First Users Are Harder to Get Than the Product
Founders are grappling with the challenge of acquiring initial users for their new products and frameworks. They're seeking practical, non-viral strategies beyond standard advice like Product Hunt and Reddit, and are struggling to find effective channels and understand audience response. The core pain is a lack of visibility and difficulty connecting with their target users.
SOURCES (60)
“definitely getting the first users. i think the reason why that is is that it's very easy to build "something" but to get users you have to build something useful, something that solves a pain for people. i've gotten my first users through SEO (now…”
I kept running into the same problem after building things: Building the product was getting easier. Finding the right people to actually use it wasn’t. So I built NearbyCrew. You describe what…
“Founders on NearbyCrew are looking for real people to try what they’re building. You create a profile about yourself, what you do, what you like, what you know, and what you’re interested in. When something needs someone like you, we match you. Try an app. Test a product. Give your opinion. Discover something new. You get paid 👇🏼 Join today - NearbyCrew.com/join-welcome submitted by /u/alielknight [link] [comments]”
“Two founders, no marketing hire, social is whoever has ten minutes. We need scheduling and an inbox and genuinely nothing else for the next year. Vista Social, Metricool, Agorapulse and Publer all cover that at a price that does not need approval. What I would rather not do is pick something we outgrow in eight months and pay a migration for. submitted by /u/Only-Apricot4 [link] [comments]”
“In my experience the building was the easy part, and the marketing was difficult. I mean you can have a mid product but with good marketing you will get users. And on the other side you can have a good product, but with bad marketing you will get little to no users...”
“im weighing this up and i keep talking myself out of it, so id like to hear from people who tried it either way. the case for owning a space is obvious. the communities where my actual users already hang out forbid promotion completely, and reasonably so. so i can build credibility there for months and never be allowed to say what i built. thats the trap. the most relevant room is the one where you can never sell. the case against is also obvious. a new sub or discord with nobody in it is just m”
“So true. I had 400 free demos before I got my 10 people to stick around for more than one payment”
“you dont get 10 people, you get 1000 and maybe 10 of them will like it enough to keep using”
“I am currently building something and honestly, I expected the hardest part to be the actual building. I have been thinking about this lately. Initially, I thought building the product would be the hardest part. You have to come up with the idea, build the MVP, fix bugs, change things you thought were already finished, and somehow get it ready to show people. But once the product is ready, then comes a completely different problem. The product is moving forward. I can figure out the technical pr”
“New to this so I need advice on where to go from here. I started this project just for fun. I think I am ready to let users start using it. I am a little worried about the cost of just opening the doors and letting users in. I'm probably over thinking it but would really like to hear from others that have releases something on this scale before as a solo dev. Here is a little about it. It's a real-time collaborative Web OS in a browser tab an infinite canvas that behaves like a shared co”
“I see a lot of people posting about getting their first users and customers, but very few also share how they’ve done it. Here’s how we did it. Step by step. 1. We answered the question “who’d use this thing we’re building?” In fancy words, we defined our ICP (ideal customer profile). Who’d use this thing? Where would these people spend their time? Linkedin? Facebook groups? Reddit? Instagram? TikTok? etc… What’s the main problem they’re facing that we’re solving? Write down the answers and thin”
“Kind of flips the problem, the audience isn't something you build after, it's a byproduct of doing the research in the right place to begin with. Good thought”
“The point about zero search volume meaning early instead of fake is a good one, most people treat search volume as the validation instead of just one signal among several.”
“this is such an underrated point. the research phase and the distribution strategy aren't separate things, they're the same activity. if you're already deep in a community when you spot the problem, you've basically built the channel before you've built the product. cold-starting both at once is brutal.”
“this timeline is genuinely useful, saving it. quick question on weeks 1 to 2, how are you actually finding and messaging those 15 to 20 people cold. like are you DMing people from relevant subreddits or communities, finding them through their reviews or complaints somewhere, or something else. and what's actually getting people to respond to a stranger asking about their workflow, versus just getting ignored?”
“It's highly unlikely for people to randomly stumble upon your website. However in best case you'll get some users at some point (yes yes, let him dream). That's the point where you should just create a second vercel service, call it 'stage' and test there. You can lock it with basic auth, or only fire it up once you want to test.”
“How would they find out about it? You won’t get any users until you publicise the site.”
“I really want to reach out to this creator that is in the space of tech but he is very popular so my message are not even seen by him via Twitter, Linkedin, email, etc. What do you think I should do next? Id really like to have a discussion with him... submitted by /u/LevelSoft1165 [link] [comments]”
“I first try and test if there is specific problems I can solve by making mini websites fully focused on solving 5-10 problems around a specific topic. SEO as focus channel. Search volumes and interactions prove market opportunity. Also easy to port it into initial acquisition channel once the product or offer is ready to rumble!”
“Look, finding people when you have zero audience is tough. I hung out where my potential users already gathered. Direct , helpful outreach to a few folks beat blasting posts. Don't spread yourself too thin”
“On the audience part of your question, since nobody really touched that one: the research channel and the pre-launch audience tend to be the same place. You read a niche for weeks looking for the recurring complaint, and by the time you launch you're a known regular there, so people actually click the thing. Pick an idea in a niche where you have no history and you're doing cold start distribution no matter how clean the landing page is. That filters ideas harder than any landing page te”
“For my current project I checked communities before search volume, and the order matters more than people think. A problem people haven't found a name for yet barely registers in search, so a zero-volume result told me the need was early, not fake. The signals I actually trusted were the same complaint resurfacing under different wording week after week, and users describing the spreadsheet workaround they'd hacked together because nothing existed. That was a few weeks of reading before”
“Getting into the store is the easy part - now you're competing against thousands of other apps for shelf space that basically doesn't exist. Your real move is figuring out where your actual customers hang out (communities, Discord servers, specific subreddits) and going there instead of waiting for organic discovery.”
“Those are good communities to start with. When you post there, lead with the specific problem you're solving rather than asking people to test a product — reps are more likely to engage if it reads like a conversation about their workflow than a beta request. What does your project actually do?”
“I have the same problem. Let's just all make a group and agree to test each other's apps.”
“I run a product distribution firm. Let me try to give you some clarity. For a quick start, a lot depends on the solution you are building. Not having an audience is fine. You have to start somewhere. But what matters is, building something that market really needs. If your solution is relevant, then only it’s a solution. Or else, its just another fluff. Hence, a lot depends on what you are building. To simplify, - You need to know what TAM - Total Addressable Market is. - You know to find a gap”
“I’ve just started building and shipping products, but I’m stuck on the part nobody really explains: distribution. I have basically no audience, no followers, and no existing community to launch to. For people who started from zero: How did you get your first 100 users? Where did you actually find people to talk to? What worked better: Reddit, X, Product Hunt, communities, cold outreach, etc.? How much should I be posting vs. directly reaching out to people? What are the biggest mistakes beginner”
“I'm curious how common this is, if there's a name for it, etc. Like you create a landing page, see if there's interest, and then if so, create the product? I'm curious what this is called and also what's the conversion rate, like if 1000 people say they're interested in something, how many would in turn become paying customers? submitted by /u/mapleCrep [link] [comments]”
“Find people already asking for what you solve. If your ICP is posting about the exact problem on forums, that is your warmest entry. Offer early access and close the loop by shipping their input in the next build. People test when they believe their input changes the product. A generic beta invite will not land.”
“Go where they already ask for help, not where you want to announce. Find threads where your ICP describes the exact problem you solve. Reply with a genuinely useful answer, then mention you are building something for this and ask if they want to try. Cold outreach to strangers gets ignored. Helping someone who just asked for help gets replies.”
“Hey guys! I was trying to get 10 beta users for my SaaS. I reached out 250 ICP through LinkedIn, getting 50 answers and 15 users interested in trying my app. The problem is that, after 2 weeks, those 15 users didn’t use it yet. Just to be clear, I previously confirmed with them that my app solves their problem. How do you handle this kind of problem? submitted by /u/Enough_Protection_96 [link] [comments]”
“just wanted to share my experience in trying product distribution for the first time. since the public launch, i've been quite active on reddit and x. now i get an average of 1 user every day, although i wasn't so active past week. posted on x, my impressions jumped from 30 initially to around 400 on my last post. reddit has been so far great, almost got all organic sign ups from reddit solely. received good support from the community in improving the conversions too. my first few posts”
“just wanted to share my experience in trying product distribution for the first time. since the public launch, i've been quite active on reddit and x. now i get an average of 1 user every day, although i wasn't so active past week. posted on x, my impressions jumped from 30 initially to around 400 on my last post. reddit has been so far great, almost got all organic sign ups from reddit solely. received good support from the community in improving the conversions too. my first few posts”
“Now time to do the following: - brand kit (i need to do this as well but a set of images/ a video to show people) - figure out easy to understand marketing lines (whats gonna be ur brand’s “tagline”) and how to explain it easily to potential customers - get feedback from that user if possible - try getting your friends / people (who fit the target audience) who have never used the product to try it out and see where they encounter bugs - also, this is probably the first of many sales, and why no”
“The name-and-face point matches what I've seen collecting testimonials for my own product. Text testimonials with no name attached get skipped over almost every time, but a 15 second video of a real person saying the same thing gets watched to the end. People trust a specific human more than a paragraph that could've been written by anyone, including the founder. That's why I built video collection into TrustSnap instead of just a text box.”
“I've been building a tool for students solo for a few months. Last week I finally sat down and compared my analytics against my database, and found something I'd been shipping past for months. Analytics: 2,507 sessions, 103 signup_started events. Database: 7 user rows, all time. Two from June. The rest were my own test accounts. Not a low conversion rate. Zero. What it was A migration had never been applied to production. The profiles table was missing four columns the app expected: free”
a competition mostly attracts people who want the prize, which is probably why it didn't move the needle — they were testing the giveaway, not the product. with sept 7 that close,…
“IMO there are no real scalable ways to get off the ground other than capital ad spend or grinding content. I finished the beta program of tinh.io with around 250 beta users, I would say about 60% of the active ones were from me courting them directly, the other 40 were from Reddit comments that got under 300 views each. Find a community that would get value from solving the problem you solved, then check it once or twice a day for posts that are relevant and just be present. There's pretty o”
“this tracks with what happened when we were testing slide tools for a similar launch push, tried Beautiful.ai , Gamma, Tome, and recently Oria which just plugs into PowerPoint directly instead of making you export/import everything, saved a ton of back and forth honestly. video probably still wins on conversion but for internal decks it cut our prep time down a lot”
“We're gearing up for a beta launch on Sept 7 and hit a wall trying to find genuine testers. Ran a competition to drum up interest, but it didn't really move the needle. Curious how others here have approached early beta testing — did you go through communities, personal networks, paid platforms, something else? What actually worked (or didn't) for you? Would love to hear what's worked for people in a similar spot. submitted by /u/Charming_Mark9257 [link] [commen”
“definitely not just for badges – we saw a good bump from PH early on, but converting that into actual users was the real challenge. it takes so much time to prep all the launch assets and then actually engage with comments. i think i spent almost a week just on that.”
How did you overcome the reality of "the best product doesn't win, the best-known product does"? I launched an app and I'll be honest; marketing isn't my forte... I've been trying some…
This really is the dilemma we're faced with today. I still (maybe naively) believe that with a good product and consistent marketing, eventually you will find an audience. With the caveat that…
I don't think what I asked presumes I built the same thing everyone else did, I think it presumes we all operating in the same "online tools" market and have access to…
“Hello, I was building a software directory earlier and used to go through people building new products. I used to feature a few on my directory. People get scared to post their website on Reddit. Only when we ask for it, they share. So, I used to request for it and review their product. I was doing insurance consulting to earn my living and tried for a remote job. I tried to promote few affiliate programs but was not very successful in the same. Later, I decided to focus on building Testimonial”
“10 users > 10 features every time. Cold linkedin outreach got me my first testers, I run Lead monster for the prospecting side of things. The real trick is asking for feedback not signups”
I don't have any learning journey to share here as I am still learning how to grow my own app. I would love to learn from people here how to grow the…
“my product is freemium so everyone can try it, but it is difficult to attract people to the product there are no issues with retention among the small number of existing users so the product is useful to them”
“I’ve got a rough prototype that proves the main idea, but it’s definitely not something I’d be comfortable putting in front of paying users yet. Now I’m trying to figure out what the next step should be. For founders who’ve gone from a working prototype to a production-ready product, how did you approach that transition? Did you end up rebuilding parts of the prototype, or were you able to work with what you already had? submitted by /u/VendioHandMadeHelp [link] [comments]”
“When there's no category search, stop marketing the category and market the moment. People do search the symptom, not the solution: "why am I always X", "how do I stop Y". I'd write and post to that exact phrasing in the places where the problem gets described in the person's own words, and borrow existing category demand by positioning against the nearest thing they already use. For signal, ignore impressions and watch whether new users complete the core action i”