7 ways to get your first 100 users without a marketing budget

Nobody is coming to save you.

There is no press cycle, no Product Hunt placement, and no ad spend that turns a product nobody has heard of into a product with a hundred users on it. I want to be blunt about that early, because the fantasy version of this, where you build in secret for six months and then unveil the thing to an eager crowd, is the single most common way I watch people burn a year of their life.

The good news is that the first hundred is the only stretch where you get to do things that do not scale, and where the fact that you have no money matters far less than you'd expect. You just have to show up daily for a few months. Here are the seven things I would actually do.

1. Start collecting emails before the product exists

You may think you're in the business of whatever problem your app solves. You're not. You're in the business of collecting customer emails.

Put a waitlist on your landing page before you have anything to put behind it. Buttondown will hand you an HTML snippet, and your agent can drop it into the page for you:

I'd like to add a waitlist to my homepage so I have a way to engage with customers before my product is ready. Here's the Buttondown snippet: ...

Make the copy compelling and make sure the CTA is clear and attractive.

Customers like joining waitlists more than they like signing up for products. Signing up for a product is a decision backed by a wallet. Joining a waitlist for someone you find interesting is more like hopping into the passenger seat for a behind-the-scenes adventure, and that is exactly the person you want first.

There's a second reason to do this on day one. If the build takes three months longer than you planned, and it will, you'll still have spent those months acquiring customers instead of only writing code.

2. Stop guarding the idea

Nobody is going to steal your idea. I know that stings a little, because the secrecy instinct feels like protecting something valuable, but staying quiet hurts you badly: every week you say nothing is a week of feedback you didn't get and awareness you didn't build.

Say what you're building, publicly, by name, starting now. The person who hears about your product in month one and remembers it in month four will do more for you than the theoretical competitor who was never going to bother.

3. Post the first video, and let it be bad

Go somewhere you can talk out loud without feeling self-conscious. Your car, your backyard, on a walk. Open the camera in selfie mode and talk for a minute about your app the way you'd describe it to a friend. Try one of these as an opener:

"Hello world! My name is X. And I'm working on…"

"Have you ever wished there existed a product that…"

"I am so fed up with [competitor]. That's why I'm building…"

Then don't do a second take. Give it a title you would click yourself, not a description like "introducing my todo app."

Titling is the one place to be shameless. Write the honest title first, then write the most egregiously over-the-top clickbait version you can stand, and pick something between the two. Keep the bait in the packaging and never in the contents: a viewer should be a little wrong when they click and fully satisfied when they leave. Nobody gets angry about a clickbaity title, they get angry about empty content.

Then hit publish.

You will have a thousand objections. What if someone from work sees it? What if people I went to school with see it and laugh? Publish it anyway. Your first content should be cringe, and three months from now you'll look back and wonder how it was that bad. That's what learning looks like, and you cannot skip to month three without shipping the month-one version.

4. Post three times a week, on the platforms that show strangers to strangers

Register a YouTube channel and a TikTok account first, before anything else.

I'm specific about those two because their algorithms will show a total unknown to strangers. TikTok will put a brand new account's video in front of a few hundred people who have never heard of you, purely to see what they do with it. Instagram and X lean much harder on who already follows you, and right now that's nobody. Add X if your product is for technical people, or Instagram if it's artsy or lifestyle, but treat them as the second wave.

Take your time on the bio. Someone who likes one of your videos will check your profile once and then never again, so that bio is your one shot at moving them to your site. "Building a todo app" tells a stranger nothing. "Most todo apps track tasks. I'm building one that tracks happiness" makes someone tilt their head and tap the link.

Write me profile bios for X (160 characters), Instagram (150), TikTok (80), and YouTube (a couple of sentences).

Don't describe the features. I want the kind of bio that makes a stranger curious enough to tap the link, more like a portrait of the lifestyle the product gives someone. Give me three options per platform.

Then pick one platform and post to it every day. If daily is too much, every other day, and I won't haggle lower than three times a week. That three is not a number I made up: Buffer looked at 2.1 million posts across about 102,000 Instagram accounts and found that accounts posting three to five times a week got roughly 12% more reach per post than accounts posting once or twice.¹

Ignore your view counts for the first few months. Fifteen people half-watching your updates are not a wasted audience. Robert Zajonc ran experiments in the 1960s showing people faces of strangers and foreign words, some repeatedly, and people rated whatever they had seen more often as more likeable and more trustworthy, purely on repetition. It's called the mere exposure effect, and it's how a stranger slowly turns into someone who feels like they already know you.

Point every profile link at your own domain, never a link-in-bio service. You own the domain, search engines will start associating it with your product, and it's where you collect the email addresses. And sign in to all of them on your phone, because you'll be posting in the thirty spare seconds you have while waiting for a coffee, and a login screen in that moment is enough friction to make you not bother.

5. Become a reply guy

For a long stretch at the beginning, you'll get more early users out of this than out of your own posts.

Pick the communities your customers already spend time in, then start replying. On X, on Reddit, on Hacker News. Not anonymously — use your real name and your real face if you can muster it. People will forgive a mid-quality reply from an obvious human. Show up under the same name and face often enough and people start to recognise you, which is how you build a following here.

Reply early. If a post is more than twelve hours old, don't bother. A post is most relevant in its first couple of hours, and people only ever read the handful of replies at the top of the thread. Show up as reply number sixty and you're below the fold where nobody scrolls. Inside the first hour sets you up nicely.

Never mention your product in a reply. Put your product in your profile instead, and that's where people will find it once you've said something interesting enough to make them curious about you. Rule one of Reddit especially: do not mention what you're building, or mention it so obliquely that nobody could tell you were talking about your own product. Say "I'm actually building something that does exactly this" and leave the link out entirely. People there smell self-promotion from a mile off, and a ban shuts you out of that subreddit for good.

And never, ever use AI to write your replies. That's the fastest way to be ignored by everyone. This is a muscle you're building, and you won't gain anything by having a machine lift the weight for you. If you want AI involved, keep it on the sidelines reacting to something you already wrote:

Here's a post I'm thinking of replying to: [paste it]. Here's the reply I drafted: [your draft].

Do not rewrite it and do not suggest replacement wording. Tell me instead: is my point actually clear, am I saying something the other forty replies are already saying, and is there anything here that reads as smug or as self-promotion? I'll do the rewriting myself.

Give this a few months. The goal is that people in the subreddit start recognising your name, and eventually someone else answers a question by pointing at you. Then you have other people marketing on your behalf.

6. Treat everyone who complains as a gift

Once you have your first handful of users, some of them will be annoyed with you, and a few will be rude about it.

Let them. Early on I had a customer whose Bitcoin payment got denied by a price swing, and he came at me furious. I got indignant and challenged him back, basically asking how he would have solved it. A friend saw the exchange and said: dude, you have a guy trying to give you money, and this is how you speak to him? I have never talked to a customer that way since.

The overwhelming majority of unhappy users say nothing at all. They close the tab and you never learn why. So the angry person in your inbox is doing you an enormous favour. They are handing you the reason all the quiet ones left.

Fix what they reported, then tell them you fixed it. A frustrated customer whose problem you actually solved will turn into a believer, and often a loud one. At a hundred users you can do this personally for every single person, which is the one advantage you hold over every competitor with a support queue.

7. Never have a launch day

The big launch is almost unquestioned logic, whether you look at actual startups or at Hollywood fiction like Silicon Valley. Months of secret work, then you post to Product Hunt and Hacker News, you tell the press, you tell your mom, and then…

Nothing happens.

I have worked at big companies with dedicated press teams that landed coverage in every major publication, and the day comes and goes there too. It's boring. If you're a solo builder with no existing audience, it's ten times more painful, and the demoralisation is what makes people quit.

So launch every day instead. A tweet is a launch. A TikTok is a launch. A blog post, a new feature, a bug fix — these are not different things, and v1 of your app is not more meaningful than publishing a video. Build in the open and treat all of it the same way. You're trading one tall spike surrounded by silence for a hundred small bars that keep going and slowly get taller. Pick the second one and you'll reach a hundred users.

Not one of these seven takes money. They ask you to be publicly visible for a few months while it feels like nothing is happening, and you can start today.