Your Path to 100 Users

Hey friend,

Everyone tells you to go get your first 100 users. Nobody hands you the list.

The truth about the first 100 users is that there is no single channel that gets you there. There are about fifty doors, and your job is to knock on enough of them to find the three that open for your product. Most founders knock on two, get no answer, and conclude that marketing does not work.

So here is the list. Thirty doors.

None of these require a budget beyond pocket change. All of them work best when you are small, because they trade on the one thing you have that big companies do not: you can do things that do not scale, personally, this week.

Pick three. Run each one properly for two weeks before you judge it.

Let’s go.

🚪 The core ten

Start here. These are the channels every founder has heard of, done the way that actually works.

1. Post reels daily

Short form video is one of the last places a 40 follower account can do 200,000 views, because distribution is decided by the first three seconds, not by your follower count.

Phone, front camera, face a window, captions on. Film six to ten in one afternoon, post one a day, and put your best line in the first sentence. Do not judge anything before video number thirty. The first ten are practice.

I wrote an entire playbook on this one, The Founder Led Content Playbook, with 30 days of scripts. Start there if this is your channel.

2. DM your ICP

Find 50 people who visibly have the problem you solve. They are complaining about it in comment sections, asking about it in communities, posting about the workflow your product replaces.

Message them like a person, not a funnel. Open with something specific about them, ask about the problem, and only mention the product if the conversation earns it. Ten real conversations beat 500 templated blasts, and the ones who do not convert will tell you exactly why, which is worth more than the sale right now.

3. Build in public

Share what you are building while you build it. Real numbers, real decisions, real failures. The revenue screenshot on a bad month, the feature you deleted, the pricing change that backfired.

The mechanism is simple: people root for people. An audience that watched you struggle toward launch converts at rates a stranger’s ad never will, and the daily act of building generates the content for free.

4. Send cold emails

Cold email still works. Bad cold email does not, and almost all cold email is bad.

Send twenty a day, not two hundred. Research each person for two minutes, open with the specific reason you picked them, keep it under 100 words, and end with one small ask. A reply, not a demo. The metric that matters is response rate, and response rate is a function of how obviously the email could not have been sent to anyone else.

5. Launch on Product Hunt

One good day of concentrated attention. Prepare like it: a clear tagline, a demo that shows the product in the first ten seconds, and a maker comment that tells the honest story of why you built it.

Then spend the entire day in the comments. The founders who do well on Product Hunt treat it as a conversation they host, not a billboard they post. And whatever happens, you walk away with a backlink, a badge, and a page that keeps trickling visitors for months.

6. Post on Reddit

Reddit hates marketing and rewards usefulness, which makes it perfect for founders willing to be useful.

Spend a week in your niche’s subreddits before you post anything. Learn what gets removed. Then share things with real substance: what you learned, what failed, the data you collected. Mention the product only when someone asks or when the rules allow it, and disclose that it is yours. One honest post that hits the front page of a mid-size subreddit can be hundreds of signups in a day.

7. Hire UGC creators

UGC creators make content that looks like a person recommending a product, because it is. Small ones charge modest per-video rates, and you can commission a batch for less than one month of a marketing tool.

The work is in the brief. Give them the pain point, the moment the product clicks, and the one thing to say in the first three seconds, then let them say it in their own words. Scripted UGC reads as an ad and dies. Run the videos on your own account first before you spend anything amplifying them.

8. Write a newsletter

Every other channel on this list is rented. Email is the one you own.

Weekly, short, genuinely useful, about the problem rather than the product. The list grows slowly and that is fine, because 100 subscribers who open every week is a direct line to your exact buyer that no algorithm can take away. Start it before you think you need it. The compounding only works if the clock is running.

9. Join free tool listings

There are dozens of directories where early adopters browse for new products: startup listings, alternative-to sites, niche tool roundups. Each one takes ten minutes to submit to and sends a small trickle forever.

None of them will get you 100 users alone. Twenty of them together produce a steady background hum of exactly the kind of person who tries new things, plus a pile of backlinks that quietly helps every search-based channel on this list.

10. Join communities

Slack groups, Discord servers, forums, Facebook groups. Wherever your ICP already gathers, be there, and follow the oldest rule of communities: give ten times before you ask once.

Answer questions. Share what you know. Become the person whose name people recognize. After a few weeks of that, mentioning your product when it genuinely fits does not read as promotion, it reads as help. Two or three communities done properly beat twenty done as a drive-by.

🎙️ Borrow someone else’s audience

You have no audience yet. Other people do, and most of them are more approachable than you think.

11. Guest on tiny podcasts

Not the big shows. The shows with 200 listeners in your exact niche.

Small podcasts are desperate for guests, they say yes to almost anyone with a real story, and 200 listeners who care about your exact problem beat 20,000 who do not. Search your niche on any podcast app, sort by “has published in the last month,” and pitch ten hosts with two sentences: who you are, and the one specific thing you can talk about that their audience would care about.

One episode a week for a month is four warm audiences hearing you talk for 40 minutes. Cold emails do not get you 40 minutes.

12. Be a source for journalists

Reporters and newsletter writers constantly need quotes from founders and operators. Services that connect journalists to sources let you answer three or four requests a week in your area.

The link and the mention matter less than you think. What matters is that “as featured in” turns a stranger’s landing page into one that looks trustworthy, and your first 100 users are all strangers deciding whether to trust you.

13. Sponsor a tiny newsletter

Newsletters with 1,000 to 5,000 subscribers in your niche often charge less than a nice dinner for a sponsorship slot. The audiences are small, loyal, and nobody else is bidding for them.

One rule: do not run an ad. Write a personal note. “I built this because X, here is what it does, reply to the founder directly.” In a small newsletter, sounding like a neighbor beats sounding like a brand.

14. Gift your product to micro-influencers

This is not hiring UGC creators. This is finding 30 small creators whose audience matches yours and giving them free access with no strings attached.

Most will ignore you. A few will use it. One or two will mention it because it genuinely helped, and an unprompted mention from a trusted small account converts better than any paid placement you could buy.

15. Cross-promote with a complementary founder

Somewhere out there is a founder at your exact stage whose product serves your audience without competing with you. A meal planning app and a grocery budgeting app. A resume tool and an interview prep tool.

Find them, and swap. A mention in each other’s newsletter, a shoutout in onboarding, a shared discount. Two audiences of 80 people each become two audiences of 160. This is the cheapest distribution deal you will ever sign, and almost nobody does it because it requires sending one slightly awkward DM.

16. Run a partner giveaway

Take that same complementary founder and run a giveaway together. Both products bundled, both audiences entering, both email lists growing.

Giveaways attract freebie hunters, so keep the prize narrow. Give away the thing only your real ICP would want. A year of your product filters better than an iPad.

🔍 Get found instead of finding

The channels above are you pushing. These are people pulling. Slower to start, but they compound while you sleep.

17. Build a free tool that ranks

A calculator, a checker, a grader, a generator. Something your ICP searches for, free, no signup wall.

The pattern is always the same: the free tool answers a question your buyer has right before they need your product. Someone checking “is my email subject line good” is someone about to send a campaign. The tool does the trust building, and the small banner underneath does the converting.

One good free tool can outperform a year of content.

18. Write “alternative to” comparison pages

Your future users are not searching for your product. They have never heard of it. They are searching for your biggest competitor, and some of them are typing “competitor alternative” because something about that competitor annoys them.

Write an honest page for each major competitor. What they do well, who they are right for, where your product differs. Honesty is the strategy here, because the reader has usually already used the competitor and will smell spin instantly.

These pages convert at rates normal content never touches, because the reader arrives with a credit card already half out.

19. Make YouTube tutorials for search

Not vlogs. Not daily uploads. Search content. “How to do X” videos targeting the exact problems your product solves, where X is something people type into YouTube every day.

YouTube search is the most underrated channel for small products because videos rank for years. A screen recording with your voice over it is enough. Production quality is nearly irrelevant for tutorial content, people just want the answer.

20. Publish templates in marketplaces

Notion gallery, Figma Community, Canva templates, Google Sheets galleries. Wherever your ICP already browses for free resources.

A genuinely useful free template with your product’s name on it gets discovered by people at the precise moment they are trying to solve your problem by hand. The template solves it badly enough that some of them come looking for the real thing. That is not a bug in the strategy. That is the strategy.

21. List in app marketplaces and integration directories

If your product can plug into anything, plug into it. Zapier, Slack, Shopify, Chrome Web Store, WordPress. Every integration is a listing, and every listing is a small permanent stream of people who already use the platform your product improves.

Marketplace users also stick around longer, because your product is wired into a tool they already depend on.

22. Publish numbers nobody else has

Original data is the only content that other people are forced to link to. Run a small survey of your niche, analyze something public at scale, or compile the benchmark everyone wishes existed. “We looked at 500 SaaS pricing pages, here is what the top performers do differently.”

It sounds like a big company move. It is a weekend with a scraper or a Google Form. Newsletters cite it, journalists quote it, and every citation is a backlink that lifts every search-based channel on this list. One good stat with your name attached keeps introducing you to strangers for years.

🤝 Show up as a person

At this stage you are not a company. You are a person with a product. Use that, because it is temporary.

23. Become a helpful reply guy

Find the ten biggest accounts your ICP follows on X or LinkedIn. Turn on notifications. When they post, be in the replies early with something genuinely useful. Not “great post.” An addition, a counterpoint, a real example.

Big accounts get you in front of their audience for free, and the people who click your profile from a smart reply are pre-qualified by the account they were already following. Your profile does the rest, so make sure it says what you are building in plain words.

24. Answer questions where people are already asking

Quora, Stack Overflow, niche forums, Facebook groups, Discord servers. Somewhere on the internet, people are asking the exact question your product answers, in public, every single day.

Answer thoroughly. Mention your product only when it honestly fits, and disclose that it is yours. One great answer to a question with search traffic keeps delivering visitors for years. This is the slowest channel on the list and one of the most durable.

25. Host a free live workshop

Teach the thing your product does, live, for free, for 45 minutes. Not a demo. An actual lesson someone could apply without ever buying from you.

Twenty attendees is a great result. Twenty people who spent 45 minutes learning from you are worth more than 2,000 impressions, because trust does not come from being seen. It comes from being useful for a sustained period of time. The recording becomes content. The Q&A becomes your roadmap.

26. Show up in person

Local meetups, industry conferences, or the one nobody tries: host your own dinner. Eight people from your industry, a restaurant, you pick up the bill.

In-person is wildly inefficient, which is exactly why it works. Nobody forgets the founder they had dinner with. Your first 100 users do not need to be acquired efficiently. They need to be acquired at all, and the ones you meet in person become the loudest advocates you will ever have.

27. Send personalized video audits

Pick 25 dream users. Record a five minute video for each one, walking through their website, their workflow, their content, whatever your product improves, and pointing out three specific things they could fix. Send it with no pitch beyond “made this for you, thought it might help.”

It does not scale. That is the point. Response rates on genuinely personalized video are absurd compared to any template, and the people who respond already understand your product’s value because they just watched it applied to their own situation.

🔁 Engineer the loop

The last group turns the users you get into the users you have not gotten yet.

28. Launch a Show HN

Hacker News is not Product Hunt. No hunters, no launch day theatrics, no asking friends to upvote, which is against the rules and gets you buried.

Post a Show HN with a plain title, a first comment explaining what you built and why, and then live in the thread all day answering everything. HN readers are allergic to marketing and generous to builders. If your product is genuinely interesting, one good Show HN can deliver your first 100 users in an afternoon. If it flops, you lost a morning.

29. Turn your waitlist into a referral loop

If you have any kind of waitlist or signup queue, give people one reason to share it. Move up the list for each referral. Unlock a feature. Get in today instead of next week.

The mechanic is old because it works. Every signup becomes a tiny distribution event, and the people who refer friends arrive already invested. Just keep the reward attached to your product. Points and merch attract sharers, access attracts users.

30. Do concierge onboarding and ask for one intro

Onboard every single early user personally. A call, a shared screen, you setting things up for them while they watch.

Then, at the end, when it works and they are happy, ask one question: “Who is one person you know who has this same problem?” Not a favor, not a referral program. One name, in the moment their gratitude is highest.

If every user gives you one name, your first 50 users find your next 50, and you never did any marketing at all.

🧭 How to actually use this list

Thirty ways, and the worst thing you can do is try eight of them at once.

Here is the honest playbook. Pick three that fit how you like working. If you enjoy talking to people, take podcasts, workshops, and dinners. If you would rather die than be on camera, take comparison pages, free tools, and marketplaces. The best channel is the one you will still be doing in week six, and you already know which ones you will quit.

Run each one properly for two weeks. Properly means the full rep, ten podcast pitches, not two. Twenty five videos, not four.

Then look at where actual users came from, kill the weakest channel, and double what worked. That is the entire system. Everyone’s three channels are different, and the only way to find yours is to knock on the doors.

Thanks for reading, friend

One last thing.

The first 100 users are not a marketing problem. They are an effort problem wearing a marketing costume. Every founder who got to 100 did it through some unglamorous combination of the things on this list, done repeatedly, past the point where it felt like it was working.

Nothing on this list feels like it is working in week one. Almost everything on it works by week six.

Pick your three. Go knock.

And when you get your hundredth user, tell me which doors opened. I keep a running tally and it is never the ones people expect.

Onwards and upwards,

Adam