Getting your first 100 users on your own

The first 100 are the hardest and they're mostly manual. Every guide that tells you to "build in public" is describing something that works once you already have a few hundred followers. Here's the version for when you have none.

Before anything: can you tell who arrived?

Put analytics on before you promote anything. Plausible's free trial, or GA4 if you must, but something.

You need to know which of these efforts did anything, because you'll only have the energy to do about 4 of them properly and you want to pick the right 4.

Also check your site works on a phone. Most of what follows sends people from a phone.

The ones that work

Answer the question your product answers, where it's already being asked. Search Reddit, Stack Overflow, the relevant forum, for people describing your problem in the last month. Answer properly, without mentioning your thing. Mention it on the second or third exchange, or when someone asks what you'd use.

Slow. Genuinely works. The people who arrive this way actually use the product, which is more than you can say for most launch traffic.

Ship it to one specific community rather than the internet. "I built a thing" on X gets nothing. The same post in a Discord for the exact hobby your tool serves gets 20 users and 4 pieces of feedback that change what you build next.

Find the 3 places your users already gather. Be a member for a fortnight before you post.

Write the thing you'd have searched for. Not "introducing my product". The problem, worked through properly, with your tool mentioned once where it naturally fits. This is the only one that compounds, and it's why it's worth starting early even though it takes months.

Ask 10 people directly. Email, DM, whatever. People you know who have the problem. This feels awful and gets a better conversion rate than everything else combined.

The ones that mostly don't

Product Hunt. A spike, then nothing. Worth doing for the backlink and the badge. Don't plan around it. The people who do well there have been building an audience for a year first.

Hacker News. A lottery. Good odds if your thing is technical and genuinely interesting, near zero otherwise. Post at 8am Eastern on a weekday, use a plain descriptive title, and don't ask for upvotes.

Paid ads. At your stage you don't know your conversion rate, your retention, or your message. You'll spend £200 learning things a conversation with 5 users would have told you.

Cold DMs at scale. Gets you banned and makes you feel grubby. The 10 targeted ones above are a different thing entirely.

The unglamorous middle

Once you have 20 users, most of your effort should go into talking to them rather than finding more.

Email every single one personally. Not a newsletter, an actual email that mentions something specific about how they used it. Ask one question: what nearly stopped you using this?

You'll get maybe a 30% reply rate at this size, which is a luxury you'll never have again. Those replies are worth more than the next 80 users.

Directories

There are hundreds of launch directories and submitting to them is a boring afternoon that's worth having. Expect a handful of visitors from most, a few dozen from the bigger ones, and a slow trickle of referral links that help your search visibility.

Do them in one sitting with a text file of your name, tagline, description and screenshot ready to paste. Don't turn it into a project.

A realistic timeline

If you're starting cold with no audience:

• Week 1: 5 to 20 users, all people you contacted directly
• Month 1: 50ish, mostly from one community that liked it
• Month 3: 100 to 200, if you kept talking to people

Anyone telling you they went 0 to 10,000 in a fortnight had an audience, got lucky, or is selling you a course.

The bit that decides it

100 users who don't come back is a worse position than 10 who use it weekly, because the first number will convince you the thing works.

Watch returning visitors, not total signups. If nobody comes back, stop promoting and go and ask the ones who left what went wrong. More traffic into a leaky product is just a faster way to burn through your addressable audience.