We Didn't Get Our First User for 6 Weeks. Then Everything Changed.
My co-founder and I launched Teamcamp, thinking we built the perfect project management tool.
Week 1: 0 signups.
Week 2: 0 signups.
Week 6: Still 0.
👉 Turns out, nobody cares about "perfect." They care about solving their actual problems.
The breakthrough happened at 2 AM on a Tuesday.
I was doom-scrolling Reddit (healthy, I know) and stumbled on a thread in r/freelance. Someone was venting: "I spend more time screenshotting project updates for clients than actually doing the work."
That hit different.
We'd built task boards, Gantt charts, time tracking—all the "must-have" PM features. But we missed the obvious pain: clients constantly asking "where are we on this?"
So we pivoted. Hard.
Built a client portal in 72 hours. Agencies could share project status without exposing their internal chaos. No fancy AI. No blockchain. Just a simple view that answered the question: "What's the progress?"
Then the magic happened:
Posted the feature back in that Reddit thread. Got our first user that night. An agency owner in Toronto.
He invited his biggest client to the portal. That client saw it. Loved it. Asked his 3 other vendors why they weren't using something similar.
Two of those vendors signed up the next week.
The real lesson?
Your first 10 users won't come from perfect features. They'll come from obsessing over one painful moment and solving it better than anyone else.
We're not chasing 1 million users.
We're chasing 10. Then 10 more. Then 10 more.
That 1:1 focus changes what you build and why.
💬 Curious: Where did your first user actually come from? Not where you expected them to come from. Where they actually showed up.
(Go check out Teamcamp if client communication is your pain point. I'd genuinely love your feedback 👂)
