What are you building? and how did you get your first 100 users for your product?

Great question! I'm not yet at the 100 mark for https://heraldsms.com but this site has been a great source of ideas: https://www.first100users.com

I'm building Sidekick! It's a productivity tool that blocks distracting sites and runs your focus sessions.

I got the first 20 or so within my own personal network. Then, launched on Betalist and was able to get 20-30 more. Then discovered Reddit! That was the biggest one for me and I think what pushed us over the 100 mark. :) Never forget the day! Was so happy :)

We are working on era.sh - a markdown note-taking tool for developers.
My colleague came up with the idea, after he struggled to find a good note-taking tool for years. Over the last year we built a solid beta version, which we currently offer as free to use.

Most of our first users were friends (who also work as coders) and their co-workers. Through Twitter we gained a lot of new users, as I connected with a lot of people and did a lot of posts every single day for several months.

Those first users helped us to improve and gave us valuable feedback and feature requests.

Slowly ERA is getting mature and new users come every day through existing users.

For example yesterday, a user mentioned us on a HN thread - which led to 30 new users.

With platforms like indiehackers, HN, producthunt, twitter, reddit - we have a lot of space to spread our startup.

I'm building https://zencal.io It's a Calendly alternative but focused on busy teams.

I get my first 100 users from:

• posting on the internet (twitter, reddit, LinkedIn)
• taking a part in conferences

I'm making Squeaky, which is a privacy-friendly alternative to tools like Hotjar or Fullstory. We got our first users through a combination of the following:

• Our existing network (especially for alpha testing)
• Word of mouth
• Social media (only a few to be honest)
• Communities I'm active in (some slack, indiehackers, reddit etc)

I am the founder at https://csvbox.io

I got the first 100 customers via indiehackers and hackernews.

I am building tools to help starting bootstrappers get their first customers. I got my first costumers by engaging on twitter and IH

Me and my team just finished Market Roadie - marketing tool for improving SEO and promoting startups and new businesses. https://marketroadie.com/

We got the first 100 users by posting on Reddit, and a little bit on Twitter. Social Media has a great influence nowadays, and it's important that we realize that and use the power of posting on them (if used properly).

Also, I believe it helps to have a free version of your product, for which you don't have to put credit card info to activate it. I believe that builds trust for potential customers.

Also, don't be shy to ask for feedback. You'd be surprised of how much people want to genuinely help.

We're not quite there yet, but Reddit ads have been really helpful in finding people to join the beta.

Currently building https://grabee.com/ and here's what we are doing for our waitlist.

Just recently, I have heard that reaching this milestone is hard, really really hard and there are a lot of first-time founders who fail at reaching their first 100 customers.

This is because they don't reach out to the right audience or do not take enough time to build and follow a growth-minded process which eventually led to their failure.

For initial users, I recommend starting by asking friends, co-founders, etc. to sign up, and asking them to ask their friends and people they know over Twitter, or LinkedIn. You can do it. Share the link with whomever you know and see if they are willing to give you a shot.

Next 30-40 users you can get by getting featured on betalist, betafy, SaaShub etc.

And few more through HackerNews, if your luck and strategy to stay on the first page works (HackerNews can be a little tricky).

There are many more ways to go about getting a users for your software product, but at the end of the day, you need to generate a lot of traffic and try several different methods. See what works, and move on from there.

We building Producter (producter.co)
I'm looking forward to this. But these are how we did it:

• Word of mouth
• Good branding
• Understanding and explaining product market fit well

I have built a light weight hiring pipeline management tool using Google Sheets.
It supports:

1. Sending Google Meet enabled interview invites
2. Sending updates to candidates (rejection/waitlist/confirmation) in the process

It uses a Google Form to receive candidate information that they fill on job page.

https://medium.com/gramoday/creating-a-low-cost-ats-using-google-sheets-f3dd8232d865

I'm working on https://isdown.app. For me were some connections I had, and then mostly with SEO. I have integrations with many services. With programmatic SEO, I created a landing page for each of those services (e.g. https://isdown.app/integrations/aws).

I'm building fabform.io it's a headless forms backend for handling all your websites form submissions without the need for a website backend. It has features like anti spam form captcha, universal inbox, send email to form submitters , send email notifications to form owner(s), save for data to third party services like Google Sheets and Airtable. Fabform works great with Hugo, Jekyll and other static site generators ( SSG). It's free for now !

Promoting this through anywhere I can, Reddit, LinkedIn, SEO and reaching out.

We're building witful.com. It's a tool that matches your notes and to-dos with your meetings automatically, so you're never scrambling to find or reference what you need for a conversation. We're not to 100 yet but so far have found users through Twitter, Hacker News & our personal networks.

These are great resources, thanks everyone for sharing!

I'm building WPJack.com its WordPress Hosting Control Panel. Think of CPanel or Plesk but specifically made for WordPress and it can manage an unlimited number of VPS instances. Not yet at 100 users, so far my main channel were cold emails.

I'm building the (Jaunty.org) Jaunty Gym! It's an online community and gym for your social skills. You get to role play real life social skills in real time. We got out first 100 users from our network and list which we got from our website and Masterclass alumni. We used a 5 email launch with Active Campaign.

I just launched 1link, a way for indie authors to create a beautiful link page showcasing their books. I don’t have 100 users yet, but my intention is to contact indie authors to present them the benefits they could get from the service 🙂

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Well I can't help with the customer acquisition part.. yet! I am starting a software that helps businesses get more customer reviews to improve their online reputation. Wanted to throw this in here in case anyone has tips for how to gain clients for this!