How I got my first 100 users
I'm building 1 project a month until 1 of them takes off.
Last month I launched my first project 1000 Pound Club and got 100 users in the first week.
Here's a breakdown of where I got these users, how I went about this project, and what I plan to differently next time.
100 User Breakdown
- Reddit: 60 users
- Discord: 25 users
- Indie Hackers: 15 users
- Twitter: 0 users
- Hacker News: 0 users
Reddit was by far my best launch platform, giving me 60 out of my first 100 users. This was followed by Discord in a solid 2nd place, then Indie Hackers in 3rd.
I also launched on Twitter on HackerNews, but these were not effective, giving me 0 users from each.
Why some platforms performed better than others
For a niche product like 1000 Pound Club, platforms that target niches like Reddit and Discord perform the best. My product is a powerlifting web app, which is a small niche even within the gym community.
Even if 1,000 people saw this post on HackerNews or Twitter, I think less than 1% would actually be into powerlifting enough to use the product consistently.
Then why did Indie Hackers perform well?
I think this is because Indie Hackers is a small enough community where people feel "close" to other users on the platform and are more willing to try out product. I got a surprising number of registered users from Indie Hackers, but I don't believe any of them will convert into active users.
Generally, if your product is niche, you need to find that niche rather than just targeting the general tech audience like HackerNews, ProductHunt, etc.
However, if your product is tech-related, these tech audience platforms are your best bet.
Project Timeline
1000 Pound Club is the first of many projects I'm planning to work on. Because of this, process will be a very important factor to me since I will be going through this process several times. Here's my general timeline I used for 1000 Pound Club:
Week 1: Product and design
I spent this week gather product requirements and putting together a mockup in Figma.
Product requirements included a product summary, one-liner, target audience, feature list, and a vague business plan. The business plan more-so focused on potential income if the project did well rather than how I can make money in 1 month.
Then I worked off of these product requirements, especially the feature list to create a mockup in Figma. I tried to be as detailed as possible, but things are always left out during design.
This design step was super important for me as it defined most of the product and pushed a lot of the frontend engineering decisions early in the process. This let me build very quickly.
Week 2 & 3: Build
I spent 2 weeks heads down building the product. I used React on the frontend and Firebase Firestore for the database. I'm familiar with these tools and can build quickly with them.
I used Ant Design as the UI library, ChartJS for the graphs, and Firebase Auth for authentication. Then I bought a domain on Google Domains and hosted the site on Firebase Hosting.
This Firebase-centric stack made things very simple and fast to build. It worked well for me with my focus on development speed.
Week 4: Launch
I asked a few friends to try out my site. This helped me find some glaring bugs and improve the features slightly.
I added analytics tooling (Google Analytics and Hotjar) to my site to prep for launch. Then I posted on Twitter, HackerNews, Indie Hackers, Reddit, and Discord.
During launch, I tried to react quickly to feedback from early users. I had many feature requests from Reddit and Discord. I think users are impressed when they request a feature and you're able to release that feature in an hour or so. I think this is a good strategy to retain your first few users.
However, I don't think I responded to many feature requests fast enough. I was too focused on launch and getting the numbers to go up that user retention suffered. Next time I plan to specifically set aside time to react fast and build feature requests immediately.
What I would do differently
I'm building 1 project a month until 1 of them takes off.
I've already started working on my project for September which means I don't think 1000 Pound Club has "taken off".
I do view this project as a great success since it far exceeded my expectations in user acquisition. However, users do not stay active. Most users create an account, try the features, then never touch the app again. There are about 5 users who have come back to the app to use it a second time.
Here are the key things I will do differently on this next project
- Join launch platforms like Reddit and Discord as a first step. Learn about your users and maybe even get your first few users before the product exists.
- Allow users to use the product without creating an account. Many users hit the signup page and left.
- Try a different business model. My plan with 1000 Pound club was to get 10k users, then release a premium plan. I want to try something that could generate income earlier.
- Focus on user retention over user acquisition.
If you're interested in my journey building a project a month and hopefully making a living wage off of these projects, follow me on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/alexanderqchen
Where did you get your first 100 users?
How do you design and build your projects?
Google Whisk - Generate images using images as prompts, not text prompts
After 19,314 lines of code, i'm shutting down my project
Need feedback for my product.
40 open-source gems to replace your SaaS subscriptions 🔥 🚀
We are live on Product Hunt
Can you also put some limelight on what reddit strategy you used.
Nice insights.
Biggest tips are make sure you post/comment in a subreddit that’s directly in your niche and use words like “I built…” or “I had X issue so I made…” instead of “1000 Pound Club: The powerlifting app”. I wrote a post about launching on Reddit if you’re interested:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/results-from-launching-on-reddit-943b431d47
Thank you
Really great summary! Thanks for the insights on launching through reddit!
One piece of feedback, regarding responding to user requests. I’d actually advise against responding to requests so quickly. 1) I think anyone who churns because their request doesn’t get immediately responded to is probably going to churn anyway. 2) It might make your long term product a bit incoherent to respond to things as they come in.
Generally I would recommend to make a list of all your ideas for features. If a user requests a feature then that feature gets moved to the top of the todo list. Then have allocated time every week to review and code user requests.
Thanks for the advice! Will keep this in mind
I saw your Reddit post. Super simple and direct! Love it! ❤️
Wow super cool you saw my post in the wild!
Wow. You really inspired me. I didn't even think about Reddit as a platform to launch my product. Thank you!
Glad I could help!
Thanks for sharing @alexanderqchen
Could you give more context on the subreddits and discord communities? Or share links to them. It would help to understand how large they were and see your activity to get an even better sense of why the user acquisition worked there.
It was r/powerlifting and some Discords were Anabolic Asylum and Manic Muscle. I wrote more about these launches here if you’re interested:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/a-guide-to-launching-on-discord-84c5e4bf47
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/results-from-launching-on-reddit-943b431d47
🙌 Thanks!
no problem!
Super insightful.
I do know that the most important thing for new startups to focus on is retention and not just acquisition.
Beyond getting new people coming in, you should also have some thoughts and strategies to retain them. The first set of retained users are critical for a business growth.
Yes exactly! That's something I need to work on :)
This was quite helpful Alexandar. I am also going to build projects soon enough and this is definitely helpful. I wish you the best of luck
Thank you! Glad this was helpful!
Great, Alexander! Congrats on your first launch.
I'm preparing to launch my own project soon, so this is helpful. A couple of questions popped up for me as I read your post..
I guess I'm wondering if it's best to focus on the platforms you already have a presence or to diversify your audience...
Hi Julia! Great questions!
I think diversifying is good, but make sure to spend effort on each platform, it's still quality over quantity!
Sorry for the late reply, I've been heads down this past week.
I've seen a lot of people on X quit the IH life mostly because they can build but cannot sell. So I've started building sth that takes your idea and generates a 4-10 week marketing plan to get your first 10 customers.
I''m thinking of using AI and training it on A LOT of the saas marketing content on Youtube and X.
what do you think would you use it? i would...
What are your thoughts behind building a new product every month?
I'm not understanding this movement, it sounds a bit just build something and hope it takes off.
How do you see a strategy in which you focus for a year or two on building a company with a great product you love - I mean really an outstanding product?
I think the main point of the "movement" is to get experience and learn from it. If I knew exactly what I were doing, 1-2 years to build a company seems very reasonable.
I don't really know what I'm doing, so I don't think it makes sense to choose an idea and commit to it for 1-2 years (even with pivots). For me, the point of going through so many products is to learn more about the process, find what are the greatest pain points and get good at those.
Hopefully by project 6 or so, I have enough experience to know if an idea shows promise and I have the skills to make that project succeed. Then I'll commit more time to it.
1 project a month isn't an end goal for me, it's to learn quickly.
You'll find people with different opinions. Some say "it doesn't matter how many times you fail, you only need 1 success" as a reason to do this. I think that is an ok reason. 1 a month is a guideline, not a hard rule.
Congratulations on the launch, and thank you for sharing! I hadn't previously considered Reddit as a viable source for leads, but I'm glad to see I was mistaken before my own launch.
What other lead sources are you considering? I want to try them all out.
Great Story. Reddit launches seem to be pretty good at niche considering how many subreddit their are. I used it during my game launches and got very good results. Much love!
Thank you! Glad to hear you had good results launching your game.
I launched on Twitter a couple of days ago and honestly, it brought me 0 users too, even tho I have 600+ followers haha, even threads brought me about 3 users tho they didn't register but that's all you need to know about Twitter
Reddit is next on my plate, I'm trying to solidify a few systems, improve onboarding, add more starting presets and go full on reddit and facebook, curious how it goes
Best of luck with the Reddit launch! Lmk how it goes
Thanks! Yeah I'm curious myself haha
On one of my super niche products, Reddit was the place to go for getting users. Sometimes it's better to aim for a smaller audience if a higher percentage of that audience will actually convert.
Yes! Totally agree
Bravo @alexanderqchen for your launch , and thanks for sharing 🙏🏻
Great insights
Thank you! Hope this was helpful!
Congrats, am sure one of them will 🚀🚀🚀
Thanks for the encouragement!
This is such an inspiring journey, I also have a productize monthly design services its called Loopydesign and helps business owners get quality designs within 24 hours
Thank you! Hope your design services do well!
What reddits threads you promoting in?
I was posting in workout related subreddits. r/powerlifting worked best for me since my target users are powerlifters specifically.
Seems Reddit plays an important role. Which subreddit did you submit in?
The sub that worked best for me was r/powerlifting since my product is a powerlifting app!
Thanks, Alexanderq
Cool stuff. I'm challenging myself to make a dollar online in a month. Just bought the domain today!
Good luck!
Great insights on your user acquisition strategy! You mentioned focusing on user retention for your next project. Do you have specific tactics in mind to improve retention rates? Would love to hear your thoughts. 🤔
I think user retention just comes down to how much value you provide the user. If my product provides immense value, they will come back. For 1000 Pound Club I was debating if I should send email reminders like “You haven’t worked out in a week, let’s get back to it!” But I hate spam email like this so I didn’t want to send it to people.
How do u launch in Reddit? I wanna know what subs are the best for indie makers marketing products
You should post on subs that are in your niche! If you don’t have a niche, r/startups or r/internetisbeautiful can work well. I have a post about launching on Reddit if you’re interested:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/results-from-launching-on-reddit-943b431d47
Awesome!
Thanks!
Thanks so much for the post. It was very interesting to hear about where you launch, certainly gives me some ideas. Great share, thanks again!
No problem, glad I could help!
Interesting idea, It's not too late to change the signup thing. I will not use it because I need to sign, blah blah. I am not even sure what the product is tbh, so I will never sign up for such services. You should allow people to try it before creating an account etc.
Yup! Trying that out for my next product. I do feel like for 1000 Pound Club, it doesn't make too much sense to use it without an account. For my next product TypeChinese, it definitely makes sense.
That's a nice one does someone know where in Reddit you can publish your projects (subReddit/comunity?)?
For me, posting in my niche was best! 1000 Pound Club is a powerlifting app, so unsurprisingly, r/powerlifting worked best for me. If your product is pretty general, r/startups or r/internetisbeautiful could also work well!
Thanks for the insight about Reddit and Discord. I will definitely pass this info on to others that are on similar paths as you.
Glad I could help!
Thank you for sharing! Very valuable info.
It may sound weird, but reddit looks very unstructured to me.
Curious, if you post it for one community?
Same here, maybe my market have different behavior (latam)
I post in every sub thats directly relevant to my niche!
Excellent info... @alexanderqchen
Thank you! Hope this was useful!
Thanks for sharing @alexanderqchen I have been launching more frequently as well. Although my approach is with paid advertising, curious to learn how you get around the "not self promotion rule" for most subreddit?
What kind of paid advertising do you do? I’m planning to try it for my new project.
The no self promotion is a bit of a gray area. If you word it along the lines of “I ran into this issue so I made this” it’s usually better. Most subs do allow self promotion if its genuinely helpful. If you’re an active member of the sub before you self promote, they’re usually more open to it. That’s why I joined subs and discords for my new project’s niche before I started working on it.
I have been testing with facebook ads, so far it's great for driving traffic to the website, but I have not had much luck converting to sign-ups. Best of luck to your future projects though.
I see! I guess it’s just about optimizing the landing page or whichever page you link to on ads. Thanks, good luck to you too!
What parameter have you set to continue working for that product after the month completes?
Nothing too formal. Just if I “feel” it has potential or deserves more of my attention. 1000 Pound Club definitely exceeded my expectations for my first project, but not enough to commit more time to it for now.
On the one hand, I've never been all that convinced by the "launch every month" approach. On the other, though, this kind of iteration does seem like a really useful way to get a launch process built out and fine tuned. I'll be interested to follow along and learn from your experiences, particularly around the early launch process. thanks!
Yes! The reason I’m doing it is just to learn more about the process and refine it. I don’t think the first project I launch is going to be successful, so my thinking is why sit around and wait for a once in a lifetime opportunity when I can build and learn. Then when the once in a lifetime opportunity comes I’ll be ready. And if it doesn’t come, hopefully I’ve learned enough to make an average opportunity succeed. I totally don’t know if this is the best path, but it’s the one I’m taking!
love the way you're approaching this. Or well, I think once a month is too fast a cadence for an awful lot of product/service ideas, but I also know people will stand in line to tell me I'm wrong ;-)
Thanks! I think you’re right. For many projects, 1 month will not be enough time. For now, I don’t think I know enough to commit more than 1 month to a project. Once I’m confident in my skills and in a certain product, I will dedicate more than a month.
1 month is more of the validation period before I decide if I should add more time.
Interesting story, thanks for sharing! As always, it's good to test different channels and platforms, some will work, other won't. Well done. How are you going to scale now?
For me: f&f to start with mvp, then social channels
Not planning to scale this project! I don’t see too much potential in it since user retention is low. Might come back to it in the future though.
Thanks for sharing! It’s really helpful for me.
No problem, happy to help!
i have a tech product with me can you help me how to get clients in indie hackers,i am new to this platform and i don't know how to start.
sharing your project in the 'Show IH' section. Engage with the community, provide value, and consider offering special deals to early adopters. Building relationships here can be a great way to gain initial traction.
Reddit is underrated shit
It worked really well for me!
This is just like when I published my first book. The key lessons I learned from first publishing became my life changer.
That’s great to hear! I definitely view this as the first of many and a great learning experience
Reddit is an amazing place to not just launch your product but even before that. You can find ideas and problems there, you can also easily validate idea from there. ( check out this article about how to utilize reddit: How to use reddit properly. But of course there is boundary because reddit is one of the place that is easiest to get banned.
Nevertheless, don't you think 1 month building something is a bit long ? I have write this article about how speed is very important in MVP (When Building MVP, Speed is the Focus).
Basically the idea is since failure is inevitable you might as well fail fast and iterate fast. And the idea I talked about in the article is to make sure mvp can be built only on weekends. So one weekend one 1 product and 1 week to promote and check if people are interested on the product.
I feel 1 month is a good balance of speed and commitment for me! I don’t feel particularly motivated if I build 52 weekend projects this year. It makes each product feel like nothing.
That strategy is probably valid and effective, my brain just doesn’t like it :)
Hey @alexanderqchen, did you launch a waitlist before your product was ready? I found that when I previously launched waitlists, most of the signups didn't convert to users when my product actually launched.
I'm looking to solve this problem now by building embedded email conversion campaigns to the waitlist API- curious to hear about your experience!
I didn’t have a waitlist for my product! It’s something I’m curious about though. My feeling is that a waitlist can be effective if the product provides immense value and there aren’t really alternatives. Personally, I would wait for that kind of product. If it only provides a little value and there are alternatives, I can’t imagine I would join a waitlist. I think 1000 Pound Club falls in the 2nd category.
It’s difficult enough to get users when you do have a product, I feel like it would be very difficult to get users when the product doesn’t exist yet. What’s your experience like?
Incredible! I also started building one product a month, beginning in August, and have now moved on to my second product. Thank you for sharing your journey. Keep up the great work and continue sharing your insights. Your posts are definitely motivating many people; I've just followed you on Twitter as well :)
Thanks for the kind words! It’s going to be a fun journey for the both of us 😁
Acquiring your first 100 users involves targeting your audience, leveraging networks, online communities, content marketing, social media, email, partnerships, beta testing, ASO, paid advertising, launch platforms, referrals, networking, feedback, and patience to gain initial customers for your product or service.
Targeting your audience was the most important thing for me! I didn’t do a lot of the others you listed because I like to keep it simple until it can’t be simple anymore :)
That's clever, it's like Strava for weight lifting. The segment competition feature of Strava is a big reason it dominated in the MTB/cycling space.
Yes! Strava was one of the inspirations. I haven’t implemented social features/leaderboard, but that’s the vision
Such an honest and transparent post. Thank you for sharing your experience!
Thank you!!
Using the fake names "Yuri Tarded" and "Sugon Deez" is completely off-putting. Couldn't you have just gone with "Bruce Wayne" or some other non-childish name?
Yes I could have. Don’t think PR is that important at this early of a stage. I’m childish so a lot of my “Lorem Ipsum” text ends up being childish.
congratulations
Thanks!
This sounds really good, and I'd love to become active on Reddit. However, I plan to launch a product and spend 1 year actively growing the product before I move to a new one. You can check out my new product here: PostPaddy
Good luck with your product! I like the commitment
This monthly plan has encouraged me a lot, thank you!
Glad I could help! Best of luck 💪
congrats, I'm curious how one launches on Discord I thought it was like building a server and sending invites, can you expand on that, please
Also, can you share where you post your product on Reddit?
I joined existing servers in my niche, talked to potential customers and subtely showed them my product! I have a post about it here if you’re interested:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/a-guide-to-launching-on-discord-84c5e4bf47
For Reddit I found subs in my niche. Specifically the powerlifting subreddit worked best for me since this is a powerlifting app. I also have a post about that here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/results-from-launching-on-reddit-943b431d47
I'm taking note of the language you used in your reddit post. Short, direct and informative! Hopefully it will help me with engagement 🙏
Happy to help! Good luck with your Reddit launch!
Thanks for sharing!
No problem! Hope this was helpful!
You've taken an agile and iterative approach to building and launching your projects, which is commendable. It's clear that understanding your niche audience and choosing the right platforms for launch played a crucial role in your user acquisition.
Considering your focus on user retention in future projects, what strategies or features do you plan to implement to keep users engaged and active over time, beyond just acquiring them?
Well said! Knowing your niche and your users is very important.
I think retention comes down to the value you provide. If 1000 Pound Club provided immense value, then retention would be high. I think 1000 Pound Club only provided a little value to most users.
I was considering adding emails to users like “You haven’t worked out in a week, let’s get back to it 💪” but I felt this would be trying to force retention too much. I hate getting spam emails, so didn’t want to send spam emails too.
What do you think?
you forgot another one source of leads - influencers in your field. Some of them can easily bring you 1000s of new signups(!)
Thanks for the tip! This was something I was interested in. I haven’t tried any paid marketing with 1000 Pound Club yet, but that might be something I’ll try in the future!
I think it’s important to have some nonpaid marketing to start with to validate PMF. It’s easy to get users if you throw a bunch of money at it. Not as easy if there’s no money.
I recently posted on IH (Indie Hackers) about the product launch schedule. How did you approach it? Did you have a plan in mind like this:
Week 1: X
Week 2: Hacker News
Week 3: Reddit
Week 4: Discord
Or did you initially try to make it work and launch as quickly as possible? I tend to separate launches to analyze the data from each one separately, to gain a better understanding. It does take some extra time, though.
I didn’t put much thought into the ordering! This is the first project I launched, so I am a bit of a newbie. X was just because it was very easy and convenient. Hacker News was next because I heard it was good, but it didn’t give me good results. Then I tried Reddit because I felt like it would be good with the subreddits. It turned out very good, so I tried launching on Discord since it’s similarly divided into niches and it worked well too!
What kind of data are you analyzing between launches? Curious to know for my next project
Every data I can, I will then filter them depending on the context. For example My Hacker News Launch was not incredible because I haven't got feedback from users but I got more upvotes than the average project launch. This is the kind of data I store linked with the analytics on my website. That's why I write down the stats during the launch day. I will try to launch on a Discord server tomorrow and see.
That sounds good! Thanks for the info. I had my site connected to Google Analytics and Hotjar. Idk if i setup GA wrong, but it felt very surface level. Hotjar worked very well for me, but I hit the free limit too fast. Watching user recordings on Hotjar was super cool and insightful though.
That's a ton of work, my friend, keep going!
Really insightful post.
Hacker News and other mainstream places are often not a great indicator of your product's potential. I am glad you kept going and found success from Reddit and Discord
Try Reddit before,not work well. Some sub reddits are professional wise, some are entrepreneur wise. For the entrepreneur wise, all the people come for user acquisition, there is few interactions. For the professional wise, they don't even allow me to publish a link or a pic. struggled
Hey Alex,
Great overview, and thanks for sharing.
You mentioned you're doing a project a month until 1 takes off, well, I wanted to invite you to be an alpha user of our figma to code tool. Maybe it will help you get the products out faster.
Essentially, we do leverage AI and it interprets what your goal is, creating components, structure etc. in react. You don't need to do anything special on figma.
The output is react, and we're looking for feedback and alpha users. Let me know if this could be of interest.
Best
Sergio
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