EarlyUser

How did you get your first real users? Not traffic, actual users

Yeah this is exactly where im stuck too. Got like 40 visits over a few weeks from reddit, 1 actual signup who used the product, the rest just bounced What ive learned the hard way Posts asking for feedback bring testers not users. People come to look at your landing page like critics, give you ux advice, then leave. Theyre not your customer they just enjoy reviewing stuff. Useful for landing page tweaks, useless for validating if anyone actually needs your thing The few real users i got came from commenting on other peoples posts where they had a problem i could help with. Took weeks of just being helpful before anyone clicked my profile On the paying for testers thing, ive thought about it but havent done it. My worry is youre paying for someone to be polite, not for someone who actually has the problem. The feedback might be detailed but its still not real signal. Real signal is someone who finds you organically because they were already looking What kind of project, b2b or consumer? Different worlds.

I ran into the same wall: plenty of eyeballs, almost no one actually using the thing. What changed for me was stopping “launches” and doing 1:1 outreach like it was a scrappy consulting gig. I picked one super narrow use case and hunted for people already complaining about that exact pain. I replied with something useful first, then DMed: “I hacked a small thing that fixes this, want me to walk you through it?” Then I literally sat on Zoom, watched them use it, and fixed stuff live. Those folks became my first real users because I built around their workflow, not my idea. I’ve paid small amounts for feedback too: $25–$50 gift cards for 30–45 min calls. Better than vague survey answers. For discovery, I bounced between GummySearch and manual Reddit searching, and ended up on Pulse for Reddit after trying a few others because it kept surfacing high-intent threads I was missing so I could jump in early with something actually helpful.

oh man this is the real struggle. traffic is cheap. actual humans using your thing? way harder. for my first project i got my first real users by being annoyingly helpful in subreddits. not posting my link. just answering questions for like two weeks straight. then someone said "you seem like you know stuff, you got a tool for this?" and i was like... yeah actually. that felt way better then cold posting. the other thing that worked was dming people who were literally complaining about the problem my thing solved. not "hey check out my startup" but "saw your post about x, i built a little thing that might help, no pressure if not." some said no. some said sure. the ones who said yes actually used it cause they already had the pain. i never paid for early users but i traded. like i gave free lifetime access to the first 10 people who did a 15 min call with me. got way better feedback then any signup form. the thing about reddit posts is most people just scroll. if you get 10k views and 5 users thats actually not bad. but you gotta make it stupid easy to try. no signup wall. no credit card. just let them poke at it. whats your project? maybe theres a better subreddit or a diffrent angle. sometimes the problem isnt the product its where your posting.

oh man this is the real struggle. traffic is cheap. actual humans using your thing? way harder. for my first project i got my first real users by being annoyingly helpful in subreddits. not posting my link. just answering questions for like two weeks straight. then someone said "you seem like you know stuff, you got a tool for this?" and i was like... yeah actually. that felt way better then cold posting. the other thing that worked was dming people who were literally complaining about the problem my thing solved. not "hey check out my startup" but "saw your post about x, i built a little thing that might help, no pressure if not." some said no. some said sure. the ones who said yes actually used it cause they already had the pain. i never paid for early users but i traded. like i gave free lifetime access to the first 10 people who did a 15 min call with me. got way better feedback then any signup form. the thing about reddit posts is most people just scroll. if you get 10k views and 5 users thats actually not bad. but you gotta make it stupid easy to try. no signup wall. no credit card. just let them poke at it. whats your project? maybe theres a better subreddit or a diffrent angle. sometimes the problem isnt the product its where your posting.