How to Get Your First 100 Users for a Side Project

The first 100 users are the hardest ones. Nobody knows your project exists, you have no reviews, and every channel you read about seems to need an audience you don't have yet.

The good news: 100 is a small number. You don't need a growth engine. You need a list, a couple of places where strangers can actually find you, and the patience to do things by hand. That second part is exactly why we built BuildShipper: a free weekly board where makers drop a URL and get seen by people who are looking for new projects.

Why 100 is the right first goal

At 100 users you learn things you can't learn at 10. You see which feature people use, where they drop off, and whether anyone comes back next week. It's also small enough that you can talk to a real share of them.

Paul Graham makes the same point in Do Things That Don't Scale: founders often dismiss manual recruiting because "the absolute numbers seem so small at first", and they underestimate compound growth. His example: if you have 100 users and grow 10% a week, you add 10 users next week. Small, but it compounds.

Step 1: Pick one person to build for

Lenny Rachitsky researched how big consumer apps got their first 1,000 users. One of his biggest takeaways: to make any strategy work, first narrowly define your target user.

"Freelancers" is too wide. "Freelance video editors who bill flat fees and use DaVinci Resolve" is something you can search for, find, and message.

Write one sentence:

My project helps [specific person] do [specific job] without [specific pain].

Everything below gets easier once that sentence is sharp. It also becomes your tagline when you list the project later, so it's worth getting right now.

Step 2: Find where they already hang out

List 10 places where your person already spends time. Be concrete:

• Subreddits and forums for their tool or job
• Discord and Slack communities
• Hashtags and lists on X
• Newsletters they read
• Launch boards and directories they browse
• Offline: meetups, coworking spaces, classes

Lenny found that the most popular early strategies involve going to your users directly: online, offline and through friends. He also found most startups got their early users from just one strategy, and none from more than three. So don't spread yourself across 10 channels. Rank your list and pick the top two or three.

If you're not sure which launch boards fit your project, our where to launch page and the list of best launch directories are a quick starting point. We keep adding to these, so they're worth a bookmark if you plan to launch more than once.

Step 3: Recruit the first 20 by hand

This is the part everyone skips, and the part that works.

Paul Graham calls recruiting users manually the most common unscalable thing founders have to do, and says "nearly all startups have to". His favourite example is the "Collison installation": when someone agreed to try Stripe, the founders would say "give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot.

For a side project, that looks like:

• Direct messages. Find people who posted about the exact problem you solve. Reply with something useful first. Offer your tool only if it fits.
• Personal onboarding. Offer a 15-minute call to set it up with them. Watch where they get stuck.
• Your own network. Friends of friends who match your one-sentence user. Not your mum (unless she is the user).

A simple tracker helps. A spreadsheet with name, where you found them, date contacted, reply, and signed up is enough.

What to write in a first message

Keep it short and about them:

Hey, saw your post about [problem]. I built a small tool that does [job]. It's free while I'm testing it. Want me to set it up for you? If it doesn't help, I'd love to hear why.

No links in the first line, no feature list, no "revolutionary".

Step 4: Get the next 30 to 50 from strangers on launch boards

Once 10 to 20 people have used it and you've fixed the obvious bugs, it's time for a public launch. Launch boards give you strangers, which is what you need now. The trick is to pick boards that work without an audience, because you don't have one yet.

Here's where I'd start, in this order:

1. BuildShipper. This is the one we run, so take this with the bias it deserves, but it was built for exactly this stage. Listing is free. You drop your URL, it fills in the name, tagline and image, and you edit before it goes live. The board ranks projects by real clicks to your site, not upvotes, with likes only as a tiebreaker, and it resets every Monday at 00:00 UTC. That means you get a full week of chances instead of one launch day, and a new maker has the same shot as someone with 20,000 followers. Every listing also gets a followed (dofollow) backlink from its project page, which keeps sending a little traffic and SEO value after the week is over.
2. Show HN, if people can try it without signing up. The guidelines ask you to keep barriers like signups or emails out of the way.
3. Peerlist Launchpad for developer and design projects. Its launch window opens every Monday.
4. Product Hunt is free, but it rewards makers who can bring people on launch day. Save it for when you have a small crowd to tell.

You can list on several of these. A good pattern is to submit to BuildShipper first, early in the week, so your listing collects clicks while you prepare the bigger one-day launches. If you're weighing other boards too, our Product Hunt alternatives page lists indie projects in nearby categories.

Treat each launch as a test of your tagline. If people see it and nobody clicks, the problem is your one-liner, not the channel.

Make the page do its job

Before you launch, check your landing page against three questions:

1. Can a stranger tell who it's for in five seconds?
2. Is there one clear action (sign up, try it, download)?
3. Is there a screenshot or a demo showing the actual thing?

Step 5: Turn clicks into signups

Traffic is not users. Watch the whole path:

| Stage | What to measure | What to fix if it's low | | --- | --- | --- | | Seen | Impressions or views on the launch page | Category, timing, image | | Clicked | Clicks to your site | Tagline and thumbnail | | Signed up | Signups per visitor | Landing page headline, friction | | Came back | Users active next week | Onboarding, core value |

This is where a click-ranked board helps more than a vote count. On BuildShipper every project page shows its clicks for this week, today and all time, plus a table of daily clicks for the last 14 days. You can line those spikes up with your own analytics and see whether the people who clicked actually signed up. An upvote can't tell you that. Any analytics tool works for the rest of the funnel.

Step 6: Get the last 30 from what's already working

By now you have data. Look at where your first 70 users came from. Usually one channel stands out. Do more of that, and less of everything else.

Ways to squeeze more out of a working channel:

• Write the post people keep asking for. If the same question shows up in DMs, answer it publicly.
• Ask happy users for a favour. One intro, one review, or one share. Be specific.
• Share your project page. Your BuildShipper page has a Share on X button and an optional badge for your site. Both send people to your project page, and the clicks from there to your site are what climb the board, so the users you already have help strangers find you.
• Relaunch with real news. A major feature is a valid reason to go back to a launch board. Minor updates usually aren't.
• List on directories. They're slow, but they give you a page that keeps working. See our list of free startup directories with dofollow backlinks.

Mistakes that slow you down

• Building more instead of talking. If 20 people tried it and nobody stayed, a new feature rarely fixes that.
• Asking for upvotes. Show HN and Peerlist both tell you not to. Ask for feedback instead. On a board that counts clicks, there's nothing to beg for anyway: the only thing that moves you is people actually visiting.
• Counting signups from friends. Count them, but keep them in a separate column. They won't tell you if strangers care.
• Waiting for "ready". Show HN itself says a project doesn't need to look slick and the community is comfortable with early-stage work.

A 4-week plan

| Week | Focus | Goal | | --- | --- | --- | | 1 | Sharpen the one-sentence user, list 10 places, message 30 people | 10 users | | 2 | Onboard by hand, fix the top 3 problems | 20 users | | 3 | List on BuildShipper on Monday, then one bigger board later in the week | 60 users | | 4 | Double down on the best channel, list on directories | 100 users |

These targets are a plan, not a promise. Some projects get there in a week, others take three months. The process is the same.

When you're ready for strangers, list your project on BuildShipper. It's free, and you'll see your clicks day by day. You can also peek at last week's winners to see what kind of taglines earn clicks.