This is how I got my first 100 users. In the process, I accidentally made my site the front page of Hacker News for around four hours. This is the story of NeetoCal. I built @NeetoCal , a calendly alternative. The launch didn’t go as planned. Despite putting effort into tweeting and posting on LinkedIn for two months, I saw little to no traction. It was disheartening to see that no one seemed to engage with my product. I was not big on product hunt launches. I had heard that to have a proper Product Hunt launch, one needs to spend around four weeks preparing for it. I didn't want to spend that energy, so I said no to the launch of the product hunt. Thanks to my team members, I gingerly accepted the idea of having a product hunt launch. This decision turned out to be a game-changer for NeetoCal. In the Product Hunt writeup, I mentioned that NeetoCal was entering a crowded market as the 31st scheduling software provider. I listed all 30 existing competitors, illustrating that scheduling software has become a commodity. My key point was that if there are 30 players in the market, it's a commodity. If it's a commodity, then why is the price not falling? In my opinion, all 30 players were charging quite high. The results from the Product Hunt launch were fantastic. NeetoCal gained many new customers and received valuable feedback. Here is the product hunt page if you want to see it. The next day, I wrote a blog post reflecting on the success of our Product Hunt launch. To my astonishment, this blog made it to the front page of Hacker News and stayed there for 2 to 3 hours. This exposure led to even more signups. In short, I had no idea what would work. I had written off both product hunt and hacker news and was working hard on LinkedIn and Twitter. I tried working with influencers for NeetoCal. However, I lost all my money on them. Here is the list of influencers I had contacted. I've hidden their name. Information about their number of followers and how much they'll charge is mentioned. I worked with 7/8 influencers. I paid them money as shown on the Google sheet. Result was NIL. Nada, Zilch. All the number of followers that I saw on LinkedIn and Instagram were bots. I didn't get my money's worth, so I stopped doing influencer marketing for NeetoCal. After that, I started working with a person to send cold emails. I paid him $1200/month. In four months, I got less than 100 free signups from cold emails, which cost me $5000. Yes, for spending $5000, all I got was less than 100 free signups. Was I fooled to continue for four months? That is probably true, but the guy kept saying that cold emails work on the second and third touchpoints. After four months, I fired the marketing person. Next I wrote about my pricing philosophy. I was not even trying to market it; it was a hit. Lots of people visited that page.