Beyond Build in Public: What gets your first users?
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What seems very common when it comes to advice for founders is:
Write regularly on X
Be on Reddit
Build in the open
Because the thought is by the time you’re launching you’ve built an audience.
What intrigues me, however, is:
How do you actually get those people to become your first actual users?
Does it all come down to consistency or is it something bigger, such as relationship building, community involvement, or even direct outreach?
As someone who has launched before, what helped the most in getting those first 50 users?
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Solid product gets u users, I guess
Just launched three days ago, so I'm answering this while it's still raw.
For me it was relationships, and not in a vague way. The people who actually showed up on launch day were almost entirely people I'd had real back-and-forth conversations with in these forums over the previous month. Not people who saw me being consistent. People I'd talked to. Someone left me a critique of my positioning that was sharper than anything I'd have paid for, and a few others told me they'd keep an eye out and then actually did.
The other thing that surprised me: reach and trust are completely separate problems. I was getting 90%+ non-follower views on my Reels and it converted almost nobody. My one clean cold-to-signup conversion came from my wife resharing a post to her own Facebook network. Same content, tiny fraction of the reach, but it arrived as a recommendation from someone the viewer already trusted instead of as an ad from a stranger.
So my honest answer to 'consistency or something bigger' is that consistency is what keeps you in the room, but borrowed trust is what actually moves someone to sign up.
Curious whether anyone found a way to manufacture that trust transfer deliberately, rather than getting lucky with a person who happened to vouch for you.
For us it was direct asks. I posted in a local community and offered the full thing free to anyone willing to have an honest conversation about it afterwards - a call, or coffee, since we are in the same city. A few people said yes. Nothing we have posted publicly has done the same so far.
Satchmo's distinction between consistency and borrowed trust is the whole game. I'd add a third piece that's easy to miss: timing. People have followed my posts for weeks and only signed up the week something in their own business finally hurt enough to make it relevant, not because my messaging changed at all. Consistency keeps you visible, trust gets you considered, but a real, felt problem is what actually converts someone. The trust transfer might be less about manufacturing it and more about being visible enough, long enough, that you're the name they remember the day the pain finally outweighs the inertia.