waste all efforts.
Best way is learning through practical experience by starting with small budget, and increasing slowly with refinements.
How do you target ads when many B2C versions are trying same thing. For example, image editor that are targeted towards b2b.
I get initial interest but then people drag their feet for trials and paying after that.
Any thoughts how can I counter these drag and boost sales?
- More sophisticated logins: Google/etc.
- Integrations
- Attestations (e.g. HIPAA compliance etc.)
- Team management functionality
- APIs
- Audit trails
- Offline communications & support. I'll add payment via invoice here. I have onboarded Enterprise customers who only needed Enterprise pricing because they needed to bay by check, and/or they wanted a phone number to call for help (which they tended to not use often).
I will say that if your market is well-covered in B2C offerings, you may want to either niche down further by adding core features businesses need. For example, can you help them enforce some kind of corporate standard (possibly via workflow)?
Or you may want to get into a different market altogether.
For me personally PH would be more like ideas to copy from.
Hence the importance of industry knowledge and gut feeling.
Entrepreneurship is not for weak hearts.
It was this Show HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980
That was before showing something on HN was called "Show HN" though.
Hacker News for the next 10,000.
Target audience was devs.
What made you prefer HN over dev platforms like StackOverflow or Github?
Next 50-100 was cold emails.
After that, mostly word-of-mouth.
Target audience was publishers (audience development/growth)
Your channels are dependent on your product and market you're trying to serve. For us it's b2b enterprise customers in the United States. So email works well. If you are trying to sell to developers, or union carpenters in venezuela its going to be different per case.
I guess businesses from outside USA would need bigger effort to generate trust.
We mainly use it as a prospecting tool.
In other words SPAM.
Unsolicited messages sent over the internet is exactly what @twosdai is doing.
I've hired people who cold emailed me - in the right way. I delete without reading cold emails that seem to be bulk sent. There is a difference.
This was for a tool to speed up making educational videos, so I tried to reach out to people who were doing online courses and educational materials.
I wrote on this exact topic (literally - how I got my first 100 paying users) here: https://swiftjectivec.com/The-First-100-Subscribers/
Ads also generate installs but since my app is a one-time sale the economics don't work out. If it costs ~$4 in ads to get an install and the one-time in-app purchase is $9 you're losing money.
See for example the disproportionate number of comments on HN from users who disable Javascript and or (all) cookies and remark about a site experience based on it (can't read article, some aspect not working, etc), yet from general statistics represents a niche minority.
(Which isn't to say that any such critiques are invalid either, just an observation on perceived audience)
* Good: That side of HN is within the target for a little niche Web site I plan to launch in a few weeks.
* Bad: I used a Web framework that requires 10x the hosting resources that it should (resume-driven-development), so I might have to upgrade from free-tier hosting before HN mention, just to not be embarrassed by hug of death.
Second startup: word of mouth
We built up a partner network worldwide, so we had to find relevant partners who would help serve our potential customers in the relevant way that already had those customers. They are easyish to find and approach because they are trying to achieve a similar goal, although sometimes more generically if they are integrators (selling software, hardware and services). Sometimes they sell a competitive product so our USP had to be tight - such as not requiring a year of services to start up but maybe an hour or two.
Others were complimentary tech partners and very kindly helped spread the word, and got a foot in the door for direct engagement.
If each partner has 10 good customers, then thats 10 partners you have to engage with. We were more often than not involved with the relationship with the customer, and got direct knowledge of the customer problem, how well we fit solving the problem, identify UX issues, sales issues, support issues etc..
It’s been a successful way to start.
Like, cold outreach with a pitch then a doc saying more, what would you recommend to be in the doc now that you have that experience and how did you filter and find your potential partners? Could be over email too if you prefer.
1. First one I started 10 years ago. I built a bot that auto DMed people in various internet forums. My first 100 users came from that. The product is highly shareable, so it quickly grew. Now it's 1.6M users (most of them free).
2. Second started 3.5 years ago. My first 100 users came from simply emailing the newsletter list from my first company. This product has no free plan, so it became profitable instantly.
3. Third started 1 month ago. And it's been a struggle. I got 10k free users just by emailing my list, but 0 paying users. So I tried ads and had similar results from the ads. Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.
Summary: once you have an email list and viral social loops built-in, marketing gets easier.
I also have it posting to a slack channel so we can quickly scan any urgent ones while I'm working.
Bugs pop in heavily on new feature launches but then it's the usual "my email didn't arrive" type of questions.
Subscriptions, insurance, bills have skyrocketed. I believe many are taking a step back and rethinking necessities.
In the product itself, social is part of the value. So the more they interact, the more value they get. Similar to any social network you see today.
I do this a number of ways, none original. Reactions, upvotes, achievements, streaks, creating summary videos (like Spotify year in review), public recommendations, etc
I see what you did there.
This phenomenon isn't new. The book The Long Tail posited (way back) that even niche software could make millions now that the Internet had made it cheaper to reach just the right audience.
Teenagers, Zach Yadegari (calai.app) and Blake Anderson (apex.inc), who built million dollar app-based businesses in 6mo, plan to release a book on it: https://x.com/zach_yadegari/status/1845842051314614681 / https://archive.md/xXf9a
It's just not worth the price. You're competing against CapCut by ByteDance & that's "good enough." Their platform is freemium, uploads directly to tiktok etc. & can get you serviceable subtitles quickly.
There are a bajillion and one ways to cut videos. And they're all extremely price competitive. You aren't competing against DaVinci's studio license. You're competing against the free one.
And at the stated price point, I might as well buy Adobe After effects for $23 & use it alongside DaVinci's free license.
The value just isn't there.
But I see products like submagic doing $1m arr and I'm at loss. How are they doing so well? It can't just be their editor.
So I think the way forward for my product, if any, is to just target b2b for API usage or target users who want long form video cut into viral clips automatically. I need to niche it down.
Isn't this by definition Spamming people as you were using bots to mass DM people?
Channels get saturated and marketers start looking for new ones with les noise/competition.
The oldest that I can think of is old school markets where is shops yells to tell you how good of a deal you're gonna have if you buy from them. I think they date back to the middle ages, no?
I can't hear them here in Canada, and indeed, I can't hear everyone on the planet who is shouting.
Unlike spam.
You got the initial product invite from the GP?
1. I made an app for the colorblind in 2015 and got my first 100 (and more) users from the r/colorblind subreddit.
2. I made a breathing app in 2017 and got my first users from r/breathing, r/breathwork, and r/meditation subreddits.
3. I recently made a productivity app for the mac and got my first users from r/macapps subreddit.
Reddit is incredibly powerful if you are building something niche and are already a part of the community. Also, the results are compounding because some of my posts get good SEO traffic so I still get a handful of users from Reddit every day.
May fate preserve us all from power outages.
Should be a movie.
Lots of benefits can be gained from practicing disciplined breathing, and some people want an app.
I have found that my breathing has become quite undisciplined and irregular. Also inadequate support, in terms of coming from the diaphragm and all. I sang in choirs for over 20 years. Well-regulated breathing is essential to our health in all respects.
Absolutely. Including mental and spiritual health.
Startup idea to unlock phone/PC by a number of deep breaths as password?
I too launched a business that got a large amount of customers from Reddit. In my case, it was a niche retail product for musicians who are into synthesizers. I was a longtime contributor to a few related subreddits and launched the product by producing a series of tutorials that featured the product, but didn’t really advertise it. Many thousands of people viewed the tutorials, noticed the product, and quickly figured out where to get it in the video description. People then bought the product and started using it in their own videos, so it spread quickly. This led to thousands of units sold on every continent (except Antarctica, of course).
I generally agree with this but I will say (at least in my niche) that I’ve been pretty surprised recently with both how 1) anti ‘self-promotion’ some subreddits have become and 2) how brutal people will be if your thing is not fully free and open source. I understand where they’re coming from, but I’d recommend software founders know this when trying to use Reddit as a distribution channel.
I think you're right. And this is one of the reasons I like HN so much. You're not seen as evil for sharing a software project that is paid and closed-source. It's much more friendly for this kind of stuff.
Ironically this post was flagged and got invisible within minutes of postings. However mod team was super helpful to restore it.