Ask HN: How do I get users for things I build?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36670992

by neiman1 • 3 years ago

2 3 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've made a bunch of tools that provide value in some way or another (at least to myself). However, I've never dedicated real effort towards gaining a large number of users. For me, a 'launch' typically just involves running through a small checklist of things that feel somewhat spammy (posting on hacker news/product hunt/discord, and running a few twitter/reddit ads).

The small group of users who do happen across the project will often love whatever is built - latest example being https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36654253 - but I'm lost as to how to really scale and build a solid user base.

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

You have to do those spammy things and probably do 100x more of them you expect to do and I'm not kidding. See for instance what Pincecone has done for "posting to Hacker News"

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pinecone.io

When I was in college I was a DJ at our college radio station and I wanted a set of keys so I ran for public relations officer and won. My mission was to get people to turn up for our dances which had a bad reputation and little turnout.

On a small campus of maybe 1600 students I would print a ream of paper worth of posters (500 sheets) with maybe 20 different designs. Everyone on campus would see the posters and see we were going all out. Fortunately I had friends who were much better DJs than I was and would make sure everyone had a great time.

After two years of doing this several times a year, KTEK dances had a reputation for being really banging.

I loathe the thought of delegating this kind of task to people, particularly people who dream of great riches and influence through marketing, because many people think 1 poster design and putting up 5 posters is enough because "the people who want to go to the dance will seek them out" which is unfortunate.

If you're Facebook you can get 100 million signups for Threads easily, if you've got special connections you can be featured on the biggest podcasts. For the rest of us it a lot of work, maybe more work than you can imagine.

version_five• 3 years ago

If you're Facebook you can get 100 million signups for Threads easily

I was in university when Facebook started up and I still remember being spammed by them. I belive they were mining university email lists to try and sign up users.

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

Yep, every big success in social media has some bodies buried in terms of where it got traction.

In 2001 I worked for a startup that developed a chat application for Brazil that got pretty big. Amazingly we sent out about 20,000 unsolicited emails and got close to 10,000 signups, probably the best response to an email campaign I’ve ever seen and not something we were able to repeat, particularly when we got crappy lists where some of the addresses didn’t even have an “@“ sign in it.

Ask HN: How do I get users for things I build?

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