Indie hackers share how they got their first 10, 100, and 1,000 customers

Interested in finding out how people got their first 10, 100, and 1,000 customers? Me too.

I spoke with indie hackers and dug through posts on IH to learn more — here's what I found. 👇

First 10 customers

Here's the short of it: Cold outreach and leveraging your own network are
huge in the beginning. Beyond that, posting to your socials, reddit, and Product Hunt have helped a lot of indie hackers too.

Cold outreach

👤 Steven Goh of Proxycurl:
Cold email outreach got our first 10 paying customers.

👤 Marie Martens of Tally:
By cold outreach. We would send DM’s to people we found on Product Hunt and upvoted similar tools like Tally.

👤 Eric Alli of LayeredCraft:
I reached out to contacts on my LinkedIn and X network, who had expressed a need for a website solution like mine.

👤 Marek Piechut:
We found the first 10 clients via direct sales. We just got on the phone and in a car and started visiting potential clients. Then we found the next ~40 mostly by word of mouth and a few thanks to a lot of Instagram posting. All other tactics (seo, ads, exhibition stands got us nowhere). Source

👤 Jon Perrin:
1st Customer from Hunter.io, 10th customer from Hunter.io. Source

👤 Baird Hall of Churnkey and Wavve (acquired):
Primarily manual outreach via email. Close via customer chats (Drift). Moderate difficulty. Took about 3 weeks. Source

Your Network

👤 Matthew Pierce of Slay.so:
Our first 10 customers came through existing clients and friends of friends. Word of mouth spread through my wife's network of clients and industry peers and this quickly took us past our first 10 customers in the first month.

👤 Volkan Ozcelik:
First 10 were friends, colleagues, and trusted people in my industry. Source

👤 @AntoineR:
We seeded our user base for Ganddee, the "Google Maps for sustainable shops", by leveraging our extended network (friends, friends of friends, etc.), visiting relevant shops in person to tell them about the platform, communicating on social media (relevant subreddits, LinkedIn, Insta, etc.), showing up - in person - at relevant meetups in London, creating a blog to answer common questions and inform readers on sustainable consumption and Ganddee, etc. Source

👤 Victor of MakeSales.io:
First 3: friends
Next 3: referrals
Next 3: content
Next 3: outbound Source

Social Media

👤 Wang Legolas of Moolight:
We located a group of app enthusiasts and shared a sincere, detailed post explaining why we were motivated to create an AI journal app, which was a unique offering at the time. Our post garnered attention and led to our initial 10 customers. We actively engaged in the comments section after publishing the post. Interestingly, these early adopters referred to themselves as "investors" because they believed in the app's potential and envisioned it growing significantly.

👤 Natalie Poindexter of Authentic Inclusion Consulting:
I found my first 10 by launching my idea on LinkedIn, IG, and TikTok. I also messaged friends. Source

👤 Felix Wong of VenturesList:
My first 10 customers came from building in public on Twitter. I was pretty fast — like in a day or two. Source

Reddit

👤 @wordofhenry:
For my first 10 customers, I asked the mods on a subreddit if I could promote my app. They said yes so I posted it and it did pretty well. I got about 14 registrations! Source

👤 @Matthewbf of Partizion:
Honestly, the most effective thing (and what worked to get my first 10 users) was to just find out where my target audience hung out. Reddit was fantastic for early users — Reddit is very against self-promotion and tries to mitigate it as much as they can, but the actual reddit community and users are super supportive. If you have something interesting or of value to share, they'll love it.

My suggestion would be to write about why you're building your product, what led you to work on it, thinking about the idea, updates on your progress and what you've done, things you've learned, etc. not just "hey here's a link to a product I built, go look at it". Source

Product Hunt

👤 David Maker of ChadWizard:
Our first group of subscribers came from the PH launch. Source

👤 Alex Furman of PrintMonster:
Product Hunt and posting in community forums and Slack channels (where my target audience would hang out). Source

Hacker News

👤 Julius of TinyUX:
Most of the first 30 came from Hacker News. My "Show HN" post made the front page briefly. Source

Blog (but not SEO)

👤 Mateusz Buda of ScrapingFish:
For our first 10 customers, we prioritized crafting blog posts rich in high-quality content that genuinely added value for potential users. Instead of producing SEO-optimized text filled with keywords, we wrote content that would be organically shared and cited across the web as a trusted source of information. It was quite a significant initial investment but our commitment paid off. We know that those early blog posts still attract many users. On several occasions, our posts reached the front page of Hacker News, each time resulting in significant traffic spikes and an influx of new users.

First 100 customers

The short of it: Posting on your socials pushes the needle most, followed by word of mouth and Product Hunt.

Social media

👤 Mateusz Buda of ScrapingFish:
After crafting a few blog posts on topics relevant to our product, we joined multiple online communities spanning Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other social media platforms. We were actively looking for discussions where users had challenges that the Scraping Fish API could potentially address. Often, one of our blog posts would provide the solution, allowing us to seamlessly share it.

👤 Marie Martens of Tally:
Cold outreach. Plus building in public and sharing our experiences on social media, and engaging in online conversations about form builders.

👤 Jayaprasad Mohanan of Runcaster:
For my product, tweets and targeted hashtags for the first 100. Source

👤 @ADNL:
I got my first [100] users from Twitter, by sending a lot of DMs and commenting on tweets from people who could be interested in my product. Source

Word of mouth

👤 Wang Legolas of Moolight:
One of our initial ten users was exceptionally enthusiastic about our app. He shared his appreciation for the app with a close-knit group of fellow app lovers. The influx of downloads from these early customers caught Apple's attention, and given that our app met Apple's quality standards, it was chosen as the Weekly Editor's Pick. Shortly after, it was named App of the Month, propelling us to over 100 customers.

👤 Volkan Ozcelik:
The first 100 were friends of the first 10.
Source

Product Hunt

👤 Leo Baishun of EarlyBird:
I spread the word about our [Christmas-Day] Product Hunt launch far and wide, on social media as well as sites like Hackernews, Reddit, and Indie Hackers. We even reached out to people in Slack communities, Discord groups, and Telegram groups. Our efforts paid off and we got our first 500 customers within 3 days! Source

👤 @yanwei:
1st, 10th and 100th customers are basically all from Product Hunt. Source

SEO

👤 Steven Goh of Proxycurl:
About the same time we started cold emails, we also began investing in SEO. I’d say at least 30-50% of our 11th-100th customers began streaming in from SEO.

Speaking engagements (and Clubhouse)

👤 Matthew Pierce of Slay.so:
We launched Slay.so right around the same time as Clubhouse launched, at the height of the pandemic. Within a few weeks of exploring the Clubhouse app, I found myself in some Instagram marketing rooms where they were talking about hashtags. I was incredibly nervous, but I didn’t think the “best practices” that people were sharing were quite accurate, so I “raised my hand” to get “on stage”. I shared a few of my thoughts on Instagram hashtags, and it sparked a lot of conversation.

Before I knew it, I had digital marketers who had been in the room direct messaging me on Instagram and asking to host CH rooms with me. This turned out to be a fantastic model, and I found myself doing two or three of these rooms a week. I ran these sorts of rooms with a few different hosts so that I could tap into different audiences, and set up an affiliate program to incentivize them with a 25% commission on subscriptions. Within a couple of months, this grew our customer base between 100–200 customers.

Reddit

👤 Patryk Maron of Zazu:
I had best results posting on Reddit. Source

Hacker news

👤 Courtland Allen of Indie Hackers:
I submitted the site to Hacker News, where it stayed in the top 3 for over 24 hours. The traffic was unreal. I racked up something like 570 mailing list subscribers and 156,000 pageviews from 43,000 unique visitors in under two days! Source

A shotgun approach (all the things)

👤 @sxv:
Here's how I acquired the first 100 users for my SaaS product:
— Utilize personal and professional networks: Share your product.
— Leverage social media platforms: Use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit for promotions.
— Start a blog: Share industry insights and guest posts to widen reach.
— Engage in online communities: Be active on ProductHunt, forums, and groups. Initiate your own community on Slack or Discord.
— Offer early access: Use platforms like Betalist, BetaPage, and StartupList for initial feedback.
— Collaborate with influencers: Provide them with free trials or discount codes to share.
— Implement SEO strategies: Use tools like Google Analytics and SEMrush to optimize your website.
— Execute targeted ad campaigns: Utilize platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.
— Establish a referral program: Offer incentives like discounts or free trials. Source

👤 Baird Hall of Churnkey and Wavve (acquired):
Heavy outbound activity, blogs/SEO content, heavy social activity, guest blogging, focusing on back-linking (building domain authority), some paid social ad campaigns. High difficulty. Took 6 months. Source

First 1,000 customers

The short of it: SEO is a long game. It often pays dividends on the way from 100 to 1,000 customers.

SEO

👤 Steven Goh of Proxycurl:
70% of customers are SEO-inbound. The next big inbound source (15%) is paid user acquisition (newsletters, ads, etc). 10% of customers are still from the remnants of our cold emails campaign blast at the start. And the rest are usually word of mouth. Word of mouth is surprisingly strong.

👤 Mateusz Buda of ScrapingFish:
We're currently in this phase, steadily approaching the 1,000-user mark. We recognize the importance of SEO and it is our focus right now.

Additionally, a significant aspect of our growth strategy revolves around gathering reviews. Whenever a user reaches out to us for support or any assistance, we go above and beyond to ensure their needs are met. Following successful interactions, we then kindly request them to leave a review on platforms like Capterra or other product listing sites.

Product Hunt (relaunch)

👤 Marie Martens of Tally:
We launched on Product Hunt and doubled our user base in one day, it has been an instrumental step in gaining exposure.

Speaking (and podcasts)

👤 Matthew Pierce of Slay.so:
It was continuing to run those Clubhouse rooms, networking there and on Instagram that led to the next leap in our growth. An educator and influencer decided to interview my wife and me, then used her notes for a YouTube video that gained a lot of views (over 150k) and led plenty of traffic our way.

We're not active on Clubhouse anymore these days. Instead, we do podcast interviews from time to time.

Social Media

👤 Dominic Yates:
I've grown our community of sales professionals from 0-1500+ in 1 year using only LinkedIn. Post content about the problems your business solves, and reach out to people that engage. Rinse and repeat. Source

Invest in the product

👤 Baird Hall of Churnkey and Wavve (acquired):
Heavy product development, addition of freemium, double down on blog/seo, Adwords campaigns, some social campaigns, no manual outreach. Took 14 months. Source

Word of mouth

👤 Volkan Ozcelik:
The first 1,000+ was a result of a combination of Twitter, Facebook, but mostly word-of-mouth from the first 100.
Source

Time

👤 Wang Legolas of Moolight:
To be candid, the primary factor in our case was time. Our user count grew organically.

What they wish they had tried

👤 Wang Legolas of Moolight:

One major oversight on our part was neglecting SEO. If you search for "Moolight", our app won't appear in the results. By not investing in SEO, we missed numerous potential opportunities

Additionally, our marketing efforts were mainly confined to our local region, which meant we missed out on potential users in the US and other parts of the world.

👤 Marie Martens of Tally:
Creating customer stories and generating more SEO-optimized content that highlights various use cases. But it’s something we’ll start experimenting with.

👤 Mateusz Buda of ScrapingFish:
One growth tactic that's been on our radar for a while but which we haven't yet implemented is leveraging influencer partnerships and affiliate marketing. These strategies hold the potential to expand our audience and improve credibility, especially when partnering with esteemed figures within the community. In hindsight, we might be overthinking this a bit and should perhaps take the plunge.

👤 Steven Goh of Proxycurl:
I’d have tried to do paid search ads better. But paid ads are honestly a science all by itself because failure means losing money. We tried a few campaigns, but we were never able to produce a campaign that had a positive ROAS (return on ad spend). My hypothesis is that our target audience of software engineers mostly have adblock and do not see ads. Truth is I don’t know. I still feel like it can be done, but I just do not have the in-depth knowledge to execute it.

👤 Matthew Pierce of Slay.so:
Paid ads. We’re only just starting to explore paid traffic, and I’m not sure why we were so reluctant to explore this avenue sooner. I guess we didn’t feel like we “needed” it, but frankly, it’s a major missed opportunity.

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