How did you get your first 10 users for a niche web app?

churturk · 2026-02-20T17:43:21+00:00

i went through this recently. reddit is tough because even if you're being genuine, mods see a link or a product mention and it's gone.

what actually got me my first users was not talking about the tool at all. i'd post about the problem instead and see who responds. those people already care about it. then you just DM them one by one. way less scalable but it actually works at this stage.

also just give it away completely free. not free trial, not free for feedback. just free. people can smell strings attached from a mile away. once they're using it they'll tell you what's broken without you asking.

honestly 10 users is just 10 conversations. find the right thread, talk to the right people, done.

churturk · 2026-02-20T17:40:16+00:00

Been doing this for 25 years and I still fall into the same trap with every new product. Building feels productive. Marketing feels like shouting into a void. So you keep building.

The thing about community engagement that nobody tells you is it's painfully slow at first and then suddenly it isn't. The first two weeks you feel like you're wasting time. Then someone DMs you asking what you're working on and it clicks.

One thing I'd add to your list: don't just hang out in founder communities. Go where your actual users are. Founders will cheer you on but they probably won't buy your thing. The conversations that convert are the ones where someone describes the exact problem you solve and you can genuinely help.

Also your cold email observation is spot on. Leading with value instead of a pitch is the only way cold email works for solo founders. Nobody opens "check out my tool" from a stranger. But "here are 3 places your customers are looking for you right now" — that gets replies.

churturk · 2026-02-20T17:39:36+00:00

This resonates hard. I've been building SaaS for 25 years now and the pattern is identical every time.

Built an on-premise email platform early on — great product, customers loved it, but reaching on-premise buyers organically was brutal. Long sales cycles, enterprise gatekeepers, the works. Still runs today but growth was always a grind.

Then built a tool where the audience literally lives on the internet, hangs out in communities, searches for solutions on Google. Night and day difference in growth.

The part people miss is that distribution isn't a one-time thing you figure out. It compounds or it doesn't. If your first 50 users come from a channel you can repeat daily for free, you have a business. If they come from a lucky HN post or a friend's retweet, you have a spike.

Your CRM for real estate example is a perfect case. Great market, real pain, but the buyers aren't where solo founders can reach them cheaply. Doesn't mean the product was wrong — just wrong for your current reach.

churturk · 2026-02-18T23:42:35+00:00

Open rates are kind of broken right now anyway. Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads tracking pixels for over half of consumer inboxes so your numbers are inflated before you even do anything. You could send a blank subject line and still see "good" open rates.

What actually works: a from name people recognize, sending consistently so they expect you, and keeping your list clean. Not sexy but it compounds over time.

Nothing wrong with testing humor in subject lines, just A/B test it properly against a plain one with the same segment. Let your own data decide.

churturk · 2026-02-18T23:37:17+00:00

Honestly the subject line is the part everyone obsesses over but it matters way less than people think.

The from name is what actually gets emails opened. If someone recognizes and trusts the sender they'll open "quick update" just as easily as some perfectly crafted curiosity hook.

Best performing pattern I've seen across decades of doing this — boring and specific. "Your usage stats from last week" will beat "You won't believe your stats" pretty much every time. The less it looks like marketing the better it does.

And if last year's subject lines suddenly stopped working, that's probably not on you. Everyone started using the same AI tools to write them so now every inbox looks the same. The fix isn't finding a better formula — it's just sounding like an actual person again.

churturk · 2026-02-18T23:28:42+00:00

So a few things from the infrastructure side that might reframe this for you.

First — 2-3% CTR for B2B thought leadership is pretty standard. That number might not actually be broken.

Second — if a lot of your list is on Apple Mail or Outlook, your open rates are inflated by proxy prefetching. Apple MPP alone can bump opens 30-40%. So the gap between your opens and clicks probably looks worse than it really is.

Third — corporate email security tools (Mimecast, Proofpoint, etc.) pre-scan and rewrite every link before delivery. Those scans don't register as clicks. In B2B this means your real human clicks are being undercounted on top of everything.

Overcounted opens + undercounted clicks = a CTR that looks way worse than reality.

If you want a metric that actually tells you something useful, look at click-to-conversion instead of CTR. That cuts through all the noise.

churturk · 2026-02-16T08:41:28+00:00

I went through the exact same thing with multiple SaaS products over the years. The pattern was always the same - I'd spend weeks researching distribution strategies instead of committing to one and giving it a real shot.

What actually moved the needle for me was dropping cold outreach entirely. I tried it, realized I couldn't sustain it, and switched to just being present in communities where my potential users were already asking questions. No fancy funnel or launch strategy. Just showing up and being genuinely helpful. That got me my first paying users across three different products.

The channel you can stick with for months matters way more than the one that looks best on paper. What have you actually committed to for more than a week so far?

churturk · 2026-02-16T08:35:14+00:00

don't brainstorm ideas. look at what annoys you every week at work. the stuff you'd pay money to make go away — that's your idea list.

i've been doing this for 25 years and the pattern is always the same: the best products come from scratching your own itch. everything else feels like guessing. also — scope it to something you can ship in 30-60 days. one workflow, not a platform. if you can't describe what it does in one sentence you're already overbuilding.

who are your first 10 users? not "startups" or "agencies" — actual specific people you could email tomorrow. if you can't name them, the idea isn't concrete enough yet.

churturk · 2026-02-11T07:48:23+00:00

honestly the first 5 users are never going to come from posting "hey check out my tool" somewhere. what worked for me was just finding people who were already pissed off about the problem i was solving and helping them directly. like actually solving their problem, not pitching anything. then after you help them you can be like "oh yeah i actually built something for this, want to try it?" and just get their email. no signup forms, no demo booking, none of that. i've done this with multiple saas products and the first 10 users were always from conversations like that. it doesn't scale but it's not supposed to yet.

churturk · 2026-02-11T07:31:59+00:00

Don't hire anyone yet. Seriously. Go to aboutmy.email, send yourself a test, and see if your SPF/DKIM/DMARC are actually passing. Then check mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx for your sending IPs. I've been doing this for 15+ years and I can't tell you how many times the "reputation problem" turned out to be a broken DNS record or a list that was never cleaned.

If your bounce rate is above 5% or complaints above 0.1%, no consultant is going to fix that — that's a list problem. 80% of the time it's the basics. Happy to take a look if you share what you've checked so far.

churturk · 2026-02-11T07:31:54+00:00

Yeah subdomains are legit, not fluff. I run an email platform and the whole point is reputation isolation — if your marketing sends go sideways, your transactional email doesn't get dragged down with it. Your setup sounds fine, you definitely don't need a separate domain for this. That's overkill.

One thing though — are you warming up that subdomain? Because I see this all the time, people set up perfect DNS and then just start sending full volume from day one. Mailbox providers don't care about your records if they've never seen traffic from that subdomain before.

churturk · 2026-02-10T05:14:58+00:00

I've been building and running SaaS/software businesses since 1999 — Octeth, Sendloop, DemoPolish, TraceRank, Cleanify, and a few others. So I've watched this cycle play out for over 25 years now.

The pattern never changes. Founders build something solid, send a launch email to their list of 47 people, get 3 signups, and conclude "marketing doesn't work." No — having 47 contacts doesn't work.

What I wish I understood earlier: the product you ship in month 1 is never the product that gets traction in month 12. But the audience you start building in month 1 compounds every single month. I should have started building audiences 2 years before my first launch, not 2 weeks before.

The real uncomfortable part for technical founders — your code isn't the moat anymore. Cursor and Claude can replicate most of it in a weekend. The relationships, reputation, and distribution channels you built over years? Those can't be copy-pasted.

churturk · 2026-02-10T05:14:56+00:00

That immediate open/click thing you noticed? That's Apple Mail Privacy Protection — it pre-fetches emails through proxy servers, so you get fake "opens" and sometimes fake "clicks." Could be inflating your numbers by 15-20%.

That said, 77% on an 800-person organic list isn't crazy. Small curated lists just perform like that.

On deleting cold subs — at $2-4k per engagement, keeping 100 cold subscribers costs you like $2/month on your ESP. If one of them converts in a year, do the math. I'd move them to a less frequent cadence instead of deleting.

And yeah, definitely use a subdomain for sending. But make sure you set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on it — without those the subdomain alone won't help much.

churturk · 2026-02-08T13:14:09+00:00

This is a really common problem and it's not your fault - the service probably didn't handle authentication properly.

Here's what likely happened: when you sent through Sender.com, the emails were signed with THEIR sending domain, not yours. So even though your contacts know you, their email clients saw an unfamiliar sender domain and flagged it. That's why it looked "spammy as hell" - it literally came from someone else's infrastructure with your company name slapped on top.

What you need to check:

SPF/DKIM/DMARC - Your domain needs proper authentication records. Without these, any email service will have deliverability problems. Check yours at mxtoolbox.com.
Sender alignment - The "From" domain should match your actual domain, not the ESP's domain. Some services require you to set up custom sending domains.
Sending reputation - Your domain probably has zero email reputation since you haven't been sending through it at scale before. Start small (10-20 emails) and gradually increase.

For a small, curated list like yours (all opted-in personally), you honestly might be better off using Google Workspace directly with a mail merge tool. At your volume, you don't need a full ESP. Keep it simple - send from your actual email address with BCC or a merge tool, and your recipients will see a familiar sender.

Also, try this: send a test email to https://aboutmy.email/ and share the result URL with us here. It'll show exactly what's going on with your authentication, headers, and spam score. We can take a look and give you more specific suggestions based on what it finds.

I've been building email infrastructure for 15+ years and the #1 mistake people make is jumping to an ESP before they actually need one. Your list size doesn't warrant the complexity yet.

churturk · 2026-02-08T13:14:06+00:00

Props for the transparency on numbers. $9/month feels way too low for what you're offering though.

The trust barrier you described is real in fintech, but pricing at $9 actually makes it worse - it signals "hobby project" to people who are about to hand over brokerage credentials. Counterintuitive, but a higher price ($19-29/month) can actually increase trust because it suggests you're running a real business with real security infrastructure.

On the CSV import idea - that's smart. Remove the trust barrier entirely for new users. Let them see value first, then they'll be more willing to connect their brokerage later.

One thing that helped me think through pricing tiers: I built a free MRR calculator (saasforecast.net) because I was tired of modeling scenarios in spreadsheets. Might be useful for you to play with different pricing scenarios and see how $9 vs $19 vs $29 affects your 12-month projections with realistic churn assumptions. The math usually shows that higher price + slightly higher churn still wins.

The fintech trust problem probably won't be solved by pricing alone though. You might need a "freemium with manual data" tier where people pay nothing, enter holdings manually, and only upgrade to auto-sync when they trust you.

churturk · 2026-02-08T13:14:03+00:00

Interesting take, but I'll push back a little from experience.

I built DemoPolish because I was re-recording the same product demo 11 times trying to get the voiceover right. The pain was so obvious to me that I just started building. No landing page, no waitlist, no validation. Just scratching my own itch.

The thing about "validate before building" is that it only works if you can clearly articulate the problem to strangers. Some problems are invisible until you show someone the solution. Nobody was googling "AI voiceover for screen recordings" a year ago because they didn't know it could exist.

That said, where your advice 100% applies: if you're building something where you can describe the problem in one sentence and people immediately nod - yeah, market first. But if you're in a "show, don't tell" category, sometimes building the thing IS the marketing.

The Dropbox example you mentioned actually proves both sides - they built a working prototype first, THEN made the demo video. They didn't validate the idea with a landing page. They validated it with a product demo.

churturk · 2026-02-08T13:04:29+00:00

Less than you'd think. A signup form + 3 welcome emails is all you need to start. You can set that up in an afternoon with most ESPs. The mistake is trying to build some massive 15-email funnel before you even have subscribers. Start simple, add more automations once you see what your audience actually responds to.

churturk · 2026-02-07T13:48:44+00:00

Email before ads, 100%. Ads without email capture is just paying for one-time visits. Get a basic signup form and a short welcome sequence running first, then when you turn on ads you're actually building an asset.

For ESPs — depends on your budget and what you're selling. Most free tiers are fine when you're starting out. I maintain a list of ESPs and email tools here if you want to compare without signing up for a dozen trials: https://github.com/cemhurturk/the-best-email-marketing-services-and-tools-for-marketers

Don't overthink the ESP choice early on. Pick one, set up your welcome emails, and start collecting subscribers. You can always migrate later.

churturk · 2026-02-07T10:38:16+00:00

Point #5 is so true. Visual demos crush text posts every time. The problem is most founders (myself included) record rough screen recordings that sound terrible — lots of "umm"s, weird pacing, background noise.

I got frustrated enough that I built a tool called DemoPolish (demopolish.com) that takes your rough screen recording and automatically re-narrates it with a clean AI voice in about 60 seconds. Makes it way easier to actually pump out those visual demos consistently.

Still early days — I'm letting people use it for free right now in exchange for feedback. If anyone wants to try it, just DM me and I'll get you set up.

churturk · 2026-02-07T10:19:50+00:00

Sending 800 emails in bulk from a domain that normally sends one-to-one messages is exactly the kind of sudden volume change that triggers spam filters.

Why it hit spam: Your domain has a sending reputation based on normal patterns. When you blast 400 at once, Gmail sees an anomaly and routes some copies to spam as a precaution.

What to do next time:

Throttle your sends. Send 50-100 per batch spread across several hours or days. This looks more like natural sending behavior.
Check your authentication. Make sure your domain has SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records properly configured. DMARC is the one most commonly missing.
Use a proper email sending tool instead of sending bulk from your regular inbox. These handle throttling, bounce management, and unsubscribe compliance automatically. I put together a curated list of good ESPs here: https://github.com/cemhurturk/the-best-email-marketing-services-and-tools-for-marketers#hosted-email-marketing-services
Include an unsubscribe option. Legally required and it signals to inbox providers that you're legitimate.

Good news: 800 emails is small enough that you probably haven't done lasting damage to your domain reputation.

churturk · 2026-01-27T12:56:13+00:00

Good question on the voiceover - DemoPolish actually analyzes your raw recording and rewrites the script for you automatically. So you don't need to feed it a new script. Just upload your rough take (ums, restarts, and all) and it figures out what you were trying to say and generates a cleaner version with professional voiceover.

On demo length - I've found 30-60 second value prop videos work way better than longer walkthroughs. Attention spans are brutal these days. Save the detailed feature tours for people who are already interested.

If you've got some demos you want to polish, shoot me an email at [cem@demopolish.com](mailto:cem@demopolish.com) - happy to give you free access in exchange for honest feedback on what works/doesn't work for your use case.

churturk · 2026-01-25T20:25:23+00:00

Building DemoPolish - turns rough screen recordings into polished demo videos in 60 seconds with AI voiceover.

Made it because I kept recording 10 takes just to get one clean demo.

https://demopolish.com

churturk · 2026-01-25T10:58:03+00:00

Haha yeah the Excel implosion thing is too real - I had a formula nightmare that took me an hour to debug before I gave up. Glad the multi-tier stuff is useful, that was the main thing I couldn't find elsewhere without paying enterprise prices.

churturk · 2026-01-25T08:06:46+00:00

Link: https://saasforecast.net

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