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Comment by abrimo | Hacker News Reader

I've just started a company with one of my friends and now we are working on getting our first customers. I read a lot of articles about the topic and it seems everyone faces the same challenges. So I was thinking of creating a place where startups could post their upcoming or newly released products and early adopters could happily be their first customers.

I had some time yesterday so I created a site for it: http://bemyfirstcustomer.com/

You essentially just add your product and some sort of discount or offer and people will register their interest. Then you can just contact those people. It's pretty informal, not like those coupon sites that cost money but hopefully it will help people generate leads (if enough people use it).

What does everyone think? Does this already exist somewhere else?

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This could be pretty cool if you keep the noise down by pre-approving products in some way. I'm not sure if people would just go to the site to try to bargain hunt, hard to say really. Seems that a mix of offering quality products that are paid for by the site and offered intermittently, getting a few sponsored accounts or just having really decent products could promote return visitors. Some sort of newsletter could go a long way as well.

Yea it's hard to know how it will end up. I kind of want to keep it open so any startup can advertise their product/service. Instead of a groupon clone where you have to have some awesome pre-approved deal to get listed.

Thanks for the suggestion, I've just added a field for you to put your email address to hear about new offers.

Interesting idea. I agree with the other comments that some UI love would be nice.

At first glance, this reminded me of early adopter feedback sites like AlphaList.co, BetaCandy.com & LeanThingy.com, though they are geared more for feedback and you are more for actual users.

The name threw me off a bit. I like it, but I'm guessing it's not meant to be literal, yea? As in, all of the services listed have 0 customers and after I sign up and become one, they will not be listed anymore. In that line of thought, is there any criteria to how & when a company will be removed from the list?

In the "I'll take it" dialogue box, the Offer could perhaps be better off as plain text instead of as a disabled field. I thought I could click on that and edit the offer when I first saw it.

Very neat idea. I signed up for BugCam, so it's already working! :)

Thanks for the feedback. Yea the UI could use some work and a nice logo would be good too, I'll see if I can get that done soon.

Yea it's not meant to be literal, the companies that post offers are able to disable them whenever they want. So it's really about getting your first few customers I guess. This being a spur of the moment sort of thing, the name was a tad humorous as well.

Good points, and glad BugCam got an early signup - I really hope it helps people discover cool new products.

Tagging, tagging, tagging.

I'd use this if I could somehow subscribe to an RSS feed of just categories of things I'm interested in.

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