How do you get your first users when nobody knows you exist?

You go to them. Nobody finds you at this stage — you find the room your users are already standing in (a niche subreddit, a Discord, a forum), and you're useful in it before you ever mention your product. Supademo's first 2,000 signups came from a single Reddit post offering to do free work for people, no pitch attached.

Can I get users with no audience and no money?

Yes — that's the normal case. Every example in this guide started with no audience. Buffer's founder wrote 150 guest posts to borrow other people's readers. Airbnb went after the bloggers with the smallest audiences, because those were the ones who replied. What it costs is your time, one message at a time.

Should I get users first or validate the idea first?

Validate first. Almost every guide on this topic assumes the product exists and only distribution is missing — but recruiting users for something nobody needs is a slow way to learn that nobody needed it. A live page and fifty of the right visitors will tell you in a week. No market need is the #1 reason startups fail.

When do I stop doing things that don't scale?

When the same unscalable thing has worked three times in a row for the same reason. That repetition is the signal you've found a real pattern worth automating. Before that, you're not scaling a channel — you're scaling a guess.

How to Get Your First Users

Q: How many users do I need to validate a product?

Fewer than you think to learn something, more than ten to trust it. Ten users can all be friends and favours; around fifty is where retention starts to mean something and word of mouth either appears or doesn't. Stripe's Patrick McKenzie puts the bar well: by the time you have 10 happy customers, it isn't a fluke anymore.

In 2020, Supademo’s founders posted an offer on Reddit: drop your product URL, and we’ll build you a free interactive demo. No launch, no ad budget, no audience. That post brought in their first 2,000 signups. Today the company is past $4M ARR and 200,000 users — with no ads, no sales team, and no outbound.

That’s the shape of it. Your first users don’t arrive; you go and get them, one at a time, from a place where they already are.

Most guides to this question skip a step, though — and it’s the expensive one. They all assume you’ve already built the thing, and that your only problem is distribution. Sometimes that’s true. Often the reason nobody’s signing up is that nobody wanted it, and no amount of clever outreach fixes that. CB Insights’ post-mortems put no market need at the top of the startup failure list — we charted the top ten reasons here. Recruiting users for a product nobody needs is just a slower way to find out.

So this guide starts one step earlier than the others.

Step 0: find out if anyone wants it — before you go hunting

Here’s the cheap version of the next six months: put up a page that describes the thing, send fifty of the right people to it, and see what they do. If nobody signs up, you’ve learned something in a week that would otherwise take you a year and a product.

Rahul Vohra did roughly this before Superhuman was Superhuman. He built a landing page on Squarespace in two hours, wired it to capture emails, and set up an auto-reply asking two questions. Then he wrote an article — “RIP Mailbox,” three days to write, one day to shop around — and pointed it at the page. It brought in north of 5,000 signups, and those auto-replies turned into around a thousand early conversations. The page came first. The product came after, shaped by what those people said.

That’s a demand test, and it beats a survey for one reason: people lie in surveys and tell the truth with their behaviour. “Would you use this?” gets you a yes. A signup form gets you a fact. A payment field gets you the truth.

Y Combinator’s advice runs the same way — charge real money early, and not because you need the revenue. The point is the feedback. Paying customers give sharper feedback than free users ever will, because a free user who drifts away costs themselves nothing and tells you nothing.

If you want the full method, that’s the validate a startup idea guide, and the tools that do it are in our idea validation tools comparison. If you’ve already got signal that people want this — real signal, not encouragement from friends — then read on.

“First users” is three different jobs

The phrase hides three problems that need three different tactics. Lumping them together is why so much advice feels useless.

Your first 10 are a search problem, not a sales problem. Ankit Gupta at YC puts it better than we can: “Finding your first users is more of a search problem than a persuasion problem.” You’re not convincing a market. You’re locating the handful of people whose hair is on fire, and handing them a bucket. If you have to persuade someone hard, they’re the wrong person — early on, a hard sell is a signal you’re in the wrong room.

Your first 50 is where you find out if it’s real. Fifty is roughly the point where retention starts to mean something and word of mouth either shows up or doesn’t. Ten users can all be friends and favours. Fifty can’t.

Your first 100+ is where you find the one channel that actually works — and stop doing the other twenty-eight.

Don’t skip ahead. Almost everyone tries to solve the first-100 problem while they still have three users, which is how you end up with a marketing plan and no customers.

Pick one channel, not twenty-nine

Search this topic and you’ll get listicles with 29 numbered tactics. Ignore them — and here’s the sourced reason why.

Lenny Rachitsky went and looked at how successful apps actually got their first users. The finding: essentially seven strategies account for all of that early growth, and most apps used just one. Not seven. One. The tactic-dump posts are describing a menu that nobody in the sample actually ordered from.

So the job isn’t to run 29 experiments. It’s to guess which single room your users are already standing in, go there, and be useful for a month. The real channel set is short:

Communities where they already gather — a niche subreddit, a Discord, a Slack, a forum. Highest hit rate for most software.
Direct outreach — cold DMs and email, one at a time, hand-written.
A borrowed audience — someone else’s newsletter, podcast, or following.
Launch platforms — Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, BetaList. A spike, not a channel.
Your warm network — the first five, and only the first five.

Pick the one where your users are densest, not the one you’re most comfortable with. That last part is where founders quietly cheat.

Communities: go where they’re already complaining

This is the highest-yield channel for most early products, and it’s the one people do worst — because they show up and pitch.

Supademo’s Reddit post worked because it wasn’t a pitch. It was an offer: give me your URL and I’ll do the work for you, free. The value came first, the product came second, and 2,000 people took them up on it.

There’s a reason to care about this beyond signups. Reddit is now the #1 cited domain in AI answers, showing up in roughly 21% of AI Overviews — and you can watch it happen on this very topic. Google’s AI Overview for “how to get your first users” cites r/SaaS. Being genuinely useful in the right subreddit compounds in a way it didn’t three years ago.

The method matters enough that we gave it its own guide: how to get users from Reddit — including the value-first post template and the 90/10 rule that keeps you from getting banned in week one.

Direct outreach: hand-written, one at a time

Cold DMs work better than founders expect, and far better than cold email. OneUp’s data across 5,756 DMs put the reply rate at 26.6% — about 5× what cold email returns.

Here’s the shape that works. Steal it:

Hi [name] — saw your post in [specific place] about [the exact problem, in their words].

I built [thing] because I had the same problem. [One sentence on what it does.]

Not selling anything — I'd genuinely like to know if it's useful or if I've
missed the point. Happy to set it up for you myself if you want to try it.

Why it works: it proves you read their post, it’s specific, it asks for judgement rather than money, and it offers to do the work. Send thirty of these by hand. Don’t automate them — the automation is what kills the reply rate, and at thirty sends there’s nothing to automate anyway.

Zapier’s first paying customer came out of a forum post. Wade Foster then cold-emailed Andrew Warner, built the specific integration Warner needed, and closed him. That’s not a growth hack; it’s a founder doing a job by hand.

Borrowed audiences: someone already has your users

You don’t have an audience. Someone else does.

Buffer is the clean case: Leo Widrich wrote 150 guest posts in the company’s first nine months, which brought in roughly 100,000 users — and content was driving 70%+ of daily signups. That’s an unglamorous grind, and it worked because he went where readers already were instead of waiting for them to find Buffer’s blog.

The same lever, smaller: Airbnb’s founders went after bloggers with the smallest audiences, because those bloggers actually replied. Twitter got 250+ signups the day after Om Malik wrote about it — when fewer than 600 people were on the service at all.

Do things that don’t scale — and know when to stop

Paul Graham’s line is the most-quoted advice in this category, and the least-finished. Everyone tells you to do things that don’t scale. Nobody tells you when to stop.

The manual playbook is real and it works:

Facebook launched to the Kirkland House mailing list — about 300 people. That produced 1,200–1,500 registrants in 24 hours.
Slack hand-recruited teams it knew, and got 8,000 invite requests on day one and 15,000 within two weeks.
DoorDash put flyers up around Stanford. Tinder threw parties at USC sororities. Etsy went to craft fairs. Nextdoor worked HOA boards.

Patrick McKenzie’s rule from Stripe Atlas is the one to internalise: the founders make the first sales themselves. Not a hire, not a funnel. You. And his payoff line is the useful bar — by the time you have 10 happy customers, it isn’t a fluke anymore.

So when do you stop? Here’s a defensible answer, since nobody else gives one: stop when the same unscalable thing has worked three times in a row for the same reason. That repetition is the signal that you’ve found a pattern worth building a process around. Before that, you’re not automating a channel — you’re automating a guess.

Doing things that don’t scale isn’t a phase you suffer through. It’s how you learn what the scalable version should be. Vohra’s thousand conversations weren’t a bootstrapping tax; they were the product spec.

What not to do yet

Paid ads. You don’t know your message, your audience, or your conversion rate. Ads will convert your ignorance into a bill.
SEO. It works — it’s most of why you’re reading this — but it pays out in months. It’s not a first-user channel.
Automating outreach. At thirty messages there’s nothing to automate, and automation is exactly what tanks the reply rate.
Hiring a salesperson. If the founder can’t sell it, a hire can’t either. They’ll just fail more expensively.
A second product. The temptation when the first one is quiet. It’s almost always avoidance.

The ladder

Put together, the sequence has gates. Don’t climb until each one is true:

Demand test — a live page, real traffic, real signups or payment intent. Gate: strangers act, not friends.
First 10 — hand-recruited from one community, by you. Gate: they use it unprompted, twice.
First 50 — same channel, repeated. Gate: retention holds and someone refers you without being asked.
First 100 — now, and only now, work out what scales.

Most founders start at step 3, wonder why it’s not working, and blame the channel.

Before you go hunting for users, find out if they’re out there. ProofMachine mines the verbatim complaints, deploys a live page that captures real intent, and surfaces the exact communities to recruit your first ten from.