The first 100 users of any product are the ones who will tell you whether you've built something real. They'll give you feedback you can't get from surveys, they'll stress-test assumptions you didn't know you'd made, and — if you've done it right — they'll become advocates who bring you the next 100. The question is how to find them without a marketing budget.
Start Where Your Users Already Are
The most common mistake founders make is building a distribution channel from scratch when the audience already exists somewhere else. Before you write a single piece of content or set up a single ad, answer this question: where do people who have the problem your product solves already gather online?
For developer tools, that's GitHub, Hacker News, and specific Slack/Discord communities. For productivity tools, it's Reddit communities like r/productivity or r/getdisciplined. For B2B SaaS, it's LinkedIn and industry-specific forums. Go there first — not as a marketer, but as a contributor. Answer questions. Share useful information. Mention your product only when it's genuinely the best answer to a specific question someone asked.
Do Things That Don't Scale
Paul Graham's famous advice still holds. Email people individually. DM potential users and ask if you can show them what you're building. Reach out to people who've publicly complained about the problem your product solves. These conversations are slow, but they're far more valuable than traffic — you learn more from one 30-minute user conversation than from 1,000 sessions of analytics data.
For your first 100 users, "doing things that don't scale" isn't a phase to get through — it's the strategy. You're not optimising for volume. You're optimising for learning.
Make It Embarrassingly Easy to Sign Up
Friction kills early traction. Every extra click, every required form field, every "verify your email before you can do anything" step costs you users at this stage. Strip your signup flow to the absolute minimum. If you can get someone using the core value of your product in under two minutes from landing on your site, you're in good shape. If it takes five minutes of setup before they see anything interesting, you'll lose most of the people you worked hard to reach.
Use Directory Listings for Permanent Baseline Traffic
While you're doing all the manual outreach work to get your first 100 users, set up your passive discovery channels in parallel. Submit to CrawlRabbit and similar reviewed directories. These won't drive your first 100 users on their own, but they create a permanent baseline — people discovering you through search and AI assistants months from now, without any ongoing effort on your part.
The founders who look back at consistent growth are usually the ones who built both: intensive manual outreach in the early days, and passive indexed presence that compounds over time.
Ask Every Early User for a Referral
Don't wait until you have a formal referral program. In the early stage, just ask. "Is there anyone else you know who'd find this useful?" sent personally to your first 20 users will often get you 5–10 more. Early adopters are usually connected to other early adopters. Use that network.
Getting to 100 users is hard, but it's a solvable problem. The founders who get stuck are usually the ones trying to solve it at scale before they've solved it at all.