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Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)

243•whoishiring•11h ago•304 comments

G Lang – A lightweight interpreter written in D (2.4MB)

8•pouyathe•3d ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)

103•whoishiring•11h ago•247 comments

Kernighan on Programming

140•chrisjj•11h ago•42 comments

Ask HN: What weird or scrappy things did you do to get your first users?

7•preston-kwei•3h ago•1 comments

GitHub Actions Have "Major Outage"

48•graton•7h ago•11 comments

Ask HN: Who is firing? (February 2026)

15•chalmovsky•4h ago•1 comments

Ask HN: How do you give AI agents access without over-permissioning?

5•NBenkovich•5h ago•14 comments

GitHub Incidents with Actions and Codespaces

11•jeduardo•6h ago•3 comments

Ask HN: Has anybody moved their local community off of Facebook groups?

18•madsohm•18h ago•13 comments

Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies

153•andylizf•2d ago•87 comments

Why do people still talk about AGI?

36•cermicelli•23h ago•53 comments

Ask HN: Do you still use physical calculators?

32•speedylight•2d ago•90 comments

Ask HN: Junior getting lost

49•TheRegularOne•4d ago•36 comments

Ask HN: What serious task have you accomplished with Moltbot / OpenClaw?

7•lukol•1d ago•5 comments

Ask HN: Any Successful Co-Ops of Software Engineers

13•rubyn00bie•2d ago•11 comments

Task engine VM – for tasks with executable instructions (progress update)

4•tracyspacy•1d ago•3 comments

Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

111•cvhc•2d ago•172 comments

Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

230•item007•3d ago•213 comments

AI has failed to replace a single software application or feature

20•cadabrabra•3d ago•23 comments

Is a RAM-only PWA "Secure Camera" safe for journalists?

3•blackknightdev•2d ago•1 comments

Ask HN: How do you reset an AppleID?

13•OhMeadhbh•4d ago•27 comments

Ask HN: How do you handle auth when AI dev agents spin up short-lived apps?

4•NBenkovich•1d ago•7 comments

A simple HTTPS, HTTP/3, SSL and security headers checker I built with AI

3•dragonman•1d ago•1 comments

Waypoint 1.1, a local-first world model for interactive simulation

13•lcastricato•3d ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How do you market a side project?

14•ruairidhwm•3d ago•12 comments

Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?

67•fnoef•6d ago•82 comments

The preposterous notion of AI automating "repetitive" work

11•cadabrabra•3d ago•10 comments

Ask HN: What's your biggest LLM cost multiplier?

7•teilom•2d ago•6 comments

Ask HN: What recent UX changes make no sense to you?

34•superasn•6d ago•36 comments
Open in hackernews

Ask HN: What weird or scrappy things did you do to get your first users?

7•preston-kwei•3h ago
Hi everyone,

I’m building Persona, a platform to delegate email scheduling to AI. Lately, I’ve been working hard to get those first users on board, but it’s been quite challenging.

I’ve already tried the typical strategies that everybody talks about: cold email, LinkedIn InMail, careful targeting, decent copy. It’s mostly been a dead end. Low open rates, almost no replies.

At this point, I’m not looking for the usual advice you see in blog posts or on reddit. I’m specifically curious about unconventional or non-obvious things that actually worked for you early on, especially things that felt a bit scrappy, weird, or counterintuitive at the time.

If you’ve been through this phase, what genuinely worked and got you your first users?

Comments

superdisk•25m ago
I worked on a language learning site and in order to try to onboard tutors, I wrote a script that scraped the Preply tutor list, which gave first names, pictures, and a YouTube account link.

From there I made a spreadsheet and spent hours googling names and trying to match up pictures to faces, sending messages asking if they'd like to be a part of a pilot program on my platform.

Got quite a few people willing to try it out :) but sadly the startup didn't succeed. Fun times though.