Builders Who Ship Fast Can't Find Their First Users
37 posts across 10 communities in the last 30 days; 24% from r/microsaas.
“I had the same problem. Built an app and had no idea where to start promoting it. The key is not to give up, just keep grinding, knock on doors, and customers will show up. :) [re: We started building our first product after work. Two days ago, we finally launched it. Now comes…”
“The first 20 usually come one at a time, by hand. Find the threads and communities where people are already complaining about the problem Venus solves, answer them properly, and only mention what youre building when it actually fits. Most people will say yes to testing if you…”
“Yeah, distribution is a whole different problem once you have something people actually want. Reddit seems to be great for getting those first users, but finding a channel you can repeat consistently is the tough part.”
Technical founders who can build anything but have no idea how to get people to care: marketed for months and got 16 users, felt like a genius building and an idiot marketing, hate marketing and avoid it, built in a vacuum then launched to silence. The recurring ask is a repeatable way to reach the right audience and land the first 10–100 users without becoming a full-time marketer.
SOURCES (60)
“I had the same problem. Built an app and had no idea where to start promoting it. The key is not to give up, just keep grinding, knock on doors, and customers will show up. :) [re: We started building our first product after work.…”
“Getting users is the hard part today, not the code. Best case you know how to market your app before you even release it! [re: Our cozy mobile game made 35k in 10 months. September dropped 40%, here's why (AMA)]”
“Yeah, launching is the easy part. Getting people to actually care about the product is the hard part.”
that app idea actually sounds useful for group rides. the gps tracking and push to talk thing is something i'd use if it works smoothly as for marketing i get the pain.…
“The first 20 usually come one at a time, by hand. Find the threads and communities where people are already complaining about the problem Venus solves, answer them properly, and only mention what youre building when it actually fits. Most people will say yes to testing if you ask directly and keep the ask small, like "want to try it and tell me whats broken?" Whos it for, though? "Fast comparisons" could mean shoppers, devs, or someone else entirely. The narrower you get, the”
“This really resonates. I’m starting to realize that building the product is only half the job the bigger challenge is getting it in front of the right people and learning how to sell it. Distribution deserves just as much attention as the product itself.”
“Yeah, distribution is a whole different problem once you have something people actually want. Reddit seems to be great for getting those first users, but finding a channel you can repeat consistently is the tough part.”
“For the past 2 months, I have been building a product that competes with BannerBear, etc. umm, not close but it can do pretty much everything with canva like editor, except video generation. I am totally stuck at the marketting man. I am not being consistent and also no interest in doing that. I have been developing for past 8 years on enterprise applications(mobile, web, api), I can do almost every stage of development lifecycle. But not trying to post on social media or marketting or seo stuff”
“I think the “distribution is harder” point is the important one. Building something has become easier, but getting consistent attention from the right people hasn't. Having customers or an audience that already chose to hear from you is probably more valuable than ever.”
That sounds likely. Well, I hope I’m someone who enjoys marketing.
“ok, so.... I've been thinking hard about your post here. I appreciate the honesty that you had sharing that it can be overwhelming coming up with good ideas. My original complaint is probably disingenuous because I have been building software for a quarter of a century and so there are things just built into my psyche which not everyone else has. So I'm taking a spoonful of my own medicine. Instead of being annoyed by the swath of people asking for ideas, develop a SaaS solution which he”
“i think the hard part now is that building got so easy everyone forgot the building was never the hard part. like in 2021 you could raise money on a deck and vibes and now you actually have to get customers, which is what it was always supposed to be, it just feels harder because the free money era made everyone think traction was optional. and the AI thing is brutal because you can spend three months building something and then one model update eats your whole product for breakfast. to be hones”
“Exactly. Building is the easy half now. The hard half is getting anyone to notice, and there is no shortcut for that part.”
“The bottleneck was never building, it was knowing what to build and getting anyone to care. Founders who talk to their actual customers every week seem to survive every one of these shifts, because their moat is the relationship, not the code. You can vibe-code a feature; you can't vibe-code trust.”
“The fact you already got first customers by yourself shows way more grit than having a cofounder just for the sake of it”
I feel like a lot of us have this problem we spend weeks building something and then realize we haven't really figured out who actually needs it 😅 I had the same…
“I can see why it feels that way. The hard part seems to have shifted: building a first version is cheaper, but getting the right customers to notice, trust and pay for it is still tough. The accelerator numbers alone probably don’t tell you much about your company. What kind of traction have you seen so far?”
“The community statistics example stood out to me. The paid product came from someone asking for more of something they already found useful. Did you find any follow-up on whether that founder kept offering custom reports or eventually built a self-serve product?”
“Throw away everything you’ve built. The problem is not “how do I get the first ten customers for the things I’ve built” The problem is “what are these people in pain about?” Lots of businesses still run on paper and just don’t care because the biz works. It’s not painful for them. It sounds like they want more bookings? Talk to them and find out. Then figure out how to solve that problem”
“What changed your mind about your own SaaS after talking to your first users? One thing I'm realizing while building is that the product you think you're building and the product users actually need can be surprisingly different. I'm curious about the moments that changed things for other founders. Did users: use a feature differently than you expected? ignore something you thought was important? ask for something you never planned to build? describe the problem completely differentl”
haha, same story with me. Building is fun. I made my own app but still no one knows it..
“For my app it ended up being SEO, and not from blog posts. Every word someone adds to their list becomes a public dictionary page, so the content kind of grew on its own, and by late August that was around 4.6k clicks a week from Google. It took a few months of basically nothing before it kicked in though. The app is VibeLing, a vocab trainer I build, if you want to see what those pages look like.”
“The five-month distribution grind is the most common pattern in the data I've been collecting. I mine real complaints from Reddit/HN/forums and score them for buying intent — and the consistent finding is that the 'what should I build' posts get hundreds of replies, but the 'how do I get customers' posts get two. One thing that might help from the data side: look at what people are literally asking to buy in your niche. If you search your target market's subreddit for ”
“I did the "save it for launch day" version three weeks ago. Launch week got me 3 signups from everything combined. What's worked since is the boring part: comments like this one and writing to founders one by one. I'd have started that two weeks before launch if I did it again”
“As someone with 20+ years of experience and 30+ apps developed, I’d say this: An app needs to solve a real problem but that’s only half of the equation. The problem also needs to be one that a specific group of people is actually willing to pay to solve. Not every problem that can be solved by an app is a business opportunity. Another thing I’ve learned is that marketing needs to be part of the product strategy from day one. You can build an amazing app, but if you don’t have a realistic plan an”
“Yeah, pre-launch can feel like a bunch of random side quests. You need one thing, then that thing needs three other things, and suddenly you’re barely working on the actual product. I ended up just cutting anything that wasn’t blocking the first few users. A lot of the setup can stay ugly for a while, especially when you’re still figuring out whether anyone even wants the product.”
are u still building on the same thing now and increased the mrr?
“I used to think the main value of getting early customers was figuring out what to build next. But i think there’s another useful signal in those first few sales. Look at what the customers who actually paid had in common. Maybe they were dealing with the same problem, came from a similar type of business, or cared about the same outcome. That can tell you more about your real audience than a list of people who signed up for a free trial. I would also pay attention to how those customers describ”
“I know there are many, many people who have an idea, build it, launch it and then crickets. You try directory listings, maybe some paid ads, post on X and reddit (then get banned). There has got to be a better way. I wish I knew the answer. People with 40,000 followers will say "just stick with it", but that doesn't really seem to work. I'm going to guess there are lots of people in this spot, so I wanted to start an honest discussion on how to improve this outcome so great pro”
“building something because you personally needed it is a good starting point but its not always proof that the wider market needs it too the interesting part is seeing whether other people have the same problem and what they struggle with once they start using it trusted tech matters more once the tool moves from a personal project into something other people depend on”
“You're doing it wrong. Don't build for customers. Build something you think should exist.”
“In my opinion, keep it simple: Channels matter of course, but there’s so much else to focus on first! 1) People only care about a product if it solves a problem they actually have. Your first goal is to show that your product solves a pain point strongly enough that they have a reason to pay attention. 2) Once you've someone's attention, your goal is for them to try your app. Make this process as simple as possible (in more markety terms, avoid friction). 3) Finally, pick places aligned”
“Good add. The ones people bring up unprompted, twice, are usually the real ones. If you have to drag it out of them it's probably not painful enough to charge for.”
“this is the move, the repeating complaints part especially. i'd add: note which ones people say they've "tried to fix" already, those are the ones worth digging into”
“Nice. So what drives you bonkers about that? Perhaps you struggle to share your finished work? Or you have trouble building reusable flows with your algorithms so you can properly test your assumptions? Or you want to be able to brainstorm on your phone without a special keyboard? My brother is the PhD algorithm specialist so I'm a bit out of my depth but hopefully you're picking up what I'm putting down. Find a pain > confirm the pain is real > resolve the pain with software &”
“Maybe that's because we know nothing about this world and need to get into it first, but don't know where to start. Mind pointing us to a few examples of awesome ideas, or even crappy solutions that could be improved, just to get us started? For example, I have a PhD in STEM and have only ever written algorithms, but I'm not afraid to learn how to build apps or websites. I just need to start somewhere—to see some examples of what we're talking about and some actual awesome ideas”
“There's a powerful idea here: treat the first customers as research, not just revenue. The first version of a business rarely tells you what the market actually wants. Conversations with customers reveal the language they use, the problem they consider most urgent, what they've already tried and what they're willing to pay to change. That's why “build → launch → hope” is so fragile. A better loop is talk → identify → test → learn → improve → repeat.”
“$10k MRR in a year solo is doable but the bottleneck won't be the build. I've worked with 40+ SaaS founders and the ones who hit that number found a problem they were already inside, not one they researched cold. Pick a niche where you can get 10 real conversations in two weeks, then pre-sell before you write code. If nobody pays a deposit, you learned it for free.”
“Choose 50 reddit groups, Use Codex to collect automatically collect high-frequency discussed pain points. Research on how much it cost them to deal with the pain points. If high, it worths it. Research on current solutions to these pain points, what can be improved, is it a red sea or a blue sea. Use AI to cold reach 400 potential target customers "Have you met ....., I have a solution....., if it only cost....., would you like to have a try?" If you have a budget, quickly make a produ”
“If I were starting from zero again, I'd spend the first 30 days almost entirely off the keyboard. Week 1–2: pick ONE world you already understand (job, hobby, industry Discord). Don't brainstorm products. Collect 20 concrete complaints where someone is already paying — a VA, a spreadsheet they hate, an agency retainer, overtime. "I wish there was an app for X" is weak. "I pay someone $800/mo to do X badly" is strong. Week 3–4: message 15 of those people. Offer to do t”
“Like others have said, find the problem first. But I’d like to add something that seems to be forgotten. Software is easy for you, it’s easy for anyone you talk to on here for the most part, but your customers don’t know that, and shouldn’t know that. If your hvac customer is paying someone $20 hr , 40 hours a week, to manually do something that your solution can do in 5 minutes a day, your price isn’t for that 5 minutes, it’s for those 40 hours. Any service provider will tell you that you aren’”
“Even a year ago an engineer advertising themselves like this would have found takers – two years ago you'd have received 20 DMs – but now nobody cares.”
“I'd separate “finding an idea” from “finding evidence of a problem.” Ideas are cheap. What I would look for is a recurring workflow where people are already paying a cost — money, time, mistakes, spreadsheets, manual work, frustration, or some combination of those. A few signals I think are particularly useful: People have already built ugly workarounds for the problem. The problem happens repeatedly, not once a year. There is an identifiable person who owns the problem and can decide to pay”
“do you think the "talk to 10 people" bar changes depending on how niche the market is?”
“Reading complaint threads is where a year disappears, because everyone reads the same ones and ends up with the same ideas. Look instead for work someone already pays a human to do badly: an agency retainer, a part timer retyping stock numbers into a spreadsheet, a VA chasing unpaid invoices. That budget already exists, so a first payment lands much sooner than it does for a problem nobody has budgeted for. On your last question, agents hold up where a wrong call costs nothing, research, first d”
“The biggest mistake I see is starting with an idea instead of a problem you watch someone actually have. Pick a niche you already live in, a job, a hobby, a community. Spend two weeks just reading their complaints in forums and Discords and writing down the ones that repeat. Then talk to 10 of those people before writing any code. If you can't find 10 people willing to do a 15-minute call, you don't have a problem worth solving yet. For validation, the strongest signal is a pre-sale, or”
“Nice framing, but not for a dev/engineer, for an entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur is research, experiments, failures, and maybe finded a niche. Then the first ten customers by hand, ads, unit economics, retention, support. It doesn't end, and none of it is on your resume stack. Coding, hosting, devops in your framing is only a small part.”
“Yep! First product I launched was copied by Amazon after around 6 months. Shut that down and launched a new product on Shopify about 2 years later with no plans to go back.”
“Most founders skip the first 10 customers because they are too busy building a marketing machine for people who don't exist. You cannot scale empathy. Go talk to five humans in your exact niche community before you touch an ad budget”
“See if Kickstarter / Indiegogo makes sense. A few blanket brands launched there.”
“Glad to hear that. I’ve just started, the good thing is that i believe in my product. it’s just I’m not getting the marketing side of it right. I think I just need to give it some time”
“I kept running into the same problem with my own projects. Building the product was usually manageable, but once it was live I never really knew what I should focus on next. Should I work on SEO, Post more on X, do outreach, look at another market, Fix the positioning, most tools only help with one small part of that, so I ended up jumping between different tools and still had no clear answer. That’s basically why I started building THIS PROJECT . You give it your product or website and it looks”
“Building's the easier half, no argument. I was pure engineering for years and it took losing to a worse product with a better salesperson behind it before that clicked. Talking to users before shipping the next feature is the part everyone skips.”
“the copying was always going to happen, what changed is the window. i think the mistake is picking an idea where the moat is the product itself. distribution and switching cost are the only things that hold. if your first ten customers can leave in an afternoon you dont have a company, you have a feature.”
“The investor side has been pretty well covered here, but I'm curious about the business underneath it. “Industry expert + built something + found the first customers from your own list” can mean anything from a few friendly industry contacts doing you a favor to a pretty legit wedge. What does the app actually do, and roughly how many customers have paid? Those two details would probably tell me more about what you've got than the solo-founder part.”
“half agree. building got faster, it didn't get easier, and the difference shows up about eight months later as a codebase nobody can change safely. first handful of users came from being a regular somewhere for months before I had anything to show anyone. nothing about that is scalable and it's still the only part that worked.”