How did you get your first users before anyone knew your product existed?

I’m at the stage where building the product feels easier than getting the first real users.

Not traffic. Not friends signing up. I mean people who genuinely try the product, come back, and tell you what’s useful or broken.

I keep hearing the usual answers - Product Hunt, Reddit, X, communities, cold outreach - but I’m more interested in what actually worked when you had no audience yet.

Did your first users come from one channel, or was it mostly manual conversations one by one?

And looking back, what would you do differently if you had to find your first 20 users again?