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
Workedcommunityoutbound-sales
What they did
After the waitlist flopped, weeks of guerrilla marketing: a big push on Hacker News, manually scraping emails and posts, and reaching out with heartfelt messages ('Hey, I think you should use this'). Continued manual grinding from April to December with two people.
What happened
First ~100-500 paying users who gave feedback; ~$20K MRR by December, weeks away from running out of money.
- Stage
- launch
- Effort
- Founder + one engineer, ~8 months
In their words
The Superwall Podcast · Dan Vykhopen - This app makes $2m/year using this ridiculously easy strategy“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 to go pay and give us feedback.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Massive: Post 'if I built this, would anyone want it?' on LinkedIn before building8M impressions and 5,000 comments from ~500 connections
- Massive: 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
- Massive: Pitch the app as 'Tinder for jobs' instead of describing the AIFounder estimates 2-3x more views and better creator reply rates
- Massive: 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
- Massive: Post comedy skits aimed at college studentsCollege students didn't convert at all; skits miss the problem
- Massive: Open with 'Stop using LinkedIn to apply to jobs', not 'Indeed'LinkedIn hook: ~1M views, high conversion; Indeed: 11M views, only ~$20K MRR
- Massive: Make 80% of videos remakes of formats already going viral; 20% new ideas
- Massive: Relaunch your stalled UGC creator program with fresh energyAn 11M-view video in 4 days, but only ~$20K MRR; program died
- Massive: Scale creator videos from 500K to 3-4M views a weekNo more conversions than at 500K views a week
- Massive: Pay influencers a monthly retainer to post about the appGot views but few conversions; followers weren't job hunting
- Massive: Change your subscription pricing behind a hard paywallRevenue doubled; no details on what changed
- Massive: Use paid ads to learn what converts instead of guessing with organicRevenue up 50% from ads; method not described
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