I am building a B2C AI SaaS with $50/month price. How would you go about getting with first 100 users and then the next 500 users.
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)
• 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.
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
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!
:)
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
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/consumer-business-find-fi...
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.
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 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 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.
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.
- 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.
The way I'm acquiring customers is to offer a free Pro subscription worth over $100 to the first 100 early adopters.
We had ~100 early signups during initial testing, but it’s been much harder lately to get visibility — especially with the AI noise everywhere.
Tried:
Reddit and Facebook groups
Cold outreach to founders
Slowly investing in SEO for the long term
Still figuring out what actually drives conversions.
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/
Might be soulless and ugly too, but at least it doesn't make your customer think "Hold on is this a scam?"
Here is my approach:
1. Engineering-As-Marketing: Building features that have the potential to create word-of-mouth growth (e.g., the AI will write product requirements in Shakespearean sonnets: https://www.magical.pm/?goofballModal=true).
2. Programmatic SEO: Sitemap has over 1,000 keyword-rich pages (no AI). To accomplish this, I leverage my app's Templates feature and tools that pair well with my app (Jira, Linear, Asana, etc).
3. Blog: Product management blog, designed to find traction in product management communities.
While my SEO grows, I'm improving the product's usefulness. Once it is ready, I will launch it via ProductHunt and begin a bigger marketing push (increased content marketing, community outreach, etc).
Currently getting 15k/unique/month (it has dropped a bit less, but steadily getting up after the rewrite and bigfixes).
When the website doesn't have sponsors, I promote my other free macOS tool (https://dockey.publicspace.co) (with a donation option) that get quite a nice flow of visitors from it.
I'd call this a success, although it's not enough to pay the bills or anything :)
I started promoting it in a forum I've been part of for years and from there it's growing organically. I'm close to reaching the first 100 users with no ads and only the marketing website:
The Path to First SaaS Customers via The Mom Test:
1. Talk to 10–30 people who might face the problem.
2. Don’t mention your idea—dig into their experiences instead.
3. If the pain is real, pitch only after confirming they care.
4. Look for commitment—not compliments.
5. Build just enough to turn their problem into a usable product and keep iterating.
Since it's a side project, I haven't worked on the app in a while, but recently picked up development again. So if you have any ideas or suggestions, they are very welcome.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/app/dorepeat-checklists-todos/id15615...
I've been also posting on threads after each update. I have over a 1000 downloads now, I don't have tracking but getting a consistent download rate of about 30 a day
Zero marketing and its been a ton of fun so far. Hope that helps!
My first 40 subscribers came from direct friends and my LinkedIn network.
I got about 150 subscribers from a single popular post on Hacker News, posted here: >>43461618
The remainder have come from regular posting on BlueSky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Substack notes, and starting to get search traffic from Google.
I've gotten no traction from Reddit (wow, the programming subreddits are so much angrier than every other subreddit where I contribute!) Twitter (seems like it's pay to play, which I won't do) or IndieHackers (I post milestones just for fun, but it hasn't amounted to anything).
I've found that I need to post twice a week to grow. I had a period where I was sick and was putting less effort into posts, and another period where I was dealing with a mortgage and had to post only once a week, and my subscriber growth treaded water instead of gradually growing. Even casual visitors to the site can tell the difference between moderate and minor effort.
My strategy is too simple, I don't think it will works but It work good enough for me.
- Just engage in the community. In early day, I helped on the cloudflare forum. I just help generic about anything related to email, explain concept and here and there try to introduce my service. I always introduce my service last. Give people free option first, always, even if the free option is my competitor. But I do explain pros/confs of my service
- Build plugin that may drive traffic: For me, CloudFlare offers plugin ability so I built a CloudFlare app for that. It may not benefit me directly but get my name out there
I shared my revenu and publish update on indiehacker https://www.indiehackers.com/product/hanami/revenue
TL;DR: Email sign ups before launch via a boosted IG post.
Non TL;DR: https://www.swiftjectivec.com/the-first-100-subscribers/
I almost didn't buy the great book The One Billion Dollar App because of hits clickbait title, but it actually well-elaborates the mechanics (and the mathematics) of viral spread of apps, which not by coincident corresponds to the familiar formulas that people will have seen during the CoViD19 pandemic ("r-coefficient", r or R0 [1]).
For example, if you have a mobile app that gives you something free for each friend you invite to it, it may encourage some folks to share with r friends...
First 1000 users: daily manually done reddit posts. Very time-consuming and annoying, but it gets the job done. Just make sure the content drives users back to the site and is actually relevant, interesting, and valuable
Next 100K users: programmatic long-tail SEO. obviously this is unique to my own product, but I realized that people were organically already searching for the data contained within the maps I host. By focusing on organizing that data and making it understandable to Google, I started a traffic flywheel that's paid off massively.
I'm now exploring programmatic social media marketing as the next lever for the next 1M users as it directly drives even further benefits on the SEO side
One last thought - whatever growth channel you pick should really align with the product you are building. Some products are a great fit for SEO, others not. Some are awesome for Tiktok/Reels, others not. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution.
Good luck!
That implies that the product is ready, which it does not seem to be? The product does seem interesting, what do you do to differentiate yourself from different offerings that do basically the same? E.g. you mention Discord on the website - are you finding all the relevant discord channels for me, or do I have to join them myself, and you just monitor my account?
I'd imagine you'd get pretty good results on both ProductHunt and Reddit as well if you can get enough upvotes, though the latter is pretty difficult to promote your products on these days unless it's legitimately relevant to the community you post in.
I was fed up with human ghostwriters and honestly I didn't have enough time myself to write for LinkedIn consistently. So, I ended up designing this. I ran it with a few founders in my network and they loved it. That's when I decided to make this into an MVP. Now we have our initial set of beta users and we are just now starting to commercialize it.
So, my current ICP are individuals who want to build their brands on LinkedIn. So, its predominantly an individual user product ATM.
I'm using Chrome, with only uBlock Origin Lite but disabling it ~shows no change~ appears to allow it to work.
Looking at the requests with uBOL disabled, app.68194690.js and 5.5caaec0f.js both returned 404, everything else returned 200/202.
and with uBOL enabled https://plausible.hey.si/js/script.hash.outbound-links.js shows as blocked. maybe that's the issue?