How to get your first 100 users

The first hundred users are the hardest hundred you will ever get, and nothing about how you get them scales. That is not a failure of the method. It is the method.

Below are the seven channels that actually work at this stage, with a realistic number beside each one, in the order worth doing them.

1. People you can already name

Twenty to forty users, and they arrive in a week.

Not a mass email. A list of everybody who has ever asked what you are working on, messaged individually, saying what you built and asking them to try it. Twenty personal messages beats a newsletter to two thousand, and the replies tell you what is broken before strangers find it.

The uncomfortable part is that this is the channel founders skip because it feels like begging. It is the highest converting channel you will ever have.

2. The community that already has the problem

Ten to fifty users, and the variance is enormous.

Find the subreddit, Discord or forum where people already complain about the thing you fixed. Read its rules. Then spend two weeks being useful in it without mentioning your product at all.

When you do post, post the thing you learned rather than the thing you sell. "I measured how long this takes across 40 tools" gets read. "Check out my new app" gets removed.

3. A launch

Twenty to two hundred, almost all in 48 hours, and most of them never come back.

Product Hunt is the biggest single day available, and the whole of it is decided by preparation: see how to launch on Product Hunt. If your product would be buried there, one of the smaller rooms will treat you better.

Treat the number this produces as vanity until you check how many were still there a week later.

4. Directories that leave a page behind

Five to thirty a month, forever, and it starts slow.

A launch is a day. A listing is a page that keeps answering a search. Ten good listings produce a steady trickle that compounds as the pages age, which is the opposite shape to a launch and is why you want both. The ranked list is in the best directories to submit your app.

5. Answering the question your product answers

Five to fifty a month, growing.

Somebody asked your exact question on Stack Overflow, Reddit or a forum two years ago and the answers are bad. Write a genuinely good answer. Mention your product once at the end, as a disclosure rather than a pitch.

These posts get found for years. It is slow, it is unglamorous, and it is the closest thing to free compounding traffic available to a product with no domain authority.

6. Writing the thing only you can write

Highly variable, occasionally enormous.

You now have data or experience nobody else has: what you measured building it, what you got wrong, what the numbers were. Publish that. It is the only content nobody else can produce, and it is what gets linked to, which is what eventually makes everything else on your site rank. See free backlinks for startups.

7. Doing something manual that does not scale

Ten to thirty, and the best retention of anything on this list.

Set up the first fifty accounts by hand. Import their data for them. Get on a call. Whatever the tedious version of onboarding is, do it personally until it hurts, then automate the part that hurt.

What not to do at this stage

Not this	Because
Paid ads	You do not know what converts yet
Cold email at scale	Burns the domain you need later
Buying a list of directories	A spam footprint, not traffic
Waiting for the redesign	Nobody is looking yet

The order, on one line

Message the people you know, be useful where the problem lives, launch once, list everywhere that leaves a page, answer old questions, publish what only you have, and do the manual thing.

That is roughly six weeks of work and it reliably produces a hundred users who can tell you why they stayed.

Start with the one that keeps working after you stop: submit your app and it gets a directory page and a written article, free, with a person reviewing it first.