How do I get my first 100 users with no audience?

By running four channels at once rather than hoping for one event: answering questions genuinely in the communities where your users already are, listing the product in directories that actually have visitors, writing one page per week that answers a real question your product solves, and making those pages citable by AI assistants. The first two work immediately, the last two compound.

Does launching on Product Hunt get you users?

It gets users for people who already have an audience to bring with them, because the day is decided largely by who shows up in the first hours. For a builder with no audience it usually produces a small number of visits and very few retained users. It is worth doing once, planned properly, and it should never be the plan by itself.

How long does it take to get the first hundred users?

Usually months rather than weeks, and the progress is not linear. The first month tends to be discouraging, months two and three show impressions without many clicks, and the compounding channels typically start to convert somewhere between months three and six. Most builders quit in month two, which is exactly when the shape of the work looks worst.

Should I do paid ads to get my first users?

Rarely at this stage. Paid traffic tells you what happens when strangers meet your landing page, which is useful, but it stops the moment the budget stops and it does not build anything that persists. Spend the same money and time on pages and listings that keep working.

Is it worth submitting to directories?

Yes, for a reason larger than the direct traffic. Each listing is a place where your product is described by somebody other than you, which is what search engines and AI assistants look for when deciding whether a product exists and what it does. Write a fresh description for each listing rather than pasting one paragraph everywhere.

How many pages should I write before expecting results?

The pattern most builders report is that the first handful of pages do very little and something changes around the twentieth, because by then you have covered enough of one subject to be treated as a source on it rather than a single page about it. One page per week is a sustainable pace that reaches that point in about five months.

The first hundred users are collected, not delivered

Everybody hopes for the single moment that changes everything: the launch that goes big, the post that travels. It occasionally happens. Planning for it is how most products die quietly.

Run the free check

The first hundred users almost never come from one event. They come from four channels that each contribute steadily: direct conversations in communities where your users already are, listings in directories that send small but continuous traffic, pages on your own site that answer the questions your users search, and citations inside AI assistants. The first two work immediately and stop when you stop. The last two take longer and keep working.

Why the big launch usually does not work

The launch story is seductive because it is the only story that gets told. Nobody writes a post about the eleven months of slow accumulation that preceded the good month, so the pattern you absorb is the exception.

There is a structural reason the big launch fails for most builders, and it is simple: a launch broadcasts to an audience. If you do not have an audience, you are broadcasting into a room with nobody in it. Product Hunt does not give you an audience. It gives you access to a page that people with existing audiences also post on, and the ones with audiences win the day.

So the honest framing is this. Your first hundred users will be collected slowly from several channels at once, and your job for the next few months is to keep four of them running simultaneously.

Channel one: be genuinely useful where your users already are

Somewhere on the internet, people are describing the exact problem your app solves, in their own words, right now. They are doing it in subreddits, in Discord servers, in forum threads, in replies. Almost none of them will ever search for your product, because they do not know it exists.

The method that works is slow and unglamorous. Find those conversations. Answer the question completely, in the comment, without a link, as somebody who knows the subject. Do this repeatedly, for weeks, until you are a recognised presence rather than a stranger. Then, when somebody asks a question your product genuinely answers, mention it plainly, and accept that sometimes you should not mention it at all.

This channel converts better than any other because the person has just described their problem out loud. It also stops the moment you stop, which is why it cannot be the only one.

Channel two: get listed everywhere that is real

Directory listings do two things at once, and the second is more valuable than the first.

The immediate effect is a small trickle of visitors. Modest, but it is continuous and it costs you one afternoon per listing, permanently.

The larger effect is that you become a thing that exists in more than one place. Search engines notice that other sites describe you. AI assistants, when asked to recommend tools in your category, draw on exactly these kinds of aggregated pages. A product listed in twelve directories is a product that can be found and recommended. A product listed nowhere looks, from the outside, like a domain somebody registered.

Write each listing description fresh. The same paragraph pasted twelve times is worth much less than twelve descriptions that emphasise different things, because each one can match a different question.

Channel three: write the pages that answer real questions

This is the channel that compounds, and it is the one builders skip because the payoff is not immediate.

Every question your product answers is a page you could write. Not a page about your product, which only interests people who already know it. A page about the problem, written for somebody who has the problem and does not yet know that a solution exists.

Write one such page per week and in six months you have twenty-five doors into your app, each one findable, each one working while you sleep, each one still there next year. Most stalled apps have one door, and it is labelled with the name of a category they cannot win.

This is slow at the beginning and then it is not. The first few pages do very little. Somewhere around the twentieth, the pattern changes, because you have covered enough of a subject that you start to be treated as a source on it.

Channel four: become citable by AI assistants

This is the channel most builders have not thought about at all, and for a new product it is the one with the best ratio of effort to result.

When somebody asks an AI assistant to recommend a tool, the assistant retrieves and summarises. It does not first check whether your domain is two weeks or ten years old. This removes the single biggest disadvantage a new product has.

What makes a page citable is specific and learnable: it answers one question directly, near the top, in a self-contained paragraph that makes sense when lifted out of context. It contains concrete facts rather than adjectives. And the crawlers that feed these systems are allowed in by your robots.txt, which is worth checking today because a single wrong line closes this channel entirely.

On kurli.me, a domain registered on 27 July 2026, ChatGPT sent 56 visitors in the first twenty-five days against 23 from Google Search. Neither number is large. The ratio is the lesson.

What a realistic first six months looks like

Set the expectation properly, because the most common reason builders abandon a working product is that they expected the wrong shape of progress.

In the first month, almost everything comes from channels one and two, and the numbers are small enough to be discouraging. In months two and three, the directory trickle stabilises and the first pages start to show impressions in Search Console without many clicks. Somewhere in months three to six, if you kept writing, the pages start converting and the AI citations begin to appear.

The failure mode is stopping in month two, when the effort has been substantial and the result has not arrived yet. That is the normal shape of this work, and knowing it is normal is most of what gets people through it.

The things that do not work, so you can stop trying them

A short list, offered so you can spend the time elsewhere.

Posting your link in a subreddit with no other participation. It gets removed, and it costs you the account.
Buying followers or engagement of any kind. It creates an audience that does not convert and a signal that is easy to detect.
Paying for submissions to hundreds of directories at once. Most of those directories have no visitors and exist to sell submissions.
Waiting for Google. A new domain will not rescue itself, and waiting is the one strategy guaranteed to produce nothing.
Rebuilding the product because nothing happened. Nothing happened because nobody saw it, which tells you nothing about the product.

Part of a larger guide

This page is one part of Nobody is using it. The other parts:

Questions people ask

How do I get my first 100 users with no audience?: By running four channels at once rather than hoping for one event: answering questions genuinely in the communities where your users already are, listing the product in directories that actually have visitors, writing one page per week that answers a real question your product solves, and making those pages citable by AI assistants. The first two work immediately, the last two compound.
Does launching on Product Hunt get you users?: It gets users for people who already have an audience to bring with them, because the day is decided largely by who shows up in the first hours. For a builder with no audience it usually produces a small number of visits and very few retained users. It is worth doing once, planned properly, and it should never be the plan by itself.
How long does it take to get the first hundred users?: Usually months rather than weeks, and the progress is not linear. The first month tends to be discouraging, months two and three show impressions without many clicks, and the compounding channels typically start to convert somewhere between months three and six. Most builders quit in month two, which is exactly when the shape of the work looks worst.
Should I do paid ads to get my first users?: Rarely at this stage. Paid traffic tells you what happens when strangers meet your landing page, which is useful, but it stops the moment the budget stops and it does not build anything that persists. Spend the same money and time on pages and listings that keep working.
Is it worth submitting to directories?: Yes, for a reason larger than the direct traffic. Each listing is a place where your product is described by somebody other than you, which is what search engines and AI assistants look for when deciding whether a product exists and what it does. Write a fresh description for each listing rather than pasting one paragraph everywhere.
How many pages should I write before expecting results?: The pattern most builders report is that the first handful of pages do very little and something changes around the twentieth, because by then you have covered enough of one subject to be treated as a source on it rather than a single page about it. One page per week is a sustainable pace that reaches that point in about five months.

Start with the channel that works fastest for a new domain

The free Get Found Check shows whether AI assistants can currently read and cite your app, which is the one channel where being new does not count against you.

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