My path to first 100 users (without paid ads)

Hey everyone,
I wanted to share my journey towards 100 users.

After building my first product in June 2024, I struggled—like many of you—to get any users.

I didn’t want to spend money on paid ads because I strongly believe that paid ads can artificially force traction and don’t truly help validate product-market fit. Also didn't want to do SEO as I believed it to be a long term game (not saying its not important).

After months of trying different approaches, I found that Reddit was the only platform that worked for me. I started commenting on all relevant posts and gradually began getting users. 

Today, I have around 60 users for my Chrome extension. It’s not a huge number, but it’s meaningful progress compared to the months I spent with zero users. Now, I’m getting about 3-5 new users every day.

However, this approach is extremely tedious. I have to check multiple subreddits several times a day, promote my app, and do so cautiously to avoid getting banned.

That’s when I had an idea to make this process easier. I’m building a platform that helps you identify relevant posts for promoting your app. Here are some key features:

  • Based on your landing page or product description, it will surface relevant posts.
    • Good way to also check if there is somebody looking for what you are building
  • You can comment on those posts directly from one unified feed—saving you from manually checking every subreddit. (No auto commenting to avoid being spammy)
    • Saves several hours of time
  • You can set up alerts to receive email notifications whenever new relevant posts are published.
    • Getting to your users quickly when they are looking is important
  • Get all questions from the subreddit to understand what people actually want.
    • Build what people want

Early preview of the platform in the link below. I’ll keep it free for anyone signing up through Reddit. I can bet this will 100% get you early users because I’ve tested this approach for months now.
If you’re interested, feel free to signup for free and I will let you know when it’s live.