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)
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)
I would go find the audience it was built for.
This is how Firebase, Supabase and friends work.
Getting 100 people to sign up for a free service is still work, but significantly less.
If not, then you are in the ad business.
I suspect there's a special dynamic for developers. I'm usually more willing to try out new things on personal projects, but I also don't like paying for things on personal projects. At work I don't care how much things cost, but I'll definitely advocate for tools that worked well on personal projects.
• 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.
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.
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.
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 a 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
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.
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.
Apply this logic to the jump from 20 to 100 if it makes the task less daunting for you.
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)
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
SEO is extremely easy: Write in very clear prose what you are selling and give potential clients as much information as possible. This is all you need for SEO, apart from purely technical stuff like load times.
Turning your SEO efforts into real sales is also easy: State your price(s) very clearly on the website and then make it as easy as possible for customers to make a purchase. Get out of their fucking way when they have their wallet out.
If you insist on using paid ads and influencers, by God connect the campaigns to specific discount offers so that you know exactly how many sales origin from each channel you are paying to market in.
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.
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.
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
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)
Just keep on pushing on it, and it will eventually work out.
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).
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.
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.
Pardon my ignorance - does SoundCloud let you monetise, or is it purely it being cool that people are listening to your tracks?
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 :')
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?
- 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.
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.
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) career path where I didn't had to be in front of an audience.
* 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.
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%.
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
[NOTE: Windows build phones home for updates; others don't yet.]
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!
The content is far too wide on big screens
:)
It is supposed to be a fun demo, let's see if it works
- 22 YouTube videos
- two LinkedIn posts a week
Now I have:
- 100 signups
- 28 demo completions
- 500 subscribers on YouTube
Like, how else should it work? There is of course always Google Ads but that strikes me as more short-sighted than building a backlog of content to refer back to.
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/consumer-business-find-fi...
I think if you have a relatively novel idea, that is quick to try out, then people will naturally share.
After that, I submitted to various AI tool directories. They drove a bit of traffic and helped Google find the product. Then some landing pages I made started to rank and it has snowballed from there.
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.
(1) Talk to your existing users: If your product has a free version, reach out to all of them and make sure you speak with as many of your freemium users as possible. If your product only offers a paid version, again reach out to all of them. Anyone who has already voted with their credit card is a very important person to talk to.
(2) Maximize learning: Understand what are the biggest pain-points you are helping your customers solve. Drill down on their psychographic profiles. Map everything out.
(3) Identify your optimal paid ICP: This is a best guess effort. Do not worry about nailing it 100%. Just make sure it is as close to your current full understanding as possible
(4) Go after them. The HOW is not as important as long as you understand the WHO.
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.
Build your list for email marketing.
Paid ads (FB, Google) to drive targeted traffic. PS - I do that.
Insane Clown Posse? Now I'm interested!
B2B products, unless miraculous, do not generally "take off" without a lot of hard work, meetings, trade shows, client demos, etc, at least so far as I have seen.
To make any sales at all, it seems like you'd have to already know a lot of people in the industry, and it would have to outcompete not only other products, but just the old "we'll load all the shit we can into the truck/container based on human intuition".
In fact, ideally, you'd ask someone you know (or even better, they'll ask you) if this is a problem you can solve for them. If you can't sell it to people you already know, it'll be even harder to sell to people you don't, presumably.
Plus it will be very hard to articulate to an AI "you can't sit that on top of that!", but it's obvious when looking at it.
I'm in the midst of wading into B2B, alone, and low on capital, myself. My "success" so far is mostly due to dumb luck and being available to talk to.
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.
SaaS a crowded field for this kind of thing, and like everyone says, 20 percent of the effort is building it, the rest is marketing and support.
Leave a link to join WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, or Subreddit in the MVP.
Engage with the early adopters there and figure out what it is they need.
Move to address that as soon as you can.
Repeat?
The way I'm acquiring customers is to offer a free Pro subscription worth over $100 to the first 100 early adopters.
maybe they use image generation, thats why launch price is so expensive
Japanese language learners congregate in a bunch of online discussion boards and subreddits. Some of my competitors have forums that are open to anyone posting about their own self-made tools, in addition to users discussing learning resources unrelated to the host's products. So I simply posted about my service on several of these and quickly gained thousands of early users.
I had more luck than others who try the same because my product solves pain points and offers features that competition don't or don't as nicely, ie quality and value. I also attract users with friendly pricing: a standard pricing tier and an unverified student / low-income pricing tier for the same service level.
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/
Makes sense though. I’ve been thinking of creating a very similar tool; delighted that it might already exist!
deekshaaashaaa•4h ago