How to get your first 100 users for your app
You shipped your app. The code works, the landing page is live — and then comes the quietest, hardest part of building anything: nobody is using it yet. Building has never been easier, but getting real people to actually use what you built is harder than ever.
The short answer: to get your first 100 users, define a narrow audience that feels the problem sharply, go to the communities where they already spend time and be useful before you pitch, remove every step between "curious" and "using it", personally onboard each early user, and reward the ones who show up with perks or real payouts. Expect it to be manual — that's normal.
Your first 100 users are the ones that matter most. They surface the bugs, tell you what's confusing, and prove whether the thing is worth continuing. They are also the hardest hundred you will ever recruit, because you have no brand, no word of mouth, and no distribution yet — just the product and your own effort. Here's the playbook, step by step.
1. Define who your first 100 actually are
The first 100 users of an app should be a narrow, specific group of people who feel the problem sharply enough to try an unpolished product — not "anyone who might find it useful."
"Anyone" is not a target. Get specific: what problem does your app solve, and who feels that problem most sharply today? Your first 100 should be people who would notice if your app disappeared. A useful exercise: write one sentence in the form "My app helps [specific person] do [specific job] without [specific pain]." If you can't fill in all three blanks concretely, you're not ready to recruit anyone yet.
Then make it real. List ten actual people or communities that match the sentence — names, subreddits, Discord servers, group chats. If you can't list ten, the niche is either too vague or you don't know it well enough yet, and either one will sink the next four steps. Narrow beats broad every time at this stage: a tight audience gives you clearer feedback, faster word of mouth, and users who talk to each other.
2. Go where they already are
Early users come from the places they already spend time — niche subreddits, Discord and Slack communities, X threads, indie forums — not from people stumbling onto your website.
Don't wait for people to find you. With no SEO authority and no audience, your website is a destination with no roads leading to it. Show up in the communities your users already live in, and be useful first, share the app second. One genuinely helpful comment that happens to mention your tool beats ten cold drops of a link. Most communities ban naked self-promotion anyway — the workaround isn't being sneaky, it's actually participating.
Not all channels are equal for the zero-to-100 stage. Here's the honest comparison:
| Channel | Best for | Cost | What to expect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Niche communities (Reddit, Discord, forums) | Almost every product | Time | Slow but compounding; the highest-quality early users |
| Direct outreach (DMs, email) | B2B and prosumer tools | Time | Low volume, very high signal; painful and worth it |
| X / build-in-public | Dev tools, indie products | Time | Works if you post consistently for months, not days |
| Product Hunt / directories | Polished consumer or SaaS | Free | A one-day spike of curious tourists; few stick without follow-up |
| Paid ads | Later, once retention is proven | $$ | Usually wasted before product-market fit |
| Paid user-testing platforms like getusers.xyz | Any app that needs real usage and bug reports fast | Pay per verified bug | Motivated users on demand; you pay for outcomes, not promises |
Pick two channels, not six. Doing two well beats doing six badly, and at this stage you personally are the growth engine — your hours are the scarcest resource you have.
3. Make trying it effortless
Every step between "I'm curious" and "I'm using it" costs you a real fraction of your potential first users, so the zero-to-value path has to be brutally short.
- Kill the friction — no forced signup walls before someone sees value. Let people touch the product first and create an account when they have a reason to.
- Show, don't tell — a 20-second demo video or an interactive sandbox converts better than any paragraph you will ever write.
- Ask for one thing — a single clear call to action, not five. Every extra option splits your conversion.
- Time yourself — recruit a friend who has never seen the app and watch them go from landing page to first value. If it takes more than two minutes or they ask you a question, fix that before recruiting strangers.
4. Do things that don't scale
At the first-100 stage, the winning move is almost always manual: onboard every user personally, message them by name, and treat each one like the VIP they actually are.
Paul Graham's advice to do things that don't scale exists because founders resist it. Manual onboarding feels inefficient, so people build automation for a flood of users that never comes. Flip it: with only 100 users to win, you can afford to hand-hold every single one. Send a personal note when someone signs up. Offer a 15-minute call. Set up their workspace for them. The users you onboard by hand become your most loyal advocates — and the conversations teach you more than any analytics dashboard.
A concrete target: know the name and use case of every one of your first 100 users. If that sounds absurd, that's the point — it's an advantage no funded competitor can buy back later.
5. Turn early users into feedback loops
The first 100 aren't just numbers — they're your product team. Make it trivial to report a bug or a confusion: a visible feedback button, a shared Discord, or just your personal email in the footer. Then close the loop: reply fast, ship fixes visibly, and tell people when their feedback shaped a change. "You reported this Tuesday, it's fixed today" is the single most retention-building sentence an early-stage founder can send.
Users who feel heard stick around, and users who stick around bring the next hundred. Users who report a bug and hear nothing quietly leave and never come back — and worse, they don't tell you why.
6. Reward the people who show up
Early users are doing you a favor: they're spending time on an unproven product with rough edges. Give them a reason beyond goodwill: early-access perks, lifetime discounts, credits, public shout-outs, or real payouts for the bugs they find. Aligning incentives turns passive tryers into motivated collaborators who actually stress-test your app instead of bouncing at the first rough edge.
This is also the honest answer to "how do I get people to care?" — most won't, for free. The ones who will are either people who deeply feel the problem (step 1) or people you've made it worth something to (this step). Build for both.
7. Measure users, not signups
A hundred signups is not a hundred users. A user is someone who came back and used the product again without being reminded — signups who never return are closer to survey respondents than users.
Track three numbers from day one: how many people signed up, how many reached the core value moment at least once, and how many came back in the following week. The gaps between those three numbers tell you exactly where the product is leaking, and they matter far more than the raw total. Celebrating 100 signups while 90 of them never returned is how founders waste six months.
The shortcut: getusers.xyz
Doing all of this by hand is slow — that's the honest truth of the playbook above, and it's why we're building getusers.xyz. It compresses the loop into one flow: list your app, and real users show up to use it, file reproducible bug reports, and get paid in USDC for every issue that's verified. You pay per verified bug — outcomes, not hours — and skip straight to a stream of motivated users stress-testing your product from day one.
Everyone who joins the waitlist gets a $5 head-start, and inviting friends moves you up the line. It's the fastest way to go from zero to your first 100.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to get your first 100 users?
For most indie apps, somewhere between a few weeks and a few months of consistent manual effort. A strong launch in the right community can do it in days; a vague product aimed at "everyone" can fail to do it in a year. The variable that matters most is how sharply the first-user niche is defined, not how good the product looks.
How do I get my first users with no audience and no budget?
Borrow other people's audiences: participate genuinely in the niche communities where your users already are, do direct outreach to individuals who visibly have the problem, and personally onboard everyone who responds. Zero-budget growth at this stage is a time cost, not a money cost.
Should I launch on Product Hunt to get my first 100 users?
Product Hunt is a distribution spike, not a user base. It can send you a burst of curious visitors in one day, but they're tourists — most won't match your niche and few will return. It works best after you already have onboarding that converts, not as step one.
What's the difference between 100 signups and 100 users?
A signup tried your front door; a user came back. Retention — people returning without being prompted — is the only early signal that the product is worth scaling. If you have 100 signups and 10 weekly actives, you have 10 users and a leaky funnel worth fixing before recruiting more.
How can I get users to actually report bugs and give feedback?
Make it effortless (one-click feedback, a shared channel, your real email) and make it worth their time. Responding within hours and shipping visible fixes keeps volunteers engaged; paying for verified bugs — the model getusers.xyz is built on — turns feedback from a favor into a fair trade.