Six plays for your first 100 users when nobody knows you

Pick two. Running two of these properly for a month beats running all six badly for a week — and the ones you skip will still be here.

Play 1 — Answer the question you're the answer to

Somewhere, several times a week, someone publicly asks for exactly what you built. Reddit, Stack Overflow, Quora, Discord, X, community forums. Find those questions and answer them properly — the answer, not the link.

• Set up alerts for the three phrases someone would use to describe their problem, not your solution.
• Answer with the full answer, including how to do it without your product. Then mention that you built a thing that does it, in one line at the end.
• This compounds: those threads rank, and they keep sending people for years.

Why this beats posting
A question has demonstrated intent and an audience of everyone who searches it later. A post has neither. Ten good answers will outlast ten launch posts by about two years.

Play 2 — The adjacent-tool play

Find the tool your users already use every day and go where its users gather: its subreddit, its Discord, its community forum, its integrations directory, its 'awesome' list on GitHub.

1. List the five tools your ideal user already pays for.
2. For each, find where its users talk to each other and whether it has a public integrations or add-ons directory.
3. Getting listed in an integrations directory is often a form and an afternoon, and the traffic is pre-qualified in a way no general directory ever is.

Play 3 — Do it manually for ten people

Offer to do the thing your product does, by hand, free, for ten people who fit your target exactly. You'll find them in the communities you've already read. This is slow, unscalable, and the fastest way there is to find out whether the thing is wanted.

The offer

I'm building [thing] and I'd rather test it on real work than on made-up examples.

If you send me [the input], I'll do [the output] by hand and send it back today. Free, no catch, no signup — I just want to see whether the output is actually useful to someone who isn't me.

Happy to do this for the first ten people who want it.

Play 4 — Build the thing next to the thing

A free, no-signup micro-tool adjacent to your product: a calculator, a checker, a converter, a generator, a template pack. It ranks, it gets shared, and it collects the exact audience your paid thing needs — without asking anyone to trust you first.

• It must be genuinely useful with no email required. A gate turns a shareable tool into a landing page.
• It should take a weekend, not a quarter. If it's bigger than that, it's a second product.
• Link to the main product once, quietly, at the bottom.

Play 5 — Borrow someone else's list

You don't have an audience. Plenty of people with small ones need content. A newsletter with 2,000 engaged readers in your niche is worth more than 50,000 general followers, and its author is usually one email away.

1. Find ten small newsletters or creators covering your exact space. Small — under 10,000. They reply.
2. Offer something that costs them nothing and saves them work: a written piece, a free tier for their readers, data you have and they don't.
3. Do not ask for a mention. Give them a reason to want one.

Play 6 — The public teardown

Pick a real, public example of the problem you solve and take it apart properly — with the fix, in public, for free. A teardown of something real gets read; an explanation of your product does not.

One rule
Never tear down a small business or an individual to make a point. Pick something big enough to take it, or use your own past work. A teardown that punches down is the fastest reputational own goal available to a new product.

Choosing between them

Play	Effort	Speed	Compounds?
Answer the question	Low, ongoing	Slow start	Yes, strongly
Adjacent tool	Low, one-off	Fast	Somewhat
Manual for ten	High	Immediate	No, but it teaches you the most
Thing next to the thing	One weekend	Slow	Yes
Borrow a list	Medium	Two to six weeks	Somewhat
Public teardown	Medium	Fast if it lands	Yes