Massive · B2C · AI job application app
Post on Hacker News and send heartfelt personal messages to scraped emails
First 100-500 paying users; ~$20K MRR after 8 months of grinding
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- launch
- Effort
- Founder + one engineer, ~8 months
In their words
Dan Vykhopen - This app makes $2m/year using this ridiculously easy strategy
Dan… As soon as we got the first subscription, I was like, "This is going to be a billion-dollar company." Like I know for a fact, like, you know, we've done B2B before, we've done different types of businesses, but as soon as we did that like first consumer sub, I was like, "This is fucking huge." The problem with that is, only about like half a percentage of the waitlist converted to even signing up. Like the waitlist did not convert at all.
DanNo one paid for it. No one cared. Everyone forgot about it, it seemed like. And that was heartbreaking because I was like, "What the hell did I do all this work for?" And so then the next few weeks were just literally guerrilla marketing, boots on the ground, trying to get as many people to sign up and pay as possible. At that time, it was Hacker News. I did a big push on Hacker News, I scraped emails manually, scraped posts, I reached out with like heartfelt messages like, "Hey, I think you should use this." And that's how we got our first like 100, maybe 500 users
Danto go pay and give us feedback. And then the next few months, up until probably December, from April to December, were just like manual grinding to I think it was maybe 20k MRR, like that. And it was me and one engineer, his name is Rohan. It was really, really hard. It was like at that point we had almost run out of money, you know, we were a few weeks away. Host: Is there anything you would do now with the knowledge you have now to change the waitlist strategy? Like do you think it's possible that you could have had a higher converting waitlist?
DanNo, I think waitlists are useless. I think it's good to signal intent. You don't need to like bring people into a waitlist. Like you should be just using that time to get people to pay. It's going to be harder, but it's going to give you more results, even if they're paying for some small version of your product, like get them to pay. It's so much more valuable than a waitlist. If I could do it all over again, I wouldn't do waitlists at all. I …
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More from this episode
- Post 'if I built this, would anyone want it?' on LinkedIn before building8M impressions and 5,000 comments from ~500 connections
- Collect a waitlist with LinkedIn posts like 'top 200 companies hiring now'40-50K sign-ups, but only ~0.5% signed up at launch and almost none paid
- Pitch the app as 'Tinder for jobs' instead of describing the AIFounder estimates 2-3x more views and better creator reply rates
- Check Stripe or RevenueCat after each viral video to see if it soldNow 3-5 viral videos a day and can't tell which ones convert
- Post comedy skits aimed at college studentsCollege students didn't convert at all; skits miss the problem
- Open with 'Stop using LinkedIn to apply to jobs', not 'Indeed'LinkedIn hook: ~1M views, high conversion; Indeed: 11M views, only ~$20K MRR
- Make 80% of videos remakes of formats already going viral; 20% new ideas
- Relaunch your stalled UGC creator program with fresh energyAn 11M-view video in 4 days, but only ~$20K MRR; program died
- Scale creator videos from 500K to 3-4M views a weekNo more conversions than at 500K views a week
- Pay influencers a monthly retainer to post about the appGot views but few conversions; followers weren't job hunting
- Change your subscription pricing behind a hard paywallRevenue doubled; no details on what changed
- Use paid ads to learn what converts instead of guessing with organicRevenue up 50% from ads; method not described
- Copy a proven onboarding from another app and focus on ads instead
- Run ads that name a very specific pain, like 'run 10+ miles with tight hips?'Converted Dan after 6 ads despite a painful checkout; ads live ~2 years
- Film a friend 'discovering' the app, with two faces and a moving cameraGoes viral consistently with one or two formats; widely copied
- Have a creator repeat one format for weeks, building on any 6K-view videoSame format went from 382 views to 1.7M; founder says it converts very well
- Recreate real people's job-offer videos with actors; sell in the commentsDan calls it illegal; commenters caught on and videos are being taken down
- Grow a simple app purely on paid ads, without outside funding$200-300M a year, 30% margins, doubling yearly
- Sign up ~100,000 TikTok Shop affiliates for a product everyone can useDan guesses nine-figure revenue
- Front your bootcamp with an AI quiz funnel offering 100% scholarshipsRevenue tripled in under a quarter from a $50M/year base
- Sell the same note-taking app to older users instead of students~3x TurboLearn's revenue on 1/5-1/6 of the downloads
Tags: hacker-news, manual-outreach, first-users, scraping