What's the best way to get users without spending money on ads?

Subreddits, twitters, and startup listing sites!

Someone wrote a list a while back. It has a lot of good listing sites and links: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/relaunch-like-a-pro-100-places-to-launch-relaunch-and-list-your-product-7c67875635

Hi David, check this https://entrepreneurlist.io/growth-strategy , it’s a list of my favorite guides about growth. I believe you will find there a lot of ideas and tips.

I am yet to create a product but right now I'm approaching the potential users through twitter DMs & emails.
So far its working for me. I'm getting response from people :)
Start approaching to your potential users through twitter or some other social media platforms where they hang out.
I hope it will work for you too.

The best approach I felt includes :

GROW YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT: Twitter is the very first step for me to get users, twitter audience test your products, provides feedback and testimonials for your product.

And what to grow on twitter, provide a piece of your product for FREE to your Twitter audience, it catches the most! 😆

Twitter growth includes consistent efforts, regular interaction with people there, twitter can provides a wide market to your product.

This is might take a long to grow on twitter, but you'll worth it!

BUILD IN PUBLIC BY SHARING YOU JOURNEY! -

Also you can promote your product on many other platforms as @allison_mui mentioned a link here!

I found that PR has the highest MRR (even better - MRR per employee) ... think Pieter Levels when he started and how he took off, word of mouth + PR

Engineering
Building tools and products to help grow your brand is a great way to get more eyes on you and your products. If you’re writing a book on photography and build a photography app that helps take better pictures using some of the tactics you discuss in the book, it’s going to get people talking!

https://medium.com/@NickCalabs/traction-book-review-930f10e9dbf4

Traction Paperback – January 1, 1745
by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares

Build an audience. Start with cold outreach, a few a day. Watch for "opens". Anyone that gets opens, should get the next email, https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/campaigns/user-guide/gdpr/articles/how-to-create-consent-email. Once you have consent, start a weekly newsletter.

You can get quite creative, and I'm sure IH has a lot of hacks lying around.

Happy to be more specific if you tell us more about what your product is.

On another note, we made a post last year to share a few hacks to find potential clients/users.

Check it out
👉 https://www.thescalelab.com/post/6-untold-hacks-to-find-potential-clients

Hope this helps

Too many great strategies you can find just by searching through posts here on Indiehackers but off the top, I'd try a "listening" platform that will show you where conversations relevant to your product are occuring. I.e, on Reddit you might find people talking about photo cropping, and if you have an image editor product, it might be worth adding some value to the conversation.

basically, if you want to interact with potential customers, contribute to the conversations they are having first.

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Word of mouth and referral will always be your most effective tool. So to start with, focus on people you know, and the people they know. We trust real people more than anything :)