They're the ones hacking together a solution for more expensive.
I made a health recipe app. The early adopters were using blogs and posting recipes to Facebook.
I did e-commerce. The early adopters were hiring agents to go around selling their products or paying "personal shopper" fees for friends who were at a larger city to post certain goods to them.
I made a meditation app. The early adopters hired a consultant to make sure that employees sit quietly in front of a mirror for 20 minutes and then record their emotions into a notebook.
I made a digital punch card app for lockdown. Early adopters were taking selfies when they got into work and posting it to an FB group.
I worked on a sports social media app. Early adopters were selling bicycle tires in WhatsApp groups because people didn't trust the e-commerce sites. The only way to build trust was to hang around these people and talk about bicycles.
I posted on HN before heading to lunch (at my law firm) on day. Got tons of users that way (but not as many as I'd have gotten if I had an email signup form on the site...doh). I later learned it was the 9th-most-popular Show HN post ever. [1]
I also got some good traction posting on a couple subreddits, but I learned that you have to be very careful abiding by the rules about posting about your own stuff, and other details. After a couple posts with amazing trajectories that were shot down, I stopped even trying. I know some people have had more success by convincing their users to post there, which sidesteps much of the potential drama around self-promotion.
LinkedIn is the number one way for me to find early adopters. I love browsing LinkedIn and learning about new tech, and I think others do the same and like my content!
At its peak, I’ve received 10,000 views from LinkedIn in a week. I post interesting content every day, and I promote the latest happenings in my business and startup.
A lot of the AI community has migrated to LinkedIn after the collapse of Twitter/X for AI influencers.
You can check out my LinkedIn by searching “Josh agilend” in LinkedIn search :)
J
I recommend you post across these sites. 1. Hacker New 2. LinkedIn (Join the relevent groups and post in these groups) 3. ProductHunt (you can only post once) 4. IndieHackers 5. AppSumo 6. Reddit Groups
LinkedIn, when I worked on a B2B product
I promoted Ambiphone [0] (white noise/ambient sounds/music) on HN [1], Twitter and Reddit.
The HN post made the front page and got me the most traffic and feedback I'd had so far (about 6k visitors). It also resulted in articles on BoingBoing and Metalfloss, among others, which also sent a decent number of users.
The 1440 newsletter [2] also picked it up - just a small one-liner in a list of interesting links - and sent about 8k visitors in one day.
On Twitter it got picked up, unexpectedly by quite a lot of DJs. Turns out that a lot of DJs get tinnitus and white noise can be really helpful to mask it. So I got much less traffic from that but some really nice feedback on how useful it is. That also led to The Economist's podcast team contacting me and I ended up featuring in a piece about ambient music and white noise apps.
I did try ProductHunt and it got nowhere. It probably didn't help that I didn't really promote the launch, but it also got buried under a lot of AI projects. Ho hum.
User numbers have stabilised now at about 600-800 a day. I'm not really sure where to turn next - I hate constantly banging on about it on my personal Twitter and reposts of things that have got traction are discouraged on HN and Reddit (rightly so). I'm happy that it's got a decent userbase though.
[0]: https://ambiph.one
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856999
[2]: https://join1440.com/newsletter/florida-drug-imports-starsky...