Ask HN: What weird or scrappy things did you do to get your first users?

11 points by preston-kwei 16 hours ago

Hi everyone,

I’m building Persona, a platform to delegate email scheduling to AI. Lately, I’ve been working hard to get those first users on board, but it’s been quite challenging.

I’ve already tried the typical strategies that everybody talks about: cold email, LinkedIn InMail, careful targeting, decent copy. It’s mostly been a dead end. Low open rates, almost no replies.

At this point, I’m not looking for the usual advice you see in blog posts or on reddit. I’m specifically curious about unconventional or non-obvious things that actually worked for you early on, especially things that felt a bit scrappy, weird, or counterintuitive at the time.

If you’ve been through this phase, what genuinely worked and got you your first users?

superdisk - 13 hours ago

I worked on a language learning site and in order to try to onboard tutors, I wrote a script that scraped the Preply tutor list, which gave first names, pictures, and a YouTube account link.

From there I made a spreadsheet and spent hours googling names and trying to match up pictures to faces, sending messages asking if they'd like to be a part of a pilot program on my platform.

Got quite a few people willing to try it out :) but sadly the startup didn't succeed. Fun times though.

preston-kwei - 11 hours ago

Interesting! I bet now with AI, you can create an agent to do this. I'm glad that worked, however, we're targeting founders of b2b saas companies who are early stage, and that is quite a broad search.
- Grisu_FTP - 9 hours ago
  
  if someone annoyed me with ai like this, i wouldnt even waste the energy on an AI summary.
  On the other hand, im probably not good enough at anything to even be worth the waste of energy to annoy me.

Jeetu456 - an hour ago

I went through the same funnel, but no response

PretzelJudge - 13 hours ago

I like this quote:

> First time founders are obsessed with product. Second time founders are obsessed with distribution.

I have personally grown an app from zero to 100k+ users, with no marketing budget. I don't have a magic formula, but i can say in hindsight that the first 5 users were harder to get than the next 999,995.

Here was my secret: I begged. Finding 5 people to actually use my product was soooo freakin hard. Once I got to ~100, organic growth started to take over, but things like responding to emails, fixing bugs and looking into new features right away make early users personally like you and more likely to tell their friends.

The hard part is finding the right people at the right time. I googled "Persona email scheduling" and found https://usepersona.app/, so I'll assume that is you. I don't know much about your product, but i assume you are targeting people who need to schedule lots of meetings. I have a few notes:

1) Your pricing is crazy. $660/year is a lot for automated meeting scheduling. Your comp should be Calendly which is closer to $10/month.

2) What problem are you trying to solve? Calendly seems pretty close to the perfect solution for one-on-one meetings. This seems to be for scheduling larger groups. Make that clear at the top of the page. If you are directly competing with Calendly, then just make that clear.

3) I'm not the audience, but think about who really has this problem. For me, 90% of my group meetings are scheduled within my company and we use Google calendar to find times that work. I dont do this enough that I'd feel compelled to try out a new product. Sales people schedule lots of 1-on-1 calls, but not sure that group calls is a big issue. So think about who this is really for. In general, just about the only time i will try a new product is if it provokes my curiosity (not gonna happen for a meeting scheduling bot) or it is solving a problem I need solved right now. Some products are really great, but finding the right person at the right time is a huge challenge. This is why I brought up the quote at the beginning. The right product with no distribution is very hard to get off the ground. I'd say that your early goal should be to find power users if possible... if you try to spread too wide of a net, you will probably fail. Better to have a few people who love your app than a larger group of people who think it's nice.

4) Let's say you do get a few users. Well, you are an email scheduling tool, so distribution is actually built on. On your free or basic plans, you can have a banner at the bottom of outgoing emails that says "This email was drafted by Persona, the tool for automated emails". Now you have free marketing on every email that goes out. Same way that my calendly link is free marketing for calendly. If people want that banner removed, they can upgrade their plan.

Again, take this advice for what it's worth, which is very little, since 1) I dont know your market well, and 2) what worked for me may not work for you.

preston-kwei - 11 hours ago

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I really like that quote -- hopefully I start another company and think about distribution straight off the bat. Can I ask what the product was? Even just a general idea. And, how did you find the emails.
I've found myself procrastinating a lot when it comes to trying to acquire users. It's a lot more fun to build features than it is to do cold outreach. Yes, you found the site :).
1) Understandable, let me reply to the other 3 points to see if pricing makes sense after that.
2) We’re not trying to replace Calendly. Calendly is great for link-based 1:1 scheduling, but many execs still operate primarily over email and actively avoid sending links. Persona is an email delegation layer that handles inbound scheduling end-to-end: proactive follow-ups, coordinating across long threads, and dynamically rescheduling when higher-priority contacts come in. That distinction should definitely be clearer on the landing page.
3) Fair point that you’re not the audience. We’re focused on founders and execs who spend a meaningful amount of time coordinating meetings over email. For them, the pain isn’t finding a time once, it’s the constant back-and-forth, follow-ups, and reshuffling priorities. Not everyone can afford a human EA, and link-based scheduling tools can’t handle that level of personalization (talking to an investor is very different than a friend). Research we’ve seen shows execs still spend 6+ hours per week on scheduling.
4) That’s a good point, and we’re thinking along similar lines. Since Persona operates directly over email, there’s a natural distribution loop there, similar to Calendly links, and we plan to lean into that more deliberately. Would you be bothered if you were on our 23/mo plan and still had a banner there? Also, do you think there should be a free tier beyond the 14 day trial?
Thanks again for taking the time to respond.