From 0 to 5 Users Or How I Got Started

5 users may not sound impressive, but the point is not the number, it is about the journey. The number can change, funily enough it changed as I am writing this (read bellow).

I was thinking how to start this post... Let's maybe start with my past experience for acquiring users. In 2022 me and friend of mine we created a blockchain SaaS for holder verification (I promise it was not a scam), we built on blockchains that were newly introduced and we partnered with a guy who managed a couple of communities in Discord and he joined the project...

Shortly after that we hit 20K users for our SaaS but we eventually got outcompeted by VC backed companies, we lost momentum and our SaaS just died. After that, I didn't have any attempts for replicating this, I focused on B2B and landing contracts because you need to make some money to live, right?

But now I realized that the growing of my previous "successful" SaaS, it wasn't about me. I was not the person who was the driving force behind the growth. And lately I realized that I want to learn how to grow things.

Now it is getting easier to start any type of software related project because tools like Cursor and Windsurf are making the development easier than ever. So let's get to the point, what I launched and how I got the first 5 users:

I got this idea for a platform like ProductHunt where you launch only open source projects. I started developing it maybe 2 weeks ago but I didn't spent any meaningful development time, like it was really something in the order of hours spent just vibe coding with Windsurf (I am Cursor user btw, but I wanted to test Windsurf).

And then it was time to launch, I didn't have luck because someone domain sniped the name and got the domain that I wanted before me, more on that here: https://kill-saas.com/posts/domain-snipe A little bit unfortunate situation, but I said to myself, why not using this as a story? Like in life and in general, you will always face some kind of struggle, some kind of setback, and that's just part of the way the world works.

It is not only enough to develop and write, you also need to post. And for my project there was only two good places to post. One of them was Hacker News and the other place was Reddit.

So here is how my firsts 3 posts on HackerNews went:

Really nothing too special, but at least I got more than "1" upvote, so this is enough for a dopamine boost and some kind of validation that there could be something there. For the analytics, I'm using Posthog and I started seeing that people started visiting my tool and someone even posted a project and that's the whole point, someone using it!

And for the analytics it ain't about stalking people and stuff like that, it is about seeing people interacting with your tool, this is boosting your confidence, I think it is something like a concert / music show that we have through internet, because you are the singer and you want to see your crowd and you don't want to have a wall between you and your people right?

So for the analytics I like to check the session replays:

And the story of the domain snipe I shared on r/selfhosted subreddit (I posted on other subreddits, but this is the post that took off) So it is a short intro and a link to the blog post.

It is funny because a user with this nickname profile revealed my evil intentions 😀

But honesly how I am supposed to grow in other way? Like there is only one option: don't talk about yourself and the stuff you do, but this is so limiting, like at least you can do it in a honest way and have a meanigful story behind everything.

I went to sleep, woke up and I saw the dashboard in PostHog, and it felt great, +1.5K visitors. And I think there is some kind of magic in Reddit, because if you do things right you are going to get the eyeballs.

I went to my backend to check how many users are there (excluding my profile) as I am writing this and they are not actually 5 users, there are 6, one more signed uped as I was writing.

The conversion rate it is not that high, maybe it could be to a lot of reasons, but in the end this is a open project as of now, ongoing effort, it is not optimized and stuff like that.

So in conclusion for going from 0 to 1+ users I think you generally they will be these steps:

• development / deployment
• craft stories and post them
• analyze & think about new ideas
• have fun!

The last part imho is pretty important, my tool is free so I don't care about money right now, it is about the excitment and the journey! I wish everyone can experience the joy of acquring users!