Ask HN: How long did it take to get your first customer?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2011 where @brucedou convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 6 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 9 comments
The first time around, it was the day I opened the site, since the site was a store and I knew exactly where to get good free advertising for what I was selling.
These days, the apps I build are a lot more complex and targeted to very specific business use cases... and I'm lucky to get a couple signups in a month, despite nonstop Google/Bing PPC advertising.
With BugMuncher it was less than a day , and Hacker News is directly responsible.
I posted a Show HN, someone at The Next Web saw that and wrote and article about BugMuncher. On the back of that article I had 5 customers with in a day! Of which I think 4 are still paying customers :)
A couple days. I made about $16 before putting things on hold because I was too busy and because I needed to come back with a more scalable model.
But let me tell you, that first $16 is addicting.
Do you mean...
How long did it take to get your first customer?
-or-
How long did your first customer keep paying?
I am assuming the first.
About 2 weeks, my startup was targeted to students at a specific location.
Not much marketing was done; besides facebook and flyer distribution.