Part 1: How to get your first 100 customers

Free marketing tactics to get traction

👋 Hi, I’m Iron from Simple Analytics, and welcome to my newsletter, The Road to 1 Million ARR. Sign up for weekly insights, growth strategies, and playbooks on how we are growing our business to 1 Million ARR. Fully transparent.

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Adriaan started Simple Analytics five years ago. He was fed up with Google Analytics, so he did what engineers tend to do in this situation: Build their own solution.

It started as a side project, but here we are five years later:

💸 32K MRR
❤️ 1300+ users
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Team of Two
✊ Zero VC Dollar raised

I joined Adriaan when he was three years in and grew to 32K MRR

Link

Here is what we did to make this happen, part 1. 👇

Growing your Bootstrapped business

Simple Analytics is bootstrapped, meaning we did not receive any VC funding. We deliberately chose this option.

We wanted to work on our own terms, decide our own rules and roadmap, and not be pressured to build a unicorn. 

Going bootstrapped has implications for your growing your business. You are very much constrained without funds to spend on advertising or hiring a growth team.

On the flip side, these constraints push you to think outside the box and be more creative.

Two Phases of Growth

In my view, there are two distinct phases of growth:

Phase 1: Going from 0 to 1 - Getting traction
Phase 2: Going from 1 to 10 - Long term growth

Phase 1 starts when you launch. The goal is to gain traction. This is necessary to validate whether your product solves a real problem. 

You need to make some waves to find early users. As Paul Graham famously put it: “Do things that don’t scale”

Phase 2 starts when you validate demand for your product. In this phase, you must find a sustainable growth channel that sets you up for scalable long-term growth. I will write about this second phase next week.

First, here is how we tackled phase 1: How to get your first 100 customers. 

Phase 1: Traction. Going from 0 to 1. 

When you launch, nobody knows anything about your product. Your goal is to find your first users.

This phase is not about finding a growth flywheel or big marketing campaigns. Those are only useful if you find a repeatable process for getting users to buy your product.

Phase 1 is about traction. It's about creating a hypothesis and testing it. Create a hypothesis about your target customers and where they hang out.
And I don’t mean this nonsense:

It could be something like:

• Developers with side-projects built in NodeJS

• Solo-founders that reached 10K MRR

Once you have an idea of your target customers, you’ll need to figure out how to reach them and get them to try your product.

• Create a list of channels worth going after

• Define your strategy.

This is what we did for Simple Analytics: 

Reddit

It's notoriously difficult to crack into Reddit with a new product. Make one mistake, and the Reddit crowd will kill you. 

There are a few subreddits that allow you to submit your new product. Those are general channels. Don’t expect much sales from those, but at least you’ll get a few eyeballs. 

Here is a list of subreddits to go after. 

Secondly, you should find subreddits relevant to your niche and enter the conversation. You can use tools like Gummysearch to find subreddits and discussion topics relevant to your niche. 

But please don’t spam your product bluntly here. Reddit is about engaging. Help people out. Learn about their problems and show them how to solve them (using your product, preferably).

Provide help only, and add a link to your product only if it really provides a direct solution (and be transparent about it). 

If you want to submit a post about your business directly, make it as personal and relatable as possible. 

1 - Don't be anonymous
2 - Be transparent
3 - Only post when you find a community with a problem you can solve. 

This is the best Reddit ad ever. Take note:  

Link

Hackernews

Hackernews (HN) falls in the same category as Reddit. Self-promotion = HN jail. 

However, there is a section called “Show HN.” You can use this to showcase your project.

Tip: Make sure you use a title that stands out.

You only have one shot and one line to tell the community what you are building. Make it compelling and relevant to the audience. 

Honestly, it’s not the only way to get some HN eyeballs.

There is another way to stand out on Hackernews without promoting your product. 

I call it “How to Hack Hackernews,”

It’s about consistently creating content that hits the first page of Hackernews.

I wrote an article on Indie Hackers that explains all the steps: How to Hack Hackernews.

It’s a repeatable strategy applicable to almost every business.

In short, 

• We built a “newsbot” that filtered news related to Google Analytics

• Something newsworthy pops up: “Google Analytics gets fined by EU privacy watchdog.”

• Then, I would directly create a version with implications and my own views on the news article.

• Submit my “own news article” to HN as soon as possible (Preferably before the real news article gets posted)

• Get eyeballs on the news article on your website.

• Add a little CTA at the end: “If you don’t want to use Google Analytics, try Simple Analytics.”

This strategy worked really well. 

Source: Simple Analytics

F5Bot

There is another way to get users from Hackernews and Reddit. It’s called F5bot.

You can track keywords for your niche or mentions of competitors.

For example, I’m tracking mentions of “Google Analytics alternative” (among others) for Simple Analytics.

I will receive an email alert with a link to the conversation. Once I get that notification, I’m always the first to drop a link to our website. 

Quora

I’m following the same strategy here as I’m doing on Reddit: Engage. 

Find topics in your relevant niche and solve problems by helping people out.

To be fair, Quora is not as good as Reddit. It’s gotten way worse over the past couple of years.

However, there is a strategy to optimize for Quora:

1. Answer Quora questions with lots of views but few answers.
   
   Fellow builder Davis Baer from OneUp wrote about this on Indie Hackers.

   
   You can use this query in Google to find questions in your niche with many views but few answers. That’s where you ultimately want to be!
   
   > site:quora.com keyword "1 answer" "k views"

2. Answer Quora questions that are indexed by Google and have search volume.
   
   You can also use a keyword tool like Semrush to identify Quora questions indexed by Google.
   
   If you answer those questions and become the top-rated answer, you don’t even need SEO to be found in Google. This is called parasite SEO.
   
   People with a problem use Google to find a solution and then navigate to the Quora page, where you provide the answer. (You can also apply this strategy to Reddit).
   
   In Semrush, check the “pages” tab for the domain “Quora.com” and filter with a keyword in your niche.

Communities & Directories

Submitting your business to communities can also generate more exposure. It is worthwhile to add a new product on Indie Hackers and Betalist. Also, check IndiePage by Marc Lou.

For AI startups, check: There Is An AI For That.

The chances of getting insane traffic are low, but so is the effort. You only have to do this once.

An additional benefit is that some directories will provide a backlink to your website. Receiving backlinks improves your rankings in Google.

This legend provided a list with 400+ websites to add your startup to.

Also, Phillip built this overview of relevant websites/communities where you can drop your project to get backlinks.

He promises to boost your domain rating to at least 20 if you add your project to the websites on his list. 

Twitter

Twitter/X is interesting if your target customers hang out there.

I’m part of a little “Build in Public” bubble on Twitter. For us, this has resulted in quite a few new users.

If you want to start with “Building in public,” use your personal account. People like to cheer for people.

Beware of the drawbacks “Build in Public” can have. If you’re doing well, people like to copy your work.

Also, I use Tweetdeck to respond to relevant topics for Simple Analytics.

This is the same engagement approach I use with F5bot for Reddit: Track mentions of relevant stuff and drop your link.

Linkedin

You can use the same approach on LinkedIn as on Twitter.

For example, I schedule my “Build in Public” tweets for both LinkedIn and Twitter using Typefully.

LinkedIn is a great platform for direct outreach as well. 

1. Find target customers in your niche

2. Make a relevant introduction

3. Be genuine and transparent

Open the conversation. Don’t sell. Just talk to your target customer and establish a relationship.

Keep doing this. You’ll notice that your network will expand with potential target customers.

Start posting valuable content on LinkedIn. By doing this, you nurture the relationship with your ever-growing group of target customers.

Once they are ready to find a paid solution for their problem, you’ll be the first they think about.

Final Thoughts

This is the approach we took to get traction. This won’t create scalable growth strategies, but it works damn well to get to your first 100 customers or even to 10k MRR. 

If you reach the point where you feel validated, you can focus on the long term. This is where Phase 2 starts: long-term growth strategies. 

I will publish an article on that one next week. Leave your email to get notified when it’s online.

Questions or thoughts? Find me on X

Cheers ✌️✌️
Iron

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The Road to 1 Million ARR