They gave away a free feedback-collection community before Canny existed as a paid product, then converted engaged members once they built the SaaS tool.

“We gave away a free version of a product, a user feedback community.”

Andrew's former team, React at Facebook, adopted Canny to track feedback for React Native, and a handful of the many people who had left feedback for React went on to use Canny for their own products.

“Out of the thousands of users who left feedback for React, a handful of them ended up using our product to collect user feedback for their own product.”

Landing a well-known internal user exposed the product to a large pool of already-engaged, relevant people for free, though the founders describe this as luck rather than a repeatable tactic.

“we got super lucky here”

Canny launched publicly on Product Hunt in March 2017.

“We officially launched Canny in March 2017.”

Product Hunt's audience skews toward tech workers, matching Canny's small-software-company target buyer.

“Product Hunt was a great place for us to launch, as the majority of their users work in tech.”

They shifted to ranking organically (and via paid search) for the queries a prospective buyer would search when actively looking for a solution.

“The easiest way to acquire customers via inbound is to get in front of them when they're actively looking for a solution”

Blog posts that performed well on Hacker News, plus a presence on Quora, drove qualified traffic during the ramen-profitability growth stage.

“We wrote blog posts, some of which were well-received on Hacker News”

They ran paid ads and landing pages targeted at buyer-intent keywords.

“We set up paid advertisements and landing pages, focusing heavily on buyer-intent keywords”

A "Powered by Canny" badge shown on customers' own feedback pages acted as a self-reinforcing viral loop; the founders named it as one direct source of their next 50 customers.

“and through "Powered by Canny" (our viral channel)”