How to get your first 100 users

The first hundred users don’t come from a growth strategy. They come one at a time, from places where you can talk to people directly. We read how founders on Indie Hackers say they got theirs. These are individual accounts, some of them a few years old, so take them as examples and not as rules. They do point the same way.

Start where the problem is discussed

One founder tracked where each of their first 100 users came from. Sixty came from Reddit, with Discord second and Indie Hackers third. The product was an app for powerlifters, and the lesson they drew was that small communities built around the topic did far better than large general ones.

The useful question is where your users already talk about the problem. For a powerlifting app, that is a powerlifting forum, not a startup one.

Help first, mention later

The founder who wrote about Reddit summed it up as: don’t be an advertiser. They wrote posts that were useful on their own. Then they messaged people who were asking about the problem, and asked about their situation before saying anything about the product.

Every community has rules on self-promotion, and accounts that only drop links get banned. Read the rules, take part for a while, and mention what you built when it answers the question.

Ask people directly

Several founders said their first 10 to 100 customers came mostly from writing to people one by one, and from their own network. It doesn’t scale, and at this stage it doesn’t need to. A hundred users is a hundred conversations.

Direct contact also tells you things a sign-up form never will: what people expected, where they got stuck, and the words they use for the problem.

Give something away that shows the product

One founder offered to analyze people’s customer feedback for free, by hand, using their own tool. About 40% of the people who tried it stayed. A free sample of the result works better than a free trial of the software, because the person sees the value before learning anything.

Use launch sites and directories for the next batch

One founder got 30 to 40 users from launch directories such as BetaList and SaaSHub. Another said nearly all of their first 100 customers came from Product Hunt. Results here vary more than with the other methods, and they depend a lot on the product.

We wrote two guides on this: launch sites for indie makers and where to list a SaaS or indie project.

What didn’t work

• Ads this early. In the accounts we read for our guide to promotion without a budget, one founder spent €70 on ads for zero sign-ups, then got nine from one honest post.
• The same post in ten places. It reads as spam and gets ignored or removed.
• Waiting to be found. Search works, but it takes months. It is for user 1,000, not user 10.

A plan for the first month

1. List five places where your users talk about the problem. Join them.
2. Each week, answer five questions properly. Mention your product only where it fits.
3. Write to ten people who described the problem. Ask what they use today.
4. Offer the result of your product for free to the first twenty.
5. Note where each new user came from. After a month, do more of what worked.

Where Hivefo fits

Hivefo is ours, so weigh this accordingly. It won’t find your first users for you, and nothing on this page can be replaced by a listing. It gives your project a place on a shared map and a profile page you can link to from the conversations above. If that is useful, see how it works.