Ask HN: How did you go from idea to product to first 100 customers
Far too many people only see successful companies, but rarely do they see the struggles that occur early on. I would love to hear about how you went from a simple idea, product to fighting for your first 100 users.
You don't have to be generating millions a year, if you're even generating $1,000 a month, I would love to hear about your journey. I know there's websites like https://indiehackers.com, but I'm interested in hearing from others.
@mrburton's retrospective from 2019 captures the critical transition from initial concept to the first dollar of customer revenue.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Early traction rarely comes from passive launches; it requires direct manual outreach, personal network activation, and high-touch customer support.
Narrowing down the target audience to a specific niche allows solo founders to out-position generic horizontal competitors.
Underpricing out of fear of rejection is common; founders who set premium pricing often discover higher customer satisfaction and lower churn.
Community Debate Themes:
Discussions analyzed Show HN launch mechanics, cold DM outreach conversion rates, and the psychology of validating customer demand before writing code.
CATEGORY Zero to One →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 20 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 6 comments
We tested Draftss (http://draftss.com) back in April 2018, and here we are today where we have successfully achieved $8,000 MRR by serving 100+ customers with 0 refunds till date. Draftss provides Graphic design & Landing Page UI/UX with code on a monthly subscription.
Initially, we built a minimal landing page with a decent portfolio (We had been running a design shop for more than 10 years and we had a good portfolio to show). We pushed the prototype website live within a week. To validate the idea we first published a Show IH post on IndieHackers and hurray! We received our first 4 customers. We had added the Experiment Plan at $29/per task thinking that our customer would want to try our services first and then opt for other superior plans although we didn’t saw any such behavior from our first few customers.
By then we were pretty sure that our productized service was filling a market gap. We tried reaching out to customers for feedback on our services who had previously tried design platforms like 99designs, Upwork, Fiverr, and were unhappy with the designer services. Each platform had their own issues. This was an important point where we considered adding many services and carved a path for future updates. We improvised our landing page, edited out our FAQ’s, added more designs to our portfolio, optimized images for faster load time, and many other UI changes to make the landing page more beautiful and crisp. We re-launched our services on several listing websites and blogs. The traffic picked up and we were consistently getting users who were interested in our services.
While the visitors to our landing page were flowing in, we were eventually hunted on ProductHunt. Within a few minutes, we were bombarded with visitors on our website. We were sitting handling live chat for more than 18 hours straight, trying to initiate a conversation with as many visitors as possible. We believe live chat with visitors on the website is the most effective medium for getting quick and actionable feedback on your product. For a span of 3 days, We got around 1500+ visits out of which we were able to convert 11 paying customers.
We received tons of feedback from our visitors and customers. Using this feedback we keep on improving our services. Within the course of 10 months, we tried connecting with many communities to find a product-market fit. We helped these communities with our experience and made some good connections. We eventually created a product where we started providing FREE landing page UI/UX feedbacks to founders (http://draftss.com/getfeedback). We have helped hundreds of founders in improvising their landing pages and are now inclined to create more open source projects that shall help the community.
For us, SoloKeys, it was via Kickstarter [1]. We have blogged for a couple months before the campaign, typically sharing on HN where we hit the front page 2-3 times. Overall we signed up 2.5K emails that then helped funding the campaign very quickly. Independently from a crowdfunding campaign or not, I think trying to generate some sort of buzz at a specific point in time can help amplifying your message.
Post-campaign, we launched Shopify + Amazon US stores. In a sense we reset from zero, because our product isn't recurring. I think the 3 key strategies to get the first 100 customers on the store have been: 1. speaking at a conference (clearly planned in advance), 2. Amazon US, because people can find you even if they don't know you, 3. again some blogging, for example I went back to all my major posts and added an update with a link to the store (example [2]), so new readers can find it.
[1] https://solokeys.com/kickstarter
[2] https://hackernoon.com/why-choosing-a-fido2-security-key-8cb0e5a1a71e
Edit: formatting
For my Chrome extension Checkbot (https://www.checkbot.io/), I got the idea when I was working as a freelance web developer on several websites at a time. I was doing a lot of manual checks for SEO, speed and security best practices, and wanted something to automate the process for me. I wanted a tool that could check many pages at the same time, check for many best practices, check localhost sites, check unlimited sites and let you recheck whenever you made a change. I couldn't find one at the time so I made my own.
I showed Checkbot in its early stages to several people I knew and after I had the feeling enough other people would find it useful I spent time packaging it into something I could try to sell. This included polishing the UX, creating a website and writing a web best practices guide which was a lot of work. I launched a free beta on reddit and Product Hunt which I got a lot of feedback from. After refining the product some more, I launched payment plans and now I'm slowly growing a paid customer base.
You have the order wrong. It should be customers, then idea, then product.
That’s how all the successful products I’ve worked on have done it. Someone was in an industry, saw a need, built a product, and sold it to old coworkers/friends/employers in that industry.