How to get your first 100 users for your SaaS

Most first-time founders think the hard part is building the product. It isn’t. The product is a solvable problem — you can grind on it until it works. The hard part is that you can ship something genuinely good and have nobody know it exists. Your first 100 users are a distribution problem, not a product problem. Nobody is going to stumble onto your landing page. You have to go get them, one conversation at a time.

The good news: getting your first 100 users as a solo founder doesn’t require ad spend, a growth team, or a big launch. It requires knowing exactly who you’re for and being willing to show up where they already are. Here’s the playbook.

Get specific about who your first 100 users are

“Anyone who needs X” isn’t an audience — it’s a wish. Your first 100 users don’t come from a wide net. They come from a narrow group that feels one specific pain sharply enough to try something new from a stranger.

For your ideal early user, you should be able to answer:

• Their role and context— not “marketers” but “solo founders doing their own marketing.”
• The painful, recurring problem your product removes. Early users need to be hurting, not mildly inconvenienced.
• What they use instead today— a spreadsheet, a competitor, duct tape — which tells you how to frame the pitch.
• Where they already spend time online. This one determines everything downstream.

Writing this down is the step founders skip, then wonder why outreach falls flat. Walk through how to create an ideal customer profile — a sharp ICP turns “I need users” into “I need to be in these five places saying this.”

Find where those users already hang out

Once you know who your first customers are, finding them stops being guesswork. People with a shared problem cluster in predictable places — your job is to map those clusters:

• Reddit.A subreddit exists for almost every niche and role — the highest-signal place to find people publicly asking the exact questions your product answers.
• Hacker News.If your users are technical or startup-adjacent, HN threads and “Ask HN” posts are full of them.
• X (Twitter).Build-in-public and niche professional circles live here. Search the phrases your users tweet when they’re frustrated.
• YouTube. Comment sections and creators serving your niche are an overlooked path to a warm, engaged audience.
• Slack and Discord.Invite-only groups around a tool, course, or profession — smaller, but far higher trust and intent.

Don’t try to be everywhere. Pick the two or three channels where your user actually gathers and go deep. If Reddit is one, this list of the best subreddits to promote your SaaS covers the right communities and their norms before you post.

Show up useful before you pitch

Here’s the mistake that gets founders ignored or banned: they find a great community and immediately drop a link. To that community, you’re a stranger advertising at them. Every worthwhile community can smell a drive-by promo, and they punish it.

Flip the order. Before you ever mention your product, spend time being genuinely helpful. Answer questions in your area of expertise. Share what you’ve learned building the thing. Comment thoughtfully on other people’s posts. You’re building a small bank of goodwill and a bit of history, so that when you do mention what you’re working on, you’re a known, helpful member — not a spammer.

This is slower, and that’s the point. The founders who win their first 100 users treat communities as places to belong, not billboards to spray. Being useful first is also the best market research you’ll ever do — you’ll hear the exact words people use to describe their problem, which becomes your copy.

Reach out without being spammy

When it’s time to actually tell people about your product, the rule is simple: lead with their problem, not your feature list. The most reliable, low-risk ways to do it:

1. Reply, don’t broadcast.When someone describes the exact problem you solve, that’s your invitation. “I built a thing for this — happy to send it if useful” in a relevant thread converts far better than any standalone promo post.
2. Make honest, one-to-one DMs.Reference something specific they said. Ask if they’d try it and give feedback. You’re recruiting a beta user, not closing a sale. Copy-paste blasts are obvious and get you blocked.
3. Follow each community’s rules to the letter. Most subreddits and groups have explicit self-promotion policies. Read them.

Reddit specifically is worth getting right because it can send real, high-intent users — or a permaban if you fumble it. Read how to promote on Reddit without getting banned before you post, and treat every other community with the same respect.

Use the launch surfaces that still work

Launches are a spike, not a strategy — but a well-run one can hand you a chunk of your first 100 users in a day. Set expectations honestly: these are moments to concentrate the goodwill you’ve already built, not magic buttons.

• Product Hunt. Still a real source of early adopters, especially if you rally the small audience you’ve built first. Don’t launch to silence — launch to the people who already know you.
• “Show HN” on Hacker News. A plain, honest post about something you built and what you learned can do surprisingly well with a technical audience. No hype, no marketing voice — HN rewards substance.
• Niche directories and newsletters. Small, targeted lists in your space often out-convert the big launch platforms because the audience is exactly your ICP.

Do it manually first, then systemize

The uncomfortable truth about getting your first 100 users: it’s hand-to-hand. Every one of those early users comes from a comment you wrote, a DM you sent, a question you answered, a thread you joined. There is no automation that manufactures trust from zero, and anyone selling you one is selling spam.

So do the unscalable work on purpose. Talk to every early user. Ask how they found you and what almost stopped them from signing up. Those conversations tell you which channels actually work and which messaging lands. Only once a channel is clearly working do you build a repeatable process around it. The first 100 are earned manually; 1,000 comes from systemizing what the first 100 taught you.

Where ReachDex fits

The slow part of all this is the research: figuring out precisely who your users are, then hunting down the real communities where they gather and confirming those places are actually active. That’s exactly what ReachDex automates. Paste your product URL and it infers your ideal customer profile, finds and verifiesthe specific communities — on Reddit, Hacker News, X, and YouTube — where those buyers actually are, and writes ready-to-paste, community-first outreach plus a phased go-to-market plan. All of it constrained to free, solo-founder tactics.

It won’t send the messages for you — the hand-to-hand part is still yours — but it collapses days of research into a couple of minutes so you can spend your time actually talking to people. See what one looks like with a free sample report.