How to get your first users: 100 of them, without an audience

Getting your first 100 users without an audience comes down to putting the product where people already look for products: the directories and "alternative to" sites they search, the launch boards they browse, and the few communities that allow a show-and-tell. Then talking to every single person who shows up. Nothing here needs followers, a budget or a marketing hire. It needs a package of copy and screenshots, one afternoon of submissions, and the willingness to email a hundred strangers one at a time.

The math first

Visitors from a directory or a launch post sign up at somewhere between two and five percent if the landing page is clear and signup is easy. A hundred users therefore means two to five thousand visits. No single free channel delivers that reliably in a week, but half a dozen of them together do it in a month, and most of them keep delivering afterwards. That is the plan: many small, permanent sources rather than one big day.

The channels, ranked by return on an afternoon

1. Evergreen directories. AlternativeTo, SaaSHub and, for AI products, There's An AI For That. People search these for "alternative to X" and "tool that does Y" long before they know your name. One complete listing each, with the alternatives field filled in carefully, sends a trickle of high-intent visitors for years. Highest return on the list, and nobody does it well.
2. Show HN. One post on Hacker News. If it lands, it is the best day of your year: a thousand signups before lunch is not unusual for a technical product with an honest title. If it does not, you lost twenty minutes. Rules: something technical or genuinely new, a plain title, a first comment about why you built it, and answer everything.
3. Product Hunt. A few hundred visits on the day for a well-prepared launch, and a permanent page that ranks for your name. Worth doing, not worth a month of preparation. The checklist is enough.
4. Launch boards. Uneed, Peerlist, TinyLaunch, Tiny Startups, Huzzler, MicroLaunch and the rest of the well-rated list. Tens of visits each, not hundreds, but they add up, they compound, and each one is another page that ranks. Two to three minutes per site with autofill.
5. Communities. The subreddits with a weekly show-off thread, dev.to, Indie Hackers, the Slack and Discord groups you are already in. A post that explains the problem and what you learned, not a listing. Read the rules; one deleted post is a warning, two is a ban. The communities worth it are in startup communities worth a launch.
6. Twenty people, by hand. Find twenty people who visibly have the problem: they asked about it on a forum, they complained on X, they wrote a blog post about the workaround. Send each a short, specific message with a login. Not "would you use this?" but "I built this for exactly that, here is an account". Five will try it. Those five teach you more than the other ninety-five.
7. Building in public. Works, over months, not weeks. Start it, do not wait for it.

What to skip until you have a hundred users: paid ads (you do not yet know which sentence converts), mass cold DMs, buying followers, and a second product.

A four-week plan

Week 1: package and the evergreen listings

Build the launch package: the checklist is everything a directory will ask for, and pasting your URL drafts most of it. Submit to AlternativeTo and SaaSHub completely. Submit to the long free queues (Uneed, MicroLaunch, StartupBase, SoloPush) so they run in the background. Write to the first twenty people.

Week 2: launch boards and communities

Work through the fast-approval launch boards, one afternoon. Create the Indie Hackers product page. Post in the two or three communities that allow it. Reply to everyone who signed up in week one.

Week 3: the launch day

Product Hunt and Show HN, same morning. Be present all day. The SaaS launch checklist has the hour-by-hour.

Week 4: follow up and fix

Email every signup personally. Fix the single most common point where people got stuck. Update your listings with what changed. Check which sources produced users who came back; do more of those.

Talk to all hundred

This is the part that separates products that reach a hundred users from products that reach a hundred signups. One personal email per signup, within a day, with one question: what were you trying to do, and did it work? Half will not reply. The half that do will tell you the onboarding step that loses people, the feature they assumed existed, and the sentence they would use to describe the product to a colleague. Put that sentence on the homepage and in every listing.

Measure by source

Put a UTM parameter on the URL you submit to each directory, and record the source at signup. In a month you will know that AlternativeTo sent twelve users who stayed and a launch board sent forty who bounced. The submission log in Launch to Win keeps the directory, date and listing URL per package; the UTM closes the loop.

A note on Reddit

"How to promote a SaaS on Reddit" is a popular search and mostly a trap. The subreddits that convert are the ones about the problem, not about startups, and they ban link-dropping on sight. Be a member first, answer questions for a few weeks, and when someone describes your exact problem, reply with the solution and mention you built a tool for it. That single reply, in the right thread, outperforms any launch post.