How we reached 0 to 4000+ users on AI Context Flow with $0 marketing spend - step by step guide

I’ve been guilty of always posting about the good stuff, achievements, awards etc. But as a founder who’s largely bootstrapped, I have experienced how frustrating it is when you are trying to scale your own thing and all you see are milestones and achievements but no way to know how to get there.

So today, I want to share how we reached from 0 to 4000+ users on AI Context Flow. The good, the bad, the ugly.

1/ Your first users are always door to door

Hitting publish feels exhilirating, but the real work starts afterwards. Our first 200 users were door to door. I called my school friends, my ex-colleagues, my university mates, people I met on networking events. Anyone that (kinda) fit my ICP and would respond to my message.

2/ Manual onboarding on calls

My co-founders and I manually onboarded the first 300 users and helped users understand what the product does. If we felt like they found value in the product, we nudged them to drop a review. This helped us build an organic ratings and reviews on the chrome store.

3/ Be creative on how to get your product in front of dozens of people at once

We couldn’t manually keep onboarding users forever, so we had to scale. I had to find a way to provide value to people while bringing my product in front of them. After much brainstorming, I created a prompt and context engineering workshop which I conducted for free in different universities, co-working spaces, online communities. The tool I used in those workshops was AICF, but the content was unbiased and educative. We got 500+ users from these workshops, and >80% of them are still active users today.

4/ Product Hunt

This was the big spike. We launched on Product Hunt thinking it would be GREAT if we could somehow land in top 10. But sometimes, the universe helps you. We came #1 product of the day and this gave us a trickle of 700+ users next few weeks before the spike dying down

5/ SEO

We are not loaded with cash, we are a team thats mostly bootstrapped. After product hunt, I started investing in SEO and writing blogs while coming from a tech background. Didn’t know much about blogging, but watched a few youtube videos and started writing. I focused on long-tail, solution oriented articles (bottom of the funnel) with some core concepts pages. Here I got a bit lucky, the AI Context/Memory space was so new that people were just figuring out what different terms means and we got some high quality organic backlinks (DR 80+) because we started creating original content around what we believe these different terms mean.

Our long-tail articles also targeted between moving between platforms e.g. from chatgpt to claude, from claude to gemini etc. In the last 7 months, we have gotten around 600 users from our blogs. Turns out, SEO does work.

6/ Chrome store distribution

Chrome store and other app stores provides a mammoth of distribution that will eclipse your own distribution for quiet some time, but only if you understand how to use it to your advantage.

In the start we got maybe 3 users per day from chrome store, today we get 20-30/day. How? Great visuals, right keywords, and a consistent onstream of reviews. Every time your user reaches a point where they like your product, prompt them to drop a review. Either manually or within the product or through emails. But ASK SHAMELESSLY FOR REVIEWS. This is the only way to get more impressions on chrome store and other app stores.

7/ Fix your onboarding - manufacture AHA within 60 seconds

We drank our own kool-aid for quiet some months. Product Hunt #1, Appsumo select partner. Things looked good, until we went into the details. A large majority of our users were churning during onboarding, not after. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I did the number crunching and it felt like a punch to my gut.

Turns out, onboarding doesn’t mean telling users every feature your product has. Onboarding is a sales pitch, and you need to convince your user in 60s that your product is worth keeping. The rest, they can figure out themselves.

Took us a while to fix onboarding, but our current numbers look good. Thank God for that!

8/ Founder led content

Turns out, people like stories. We have active social pages but my personal stories (even random BS stories that I post just because..) consistently lead to more discovery for AICF than all the official channels we have.

In 2026, turning off AI slop, talking like a human, and showing people basic respect does pay off.

These are all the tips I have for you :) If you are someone just starting out with your own product, I wish you all the best. The road is long but sweet, my dear warrior.

And if you do check out AI Context Flow, DO NOT FORGET TO LEAVE A REVIEW :D (see what I did there?)
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ai-context-flow-use-your/cfegfckldnmbdnimjgfamhjnmjpcmgnf/reviews