Most advice about getting your first users assumes you already have an audience. Post to your list. Tell your followers. Leverage your network.

If you had those things you would not be reading this.

This is the version for people starting from zero: no mailing list, no Twitter following, no launch day that went well. It is slower than a viral launch and considerably more reliable.

First, Recalibrate What 100 Users Means

One hundred users is not a growth milestone. It is a research milestone.

At 100 users you are not trying to build a business yet. You are trying to answer one question: does anyone actually want this? You can only answer that by watching real people use the thing and noticing where they stop.

This reframing matters because it changes what you optimise for. Chasing 10,000 signups from a viral post gets you a spike, a server bill, and no idea why 9,800 of them never came back. A hundred users you actually talked to gets you a product worth scaling.

Aim for a hundred people you can name.

1. Go Where the Problem Is Already Being Discussed

Somewhere on the internet, people are complaining about the problem you solved. That is your first user base and it costs nothing to find.

Search Reddit, Hacker News, Discord servers, and X for the phrasing your users would use — not your product category, their frustration. Someone building an invoicing tool should search "chasing late payments" not "invoicing software."

Then, and this is the part people skip: answer the question properly without mentioning your product. Be genuinely useful ten times. Mention what you built the eleventh time, only where it directly answers what was asked.

This feels slow because it is slow. It also works, and it does not get you banned.

2. Launch Small, Repeatedly

The instinct is to save everything for one big launch. It is the wrong instinct when nobody knows you — a big launch with no audience is just a small launch with more anxiety attached.

Better: launch on smaller platforms repeatedly over a month. r/SideProject, MicroLaunch, Peerlist, Dev Hunt, Fazier. Each sends somewhere between five and fifty users. None will change your life. Together they get you to a hundred while teaching you which framing lands.

The compounding matters too. By the fourth post you have a much better description than you did on the first, because three sets of strangers told you what was confusing.

3. Do the Unscalable Onboarding

For your first hundred users, personally message every single one.

Not an automated drip. An actual message: thanks for signing up, what were you hoping this would do for you, tell me if it breaks.

Two things come from this. Some fraction reply, and those replies are worth more than any analytics dashboard at this stage. And a surprising number remember you — the founder who personally messaged them — and mention you to someone else.

This does not scale past a few hundred. That is the point. Do it while you can.

4. Build Something Free and Adjacent

The strongest zero-audience play: build a small free tool that solves a narrow piece of the same problem, with no signup required.

A free tool gets shared, linked, and ranked in ways a product page does not. It also pre-qualifies people — anyone using it has the problem you solve.

Keep it genuinely useful on its own. A "free tool" that demands an email before showing results is a signup form with extra steps, and people recognise it immediately.

5. Be an Alternative to Something Expensive

Nobody searches for products they have never heard of. They search for alternatives to products they already resent paying for.

Listing on SaaSHub and AlternativeTo, and writing an honest comparison page, catches people at the exact moment they are considering switching. This traffic is small, steady, and unusually high-intent.

Be honest in the comparison, including about where the competitor is better. Readers can tell, and the credibility converts better than the exaggeration would.

6. Write the Thing You Had to Figure Out

You solved a problem to build your product. Somebody else is currently stuck on that same problem and searching for it.

Write that up specifically. Not "10 Tips for Productivity" — write "How I handled Stripe webhook retries in a Next.js app on Cloudflare Workers." It is narrow, it is real, and the people who find it are exactly your users.

Specific technical posts also age well and get linked by other developers, which is worth more than a broad post nobody remembers.

7. Show the Work While You Build

Building in public works, with one caveat that gets left out: it works when you post specifics, not milestones.

"Day 14 of building my SaaS" is invisible. "Spent three days on a bug that turned out to be a timezone issue in my cron job, here's what I misunderstood" gets read, because it is useful to someone.

Post the problems, the numbers, and the decisions you are unsure about. Being wrong publicly is more interesting than being vague publicly.

8. Find the Twenty People Who Care Most

Somewhere there is a niche community — a Discord, a subreddit, a forum — of a few hundred people who have your problem badly.

Twenty engaged users from a community that genuinely needs this beats two hundred curious signups from a launch board. They give better feedback, they stay longer, and they tell people.

Find the small room before you try to find the big one.

What Not to Bother With

Paid ads. Not at this stage. You do not yet know your messaging, your audience, or your conversion rate. You will spend money learning things a conversation would have told you free.

Cold outreach at volume. Fifty personalised emails to people who genuinely have the problem is good. A thousand automated ones will damage your domain and your name.

Bulk directory submission services. Two hundred listings on dead directories is not distribution.

Waiting until it is ready. The most expensive mistake here. Your first hundred users exist to tell you what to build. Getting them after you finish building means you built it blind.

A Realistic Month

Assuming a few hours a day:

Week 1. Find the three communities where your problem is discussed. Join, read, answer questions. No promotion. Set up your permanent listings — they take twenty minutes and start working quietly.

Week 2. First small launch — r/SideProject or a smaller board. Expect 10–30 users. Message every one.

Week 3. Write the specific technical post. Second small launch elsewhere. Keep answering questions in your communities.

Week 4. Comparison directories and a comparison page. Third launch. By now your description is much better than it was in week two.

That is roughly a hundred users. Not a viral month — a month where you learn who your product is for.

The Part That Actually Matters

Every tactic here is a variation on one thing: be genuinely useful somewhere your future users already are, before you ask them for anything.

That is why it is slow, and why it works when you have no audience. You are not borrowing someone else's distribution. You are building a small amount of your own, which is the thing that makes the second product easier than the first.

The hundredth user is not the goal. The goal is knowing, by the time you get there, exactly who user 101 should be.

If you are building something independently, list it on BuiltByIndies — free, permanent, and the community is other people doing the same thing.