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Getting your first 100 users is harder than building the product. Change my mind.

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Building feels straightforward.

You have a problem, you open your laptop, you build, break things, fix them, ship features, repeat.

Then you launch.

And suddenly nobody cares 😅

Getting those first users forces you to do everything developers usually avoid:

Talk to strangers.
Post content.
Sell.
Get ignored.
Get rejected.
Change your positioning.
And repeat it every single day.

I've realized that building the product is only half the job.

Maybe even the easy half.

So I'm curious:

What was harder for you: building your product or getting your first 100 users?

And what actually worked to get you there?

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getting first 100 users for sure. Trying social media and paid ads on several platforms, waiting for the results. What di you try and how did it go so far

 

So far the biggest thing for us has been a mix of Product Hunt, direct outreach and being active in communities where developers already hang out.

We launched Murmell 2 days ago and just crossed 100 users, so still very early, but organic conversations have worked much better than paid acquisition for us so far.

Curious to hear how the paid ads perform for you once you have more data!

 Hi, congrats on your product launch! Our team also launched our product a couple of months ago, and we are still expanding the features. Just curious, do you use any paid ads to promote your product? So far, no one cares to even register for free.

Distrubution is the harder part for sure.

Depending on your product and your audience you gotta figure exactly which channel is gonna work for you.

There are many options we have

  • SEO (page optimization, backlink if needed) for long term or at least with a few months wait.

  • Influencer colloboration - collab with youtubers/newsletter influencers in your niche

  • Making your own youtube/social media content, youtube videos targeting google search keywords, etc.

  • Reddit commenting - very powerful, but need to do carefully. One reddit comment served me 5-10 new users every day for many months. Similarly for facebook.

 That Reddit comment getting 5–10 users a day for months is actually crazy haha.

I’m starting to realize distribution is less about being everywhere and more about finding 1–2 channels that really compound. We’ve mostly been testing Product Hunt, direct outreach and social/community content so far.

Definitely need to experiment more with Reddit.

 Building is all about control, but distribution? That's a whole different ball game—it's pure chaos. One of the biggest pitfalls is thinking of those first 100 users as just another marketing challenge when, in reality, it’s a direct sales issue. For us, the game-changer was doing unscalable, one-on-one outreach in niche Slack groups and Reddit communities. That’s what really made a difference.

harder for us too, but replies beat posts by more than we expected. since 12 aug we wrote 241 replies on x and went from 0 to 61 followers, 38 verified. posting on its own did almost nothing.

we build a tool in this space so take that w/ a pinch of salt.

 241 replies is serious commitment haha, but the result makes sense.

I’ve noticed something similar: actually joining conversations tends to work much better than just publishing something and hoping people see it.

Posts feel scalable, but replies seem much better for building the first real audience.

not 100 users yet, so take this as a report from earlier in the process. Been doing basically every item on your list daily for the past three weeks and I can confirm that numbers do not care haha.

I think, talking to strangers is slower than posting but you feel you can actually go somewhere, which on the other hand, posting doesn't for me just yet

 I think it's a very long journey, of course human interaction is always the best, but posting constantly is very important and it's like a snowball effect, it can feel complicated at first but it's very important !

Agreed, and the item on your list that hurt most was changing positioning every day. The page can't move that fast, so my headline was always describing last week's pitch. I ended up rewriting only the top of the page each week and leaving everything below it alone.