From 0 to first 200 clients by Noah Kagan

Many of us have wasted time and money on businesses that eventually fail.

Back in 2010, when Noah Kagan started his own business, he almost made the same mistake.
But his friend forced him to validate his idea.

That validation resulted in his first 200 paying customers.
This is a story about AppSumo. Now it’s a thriving business with almost a Million email subscribers.

So how did it happen:

1. As a frequent Redditor, he noticed people were using the imgur app very often and that there was an imgur Pro account.
1.2. So he figured he could sell imgur Pro at a special price to Redditors.

2. He sent an email to the founder of imgur to ask if he’d do a promo at a heavily discounted price with Noah. He said “SURE!”
2.2. So he had a product to sell but no customers or site.

3. To get the customers, he cold emailed one of the founders of Reddit and invited him to breakfast. He agreed!
3.2. Noah asked if Reddit would provide some free ad space since he was promoting something valuable to Redditors. He generously agreed.

4. Noah created a landing page and connected it to PayPal.

5. The reddit ads went live.

6. He got 200 sales and manually sent the buyers a code to redeem their imgur Pro account.

Source: appsumo.com/how-appsumo-was-built-for-50/