The hardest users to get are the first hundred. Paid ads are the worst way to get them, because you will burn money learning lessons you could have learned for free. Here is what actually works when your budget is zero and it is just you.

Start with the brutal truth

Nobody is waiting for your app. No one will find it by accident. Distribution is your job, and it is a bigger job than building. If that sounds unfair, it is also the opportunity: most builders quit at exactly this point, so simply showing up consistently is itself an edge. The first hundred users do not come from a clever hack. They come from doing unglamorous things repeatedly, long after most people would have given up.

It helps to reframe the goal. You are not trying to “get users.” You are trying to find the specific people who already have the problem you solved, get in front of them, and give them a reason to care. Ten of the right people beat a thousand random visitors who bounce.

Channel 1: be where your users already complain

Find the exact place your target user already hangs out and asks for help. A subreddit, a Discord, a Facebook group, a niche forum, an X hashtag. Then be useful first. Answer questions for a week or two before you ever mention your app.

When you do mention it, frame it as “I built this because I had the same problem,” not “check out my app.” People can smell a pitch instantly, and communities reject it on sight. What they respond to is a fellow sufferer who solved the thing and is sharing what they learned. The link is almost an afterthought to a genuinely helpful post.

This channel does not scale, and that is exactly why it works at this stage. You can afford to talk to people one at a time when you only need a hundred of them.

Channel 2: App Store Optimization (ASO)

If you have a mobile app, the store is a search engine, and free traffic lives there.

  • Put your main keyword in the title and subtitle, which carry the most weight.
  • Make your first two screenshots sell the benefit, not show a login screen. They are visible without scrolling and they decide the install.
  • Ask happy users for ratings at a good moment, after a win inside the app, never on first launch.
  • Localize the listing for a couple of big markets. It is cheap and most competitors never bother.

ASO compounds. A listing you optimize once keeps pulling installs for months. The full playbook is in the ASO guide.

Channel 3: build in public

Share the process, not just the product. “Day 12: added offline mode, here is what broke and how I fixed it.” People follow journeys, then become users, then become the people who tell others. It compounds slowly and then suddenly, and the audience you build follows you to your next app too.

Your splash pages help here. A clean page per app that auto-routes to the right store on mobile gives you one link to drop anywhere, in any thread or post, without thinking about which platform someone is on.

Channel 4: content that ranks

Write the article your user would search for before they even know your app exists. “How to do X,” where X is the problem you solve. It pulls in people with exactly the right intent, for years, for free. This blog is doing that right now: each post is a door that someone with the problem can walk through. Content is slow to start and then becomes the channel that quietly works while you sleep.

Channel 5: direct outreach

For your very first users, one-to-one beats one-to-many. Send a polite, specific message to ten people who fit your app perfectly. Ask them to try it and tell you what is confusing. You get users and the feedback that makes the next ninety easier to win. The key word is specific: a copy-pasted blast gets ignored and reported, while a genuine message that references the person’s actual situation gets a reply.

What to measure (and what to ignore)

Vanity metrics will lie to you. At a hundred users, do not obsess over downloads. Watch:

  • Activation: what fraction of installs actually reach the “aha” moment, the first real use of the app?
  • Retention: do people come back on day two, day seven? This is the single most honest signal of whether you built something worth growing.
  • Where they came from: tag your channels loosely so you know which one is actually working, and double down there.

If activation and retention are bad, more traffic just means more people bouncing faster, which can even hurt your store ranking. Fix the leak before you pour in water.

What to skip at this stage

  • Paid ads. You do not know your message or your numbers yet, so you would just pay to confirm that.
  • Press. Reporters cover traction, not launches. Get the traction first, then the story tells itself.
  • Going wide. A thousand strangers who do not fit beat nothing, but a hundred who fit perfectly beat the thousand.

A download is not a user

One caution as you count toward a hundred: a download is not a user. Someone who installs the app, opens it once, and never returns is a vanity number, not a customer, and chasing those will only flatter you while teaching you nothing. When you tally your first hundred, count the people who actually came back and used the thing more than once. That is the number that tells you whether you have something real, and it is the only one worth optimizing for at this stage.

The real unlock

Pick two of these channels and do them consistently for a month, instead of trying all five for three days. Consistency is the actual growth hack, and it is the one almost nobody has the patience for. Your first hundred users come from showing up in the same place, being genuinely useful, and asking, over and over, long after the novelty has worn off. Do that, learn from every conversation, and the second hundred gets easier, because by then you actually understand who your app is for. For the community side specifically, see getting your first users from Reddit and communities.