How are you getting your first 10 users?
I’m building a small SaaS as a solo founder, and honestly, getting the first users has been harder than building the product 😅
I’ve tried the usual stuff - posting in communities, sharing what I’m building, reaching out directly - but I’m still figuring out what actually works.
I’m curious how other indie hackers got their first 10–20 users.
Did you focus on cold outreach? Communities? Content? Friends/network? Something completely different?
Would love to hear what actually worked for you (and what was a complete waste of time).
here's mine :- https://provoon.com/
The honest answer is that your question has the wrong variable in it, and spotting that is worth more than any channel I could name. You're asking "which channel" — cold outreach vs communities vs content. But for the first 10 users, channel is almost never what "worked." What worked was the founder finding one specific person with the exact problem and solving it for them directly, and the channel was just where that person happened to be standing.
Here's the tell: "what's the best channel for first users" is a stage-two question you're asking at stage zero. Channels are how you reach a thousand people you'll never talk to. Your first 10 are the opposite — you get them hand-to-hand, one unscalable conversation at a time, by personally finding people who already have the problem and helping them use your thing whether or not it's polished. It feels too slow and too manual to be "a strategy," which is exactly why it works and why most people skip it looking for a channel that scales. Nothing scales at 10 users. You're not running acquisition yet, you're running proof.
So the reframe: stop asking where to broadcast and start asking who, by name, has the problem badly enough to try a stranger's fix this week. Ten of those beats any channel.
To make it concrete for provoon: who is the one person who feels the pain your product kills most sharply, and do you know ten more like them by name or just as a "type"? That gap is the actual first-10 problem.
The first 10 users are usually where the real signal starts.
Curious whether the people who do try Provoon are coming from the same channel, or whether the bigger issue is getting the right people to care in the first place.
Yeah, I think finding the right people is probably the bigger challenge 😅
So far it’s been a mix of Product Hunt, communities, and direct outreach. Still too early to see a clear winner though.
I’m starting to track it properly now and see where the real conversations come from.
That makes sense. Tracking where the first real conversations come from should make the channel picture much clearer.
Yeah, that’s the plan..
Right now I’m mostly just trying things and seeing what actually gets people interested enough to try it.
That makes sense. At this stage, figuring out what consistently gets the right people interested enough to try is probably the most useful signal.
Yeah exactly!! just trying to find that first repeatable signal instead of guessing. Hopefully the data starts making things clearer soon.
That makes sense. I’d be interested in continuing the conversation beyond the thread — would you be open to sharing the best email to reach you on?
What worked for me was narrower than communities. About 80 comments across Reddit, Product Hunt and here, and the handful that produced a real conversation all had the same shape: politely disagreeing with someone and being specific about why.
Agreeing, congratulating and being generically helpful produced nothing. Not fewer results, none. So volume was never the variable, and I spent the first week believing it was.
Complete waste of time so far is anything where the feedback is slow and public, because you can keep doing it for a month without ever learning whether it works.
One thing I would do earlier: instrument the funnel before chasing traffic. I found out this week that one of my steps had never fired once, so I had been optimising the part that already worked.
What have you had a real conversation out of, as opposed to a signup?
This is really useful, especially the point about real conversations vs just signups.
I’ve definitely been guilty of chasing traffic before understanding the funnel 😅
And yeah, I’m starting to realize that a few genuine conversations are worth way more than a bunch of random engagement.
Thanks for sharing this!
Glad it helped. One thing worth doing while it is still small: write down where each conversation came from at the time, not later. I did not, and I lost the attribution on the first two, which were the only ones that mattered.
You did not say what has produced a conversation for Provoon yet. Even one is enough to tell you where the next month should go, and it is usually not the channel you expect.
Yeah, that’s a good point. I honestly haven’t tracked the source properly yet 😅
Most of the conversations so far have come from Product Hunt and communities, but I’m going to start tracking this properly now.
Definitely don’t want to spend a month chasing the wrong channel.
i’m dealing with the same thing right now
what seems to make the most sense to me is finding people who already have the exact problem and talking to them directly instead of trying to get a lot of random traffic
even 10 users who actually care about the problem feels more useful than 500 signups who never use the product
You could reply naturally:
Yeah, exactly. I’m starting to realize the same thing. I’d rather have 10 people who genuinely need it than 1,000 random signups. Now I’m just trying to figure out where those 10 people are and talk to them directly.