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.

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. 1List the five tools your ideal user already pays for.
2. 2For each, find where its users talk to each other and whether it has a public integrations or add-ons directory.
3. 3Getting 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.

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. 1Find ten small newsletters or creators covering your exact space. Small — under 10,000. They reply.
2. 2Offer 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. 3Do 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.

Choosing between them