Getting your first 100 users - Founders share how they got their 1st, 10th, 100th, and 500th user. Check out their tips, and get inspired! How do you find your first users? This might be the most common question among indie hackers — especially those working on their first products with small or nonexistent marketing budgets. So I saved this answers from Indie Hackers (post by Channing Allen) where a few of successful founders shared how they got over this initial hurdle. From their answers you'll learn that you definitely don't have to burn through your savings or raise cash from VCs to get your first users in the door. This is the good news. The bad news? You might have to work just a little harder (and smarter) than those who do. Check out their answers below.

1. Getting your first 100 users
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Founders share how they got their 1st, 10th, 100th, and 500th user.
Check out their tips, and get inspired!

2. Founders just don't have time to learn
and test all the growth strategies and
tactics. They need a faster way!
I deconstruct how startups grow - like
acquisition tactics and channels - and
share them in a structured way.
Powered by TheBootstrappedWay.com

3. This might be the most common question among indie hackers — especially those working on
their first products with small or nonexistent marketing budgets.
So I saved this answers from Indie Hackers (post by Channing Allen) where a few of
successful founders shared how they got over this initial hurdle.
From their answers you'll learn that you definitely don't have to burn through your savings or
raise cash from VCs to get your first users in the door. This is the good news.
The bad news? You might have to work just a little harder (and smarter) than those who do.
Check out their answers below.
How do you find your first users?

4. #1
Contact potential customers from your current network

5. Joel Griffith
founder of browserless
($13,400/mo)
“The first batch of initial users
were developers I had worked
with on my previous projects:
puppeteer, chromeless, and
navalia. Having the first few
customers already lined up
helped me validate that the
idea was sound and motivated
me to launch.”

6. Eran Galperin
creator of Martial Arts on
Rails ($5,000/mo)
“I contacted all the gym owners
I'd been working with to
develop the initial software and
got them to try it out as an
actual replacement to what
they had. Those were my first
real customers. It's a very tight
community, so over time they
referred others my way.”

7. Clément Mihailescu
founder of AlgoExpert
($40,000/mo)
“When we launched our Alpha in April 2017, we had
a modest zero users. In our first year, we grew very
organically to over 150 users, thanks in large part
to my connection to Fullstack Academy (FSA), the
coding bootcamp I attended between September
and December 2016.
In the early months of our business, we gave the
product out for free to FSA students who
contacted me with questions about my
post-bootcamp journey. We received great
feedback from those early users and testers, which
helped validate the product. Eventually I started
teaching a class on algorithms and giving an
evening talk on programming-interview
preparation every six weeks at FSA, advertising
AlgoExpert in the process. I also did an interview
about these topics on a friend's podcast.
Slowly but surely, people started buying the
product, enjoying it a lot, and spreading the word.”

8. John Eremic
co-founder of Endcrawl.com
($20,000/mo)
“Once the Perl MVP existed, we cobbled
together a landing page with a Wufoo
form and sent an email blast to my
co-founder's filmmaker contacts. That
was the extent of our launch.
Early growth was 100% organic. But what
we found is that as we progressed,
growth got harder — not easier. There is
this founder fallacy that as you grow,
everything just starts flowing downhill.
We found the opposite to be true: once
all of the low-hanging fruit has been
picked, the real work of selling starts.
(The best thing we've ever heard on this
topic is Gail Goodman's presentation
"The Long Slow SaaS Ramp of Death.")”

9. #2
Cold email (or cold call) potential customers one by one

10. Jeff Ponchick
founder of Repost Network
($500,000/mo)
“For the first six months I just
reached out via cold email to
artists all day every day, and
we eventually hit a tipping
point. Now it's all word of mouth
— we have virtually no sales
team.”

11. Philippe Genois
founder of InputKit
($11,100/mo)
“We initially acquired all of our customers
through proactive outbound sales. I would
call people, send cold emails, send
messages on LinkedIn, and offer an
in-person demo — anything to try to get the
product out there. Within 14 months I did
around 40 in-person demos, and used
join.me to do more over the phone.
This strategy landed us our first 10 customers.
While it helped us validate the idea, it was a
pain in the ass and I wish the whole process
had taken a lot less time. At this point, we
were not relying on our website at all for
sales or marketing, and I think this was a
mistake.”

12. #3
Contribute to communities in exchange for traffic

13. Zuhayeer Musa
founder of Levels.fyi
($5,000/mo)
“We seeded traffic to Levels.fyi
by answering related questions
on Blind and other Q&A forums
with a link to the site.”

14. Guan Xun Chew
founder of WriteMapper
($1,000/mo)
“After the intial wave of visitors from
PH, I posted WriteMapper to Reddit's
/r/macapps, making sure to share
details I thought were interesting,
and replied to every comment that
came in. As a small subreddit that 1)
doesn't get many posts to begin with
and 2) typically gets posts with no
effort made to either provide a
background story or active
comments by the original poster, I
was able to have my post stay on
the front page of the subreddit for
quite a while.”

15. Joel Griffith
founder of browserless
($13,400/mo)
“I posted on most of the usual
culprits: Hacker News, reddit, and on
a few GitHub issues. I immediately
found out that because the audience
for this service was small, larger sites
just didn't seem to care much. I
made no front pages and didn't get
featured anywhere.
What did work was answering
people's questions on StackOverflow
and Github. Even if it didn't mean a
conversion right away, it started
creating some backlinks into the site,
which at least helps with SEO.”

16. Robin Vander
Heyden
founder of ManyPixels
($55,000/mo)
Part 1
“We got our initial users solely via niche Facebook
groups of entrepreneurs and startups. I joined
many Facebook groups and wrote a post asking
for feedback on ManyPixels and our value
proposition. My message basically was, "Hey guys,
here is what we do, would you be interested in
this? Yes/No/Why not?" I also experimented by
promising that each person giving us feedback
would have a promo code. This worked well — lots
of people commented, and this was a small hack
that got us a lot of buzz.
I think what we did right here was putting the right
product with the right message in front of the right
users. I was honest: I told them I was a digital
nomad in Bangkok experimenting with a new idea
and trying to validate demand. People reacted
well to that (even though it was advertising in a
sense) and were supportive. I honestly wasn't sure
if it would be flagged as spam, but I decided to
take the risk nevertheless.”

17. Robin Vander
Heyden
founder of ManyPixels
($55,000/mo)
Part 2
“Another advantage was that I was a tech
entrepreneur myself. I knew exactly what kind of
modern design style people liked, and I knew
where online entrepreneurs met and had
discussions. (Indie Hackers is one of those places.)
I did not have to do a lot of customer research. All
my decisions were based on instinct and probably
were all very biased. I also got lucky to be in such
a field and target a community that's very open to
trying new ideas.
My efforts included:
● posting case studies on reddit
● being active on Indie Hackers and Hacker
News
● actively contacting companies on Facebook
and Angel List. Though my account got
banned for a few weeks from these
platforms so I will be trying a different
strategy.”

18. #4
Build on a marketplace platform that drives traffic

19. Pippin Williamson
founder of Sandhills
Development, LLC
($245,000/mo)
“Early on, my customers came from two primary sources:
1. The large existing audience of CodeCanyon.net,
the marketplace that I was publishing my
products on.
2. A naturally grown audience I was building through
my frequent writing.
The existing audience that Code Canyon offered was
critically important to my early success. Back then I had
no reputation, no following, and no way to reach potential
customers on my own. Leveraging the audience Envato
(owner of Code Canyon) provided allowed me to build up
an early customer base without having any marketable
audience of my own.
Code Canyon helped me to build a small following pretty
quickly that I was then able to cultivate into a much
larger group through the content I was producing on my
personal site, Pippin's Plugins.”

20. Nelson Joyce
co-founder of Tettra
($61,000/mo)
“The Slack App directory was a massive
source of trials. You get free distribution from
the parent platform and a clear target
persona you can attract. There's also a whole
chunk of functionality that you can
essentially "outsource" to the platform. For us,
that was authentication, user management,
and access to the "work graph". After our
experience, I highly recommend launching
on a platform like Slack, WordPress, or
Shopify.
There are definitely risks involved, but the
benefits outweighed the risks in our eyes.
Here you can check out more details on why
you should launch on a platform from my
co-founder Andy.”

21. Tommy Chan
CTO of Altcoin Fantasy
($4,000/mo)
“As part of our initial growth strategy, we
researched Bitcoin games on the app
stores. Naturally, I wanted to target
Bitcoin game players since our initial
product was a game revolving around
crypto coins. So for version 0 of our
Android app, we literally just wrapped an
embedded web browser that pointed to
our web app (our web app is
mobile-responsive), deployed that to the
app store, and threw together ads
targeting those users. We were able to
buy clicks for less than 8 cents with a
25% conversion rate, and saw some
great initial returns from those
campaigns.”
Note: Tommy spent some money on advertising, but
we included his answer anyway in order to give a little
representation to mobile app products.

22. #5
Choose a product name relevant to the problem you solve

23. Chris Chen
founder of Instapainting
($32,000/mo)
“I was in college, but had
already tried several websites
before in high school. My
strategy up until that point
consisted of creating it and
letting it sit, hoping users would
come. For Like.fm, my first
mildly successful free-to-use
website venture, I noticed the
domain was good enough that
it was getting traffic on its own
and a trickle of users per week.”

24. “When we started the company I didn't have
much money, but I saw that the most
commonly searched term for SoundCloud
producers was "How do I get more Reposts
on SoundCloud?" A repost on SoundCloud is
like a retweet on Twitter, so artists want as
many of them as possible so their music will
get heard.
I thought if I named the company Repost
and dominated the SEO on that specific
search we could get some free inbound
traffic. My assumption worked. I believe if you
search "SoundCloud repost" in Google we're
one of the top hits, and something like 25% of
our inbound applicants come organically.”
Jeff Ponchick
founder of Repost Network
($500,000/mo)

25. #6
Get small, relevant blogs to write about you

26. Chris Chen
founder of Instapainting
($32,000/mo)
“For Like.fm, I googled for small blogs
covering things in my space and manually
contacted dozens of them. One of these
small blogs was followed by a CNET writer,
and the next thing I knew I had my first major
press article: a CNET article written about one
of my features. It got me my first 10,000 users
and gave me the motivation to keep going
and the cred to get to the next milestone.
Nowadays I run an e-commerce startup at
Instapainting.com. My first users were
acquired by making a post on a small
subreddit, where it found some immediate
customers. But later I took the same strategy
of contacting press to get traffic, increasing
SEO, and continuing to put effort and money
into press (from small blogs to large
publications).”

27. #7
Launch on popular (or relevant) product-listing sites

28. Nelson Joyce
co-founder of Tettra
($61,000/mo)
“Prior to launch, we posted on Betalist
and had about 65 people on a waiting
list. We also posted to all the typical
directories like Stackshare, Siftery,
Capterra, and AlternativeTo. Only Betalist
and AlternativeTo ended up driving any
significant traffic.
We decided to wait to post on Product
Hunt until the product was more fleshed
out and our sales funnel was working on
a small scale. We ended up launching
on Product Hunt about six months later
and got over 700 upvotes and was the
#3 spot for that day. Here's the actual
Tettra page we used to plan the Product
Hunt launch.”

29. Yoann Moinet
“I released the app on October 5th in three
different places.
● On Product Hunt
● On reddit in two specialized subs, /r/apple
and /r/macapps
● On Hacker News
I also submitted it to various startup listings that
brought very few visits and even fewer
conversions. One that stood out amazingly is my
submission to Electron's app listing. It doesn't
generate that many visits, but the conversion rate
is amazing. For 10 visits a day, I get a 20%
conversion rate. My guess is that the audience is
very specialized and interested in my product.
In this article, I propose a theory I have about the
various sharing channels. It explains how you have
to adapt your content to the audience you'll most
likely reach on different channels.”
founder of Fenêtre
($550/mo)

30. #8
Reach out to mainstream press outlets

31. Guan Xun Chew
founder of WriteMapper
($1,000/mo)
“I started actively reaching out to
mainstream online press outlets that
looked like they would be willing to
cover a newly released macOS app. I
searched as many app news sites as
I could within a day, making sure to
identify journalists that had
previously written about other Mac
apps. From there, I was able to
create a shortlist of 24 journalists to
contact, and sent each of them a
short and concise email pitch. This
effort got WriteMapper featured on
Forbes and Cult of Mac.”

32. Do you want to know how other tech companies have generated MRR?

33. I deconstruct how startups grow and share them in a structured way

34. About the maker
Hey, I’m Daniel. I’m the founder of The Bootstrapped Way and Fractional CMO. I work with B2B SaaS
companies to design and execute demand generation, lead generation, and growth strategies.
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Two years ago, I steered away from mainstream blogs and shifted my focus to working with and
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By putting what I learn into practice, now I’m able to craft growth strategies for early-stage startups
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35. The Bootstrapped Way is an Airtable database where
I surface insights from over 120 growth strategies,
channels & tactics that actually generate revenue.
www.TheBootstrappedWay.com