RealUserMatch: Targeted Early Adopter Discovery for Pre-PM SaaS

**Comment:** Honestly the first 10 came from just directly messaging people in niche Slack communities where the problem we were solving was already being complained about. Not in a spammy way, just genuinely joining conversations and when it felt right mentioning what we were building. Discord communities were the same story, the ones with high engagement around a specific pain point are so underrated for this. Product Hunt felt like a vanity play early on, lots of upvotes and very little actual retention from it. The channel that surprised me most was honestly just cold LinkedIn DMs to people with the exact job title we were building for, the response rate was way higher than expected when the message was specific and didn't feel like a pitch.

Reddit for me, but not in the way most people try it Discord and Slack communities are fine but the problem is theyre usually full of other founders trying to promote their stuff. Its like a room of salespeople selling to each other Reddit is different cause youre reaching actual users with actual problems. Someone posts "how do I do X" and you can genuinely help them while mentioning your thing if its relevant. The intent is already there Product Hunt is overrated for early users imo. You get a spike of other indie hackers who sign up, kick the tires, and never come back. Good for social proof and backlinks but not for finding people who actually need your product X only works if you already have an audience or youre willing to grind replies for 6 months before seeing anything The channel that surprised me most was niche subreddits under 50k members. Way less competition, mods are chiller, and the people there are actually engaged not just lurking If youre going the Reddit route theres a tool called MediaFast that makes it less painful. Shows you which subreddits fit your niche, what times to post, finds threads to comment on. Doesnt do the posting for you tho so you still gotta put in the work First 10 users came from 3 subreddits I never wouldve found just browsing. Niche communities are where its at

Same struggle here. I'm a dev who's never done marketing a day in my life, but the moment you build something, you realize you can't just sit and wait. Eventually you have to do the one thing that feels most unnatural: cold outreach. It's uncomfortable, but I guess that's just part of the journey we can't skip.

Honestly, Reddit is the worst channel for me. The moment I mentioned my product by name, my account got banned.