Technical founder launching my first consumer app — which channels worked for your first users?

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on a mobile app for the past couple of years.

It originally started as a side project so I could experiment with AI and a native mobile stack (Flutter + Firebase), but over time I started wondering: what if I actually try to launch it properly?

As a technical guy, I naturally focused a lot on the product side: scalability, architecture, UX, and building something clean and maintainable.

That part feels familiar to me.

What feels much harder is everything around distribution: figuring out how to reach early users, which channels are actually worth testing, and how to avoid wasting time on the wrong things.

For context, this is a consumer mobile app in the learning/discovery space. It helps people explore interesting facts and short, high-quality explainers on any topic, then suggests related directions if they want to dive deeper.

I’d love to hear from people who’ve been through a similar first launch:

• Which channels worked best for your first 10–100 users?

• How did you identify your first promising user segment?

• Is it worth paying for launch/growth help this early?

Any practical advice or lessons learned would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks!