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Growing my SaaS from 0 to 4k users in 5 months – what worked for me

11 points by felixheikka ↗ HN
When I started out building projects and was looking for advice, I always found that what helped the most was seeing how others had done it before who had actually seen success with the methods they were talking about.

Just getting that perspective used to help and motivate me. I knew that if we succeeded I wanted to help others who were in that same position as me, by sharing exactly what we did to get to where we are.

Now that we've hit some significant milestones, here's a breakdown of what actually worked.

The numbers

- 4,000+ total users

- 100+ paying customers

- $2,300 MRR

- 4 months since launch (5 months since MVP launch)

Reaching first 100 users

- Created survey to validate idea in target audience’s subreddits

- Offered value in return for responses (project feedback)

- Shared MVP with survey participants when it was finished

- Daily posts in Build in Public on X sharing our journey and trying to provide value

- Regular posts in founder subreddits

- Result: 100 users in two weeks

Getting to 1,000

- Focused on product improvements based on initial feedback

- Launched on Product Hunt (ranked #4 with 500+ upvotes)

- Got 475 new users in first 24h of PH launch

- Featured in Product Hunt newsletter

- Result: 1,000 users in about a week after PH

Scaling to 4,000

- Continued community engagement

- Strong focus on product improvements

- User referrals from delivering value

- Sustained organic growth

- Result: Steady growth to 4,000+ users

What actually worked

- Idea validation before building (saved months of work)

- Being active and engaging in communities (Build in Public on X + Reddit)

- Product Hunt launch

- Focusing on product quality over marketing gimmicks

- Being open to feedback and using it to improve product

Key insights

- Spending time making a great product beats everything else

- Community support helps a lot, especially in the beginning

- Provide value to people and you will get value in return

What's next

- Continuing to develop SEO for sustainable growth

- Working on major product updates

- Aiming for $10K MRR this year

- Continuously improving the product

I hope that getting some insight into how we did it can help you on your journey, even if it’s just with motivation.

9 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 29.5 ms ] thread
MutedEstate45
This is great! Thanks for sharing. I’ve always found the hardest part to be reaching the first 100 users. May I ask, what was the process like to get the first group of people to take your survey? Did you just post it in the target subreddits and people took the surveys right away? Or did it take some time and extra effort to figure out how to get them to participate?
felixheikka
No problem! It took some extra effort. We had to post it a few times in different subreddits to get people to respond. What helped us though was offering feedback on their projects in return.
HaQT11
Interesting approach. Did you state upfront that you would offer feedback on their projects in exchange for them taking the survey? Trying to think of how to best phrase that to get the right people interested.
nkko
The single biggest growth hack is getting that product market fit.
saaaaaam
Two months ago [0] you said that you’d been going two months and made $2200 in revenue.

At the same time your other account(?)/brother(?) was claiming you’d got to $1000 in revenue.[1]

You’ve posted the same pitch quite a lot.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=felixheikka

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=davidheikka

felixheikka
Nice investigation. We did reach $2,200 revenue within two months. We also reached $1,000 MRR within two months. There's a difference between revenue and monthly recurring revenue. You think posting about my journey two times in 60 days and doing a show HN post is a lot? He's done the same plus one post.