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New top story on Hacker News: Getting Users Is Hard

Getting Users Is Hard
41 by ryansam | 58 comments on Hacker News.
I'm building a mobile app to create and share social events with your friends. A social event would be going to the bar, house party, or meeting up for coffee. You can fill out a simple form (event name, description, date, time) and post to a feed for your friends to see. Your friends can notify you they're going by pressing the "attend" button. Right now I'm trying to solve the communication problem. Everyday you might meet up with your friends at the bar after work, invite them to lunch, coffee in the morning, or dinner in the afternoon. But you have to do the dance. You text everyone who you want to come, wait for them to reply and they may not even want to go. And for each person you invite you have to do the dance longer. This has many times wasted over an hour for me. So I propose a faster solution. If you want your friends to meet you at the bar, create an "Event". The event has a title of what the event is (e.g. "Going to the bar"). It has a description to get your friends excited (e.g. "$2 margaritas"). It has the address (e.g. "123 SomeBar St."). Lastly it has the time (e.g. "Tonight at 8pm"). As soon as you post it to the feed all of your friends get a notification that you just created a new event. They can then all tell you if they are going by hitting the "attend" button. Now I'm trying to get my first users. Yesterday was my first day. I made a spreadsheet of everyone I can message that live in my target area. My list is 82 people. Yesterday I contacted 24 people and got one person to sign up, I was hoping to get five. But most of the people I messaged didn't even respond. It's definitely a grind. I was wondering if anyone has any tips on how they got some of their first users. What was it like? Or any stories of how they got their first signs of growth. Also if you have this problem I could really use some feedback on my app. You can check it out by searching "bbook.io" in the Apple App Store. Thank you guys for reading! Ryan Sam

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