Ask HN: I built it and nobody came. What got you your first users?

11 points by deadcatfound 29 days ago | 29 comments

I'm not a developer; MBA, cyber project manager by day. Years ago I taught myself enough SQL and API glue to automate the risk levels on my own trades. That was my ceiling, and every idea that needed real software died there. AI coding tools moved the ceiling, so I spent months of nights rebuilding it into something real and launched it last week.

Six days later: three posts, two followers, essentially zero visitors. The best thing I have ever posted got four likes. 1 like was from me lol...

The part I wasn't ready for is that nobody rejected it. I'd braced for "this is bad" or "this already exists." Instead there's just silence. Every community I tried was either gated to new accounts or moving fast enough that a stranger's post sinks inside an hour.

So I have a working product, months of work, and zero information. Not "no demand" — no exposure. I can't tell you whether the thing is any good, because nobody has looked at it.

For those who have been here: what actually got you your first hundred real users? Not "post more." What actually worked?

akashskypatel 29 days ago |

I think we are in an age where there is so much saturation and noise in every corner of the internet and with the rise of AI everyone is building "disposable" software for their own niche use or what THEY think is new and unique that it's impossible to generate organic traffic anymore. All the "hot" projects are botted to hell with most likely paid promos on places like twitter to promote their project and botted stars on github. Everyone is throwing their own project out in the void and hoping someone will adopt it. I have resigned to just working on what I enjoy and find useful that fills a niche somewhere and just having fun with it.

deadcatfound 29 days ago | |

I agree with you completely! This honestly evolved beyond what i was expecting. It started as a learning tool for my work colleagues and evolved into a local tool they use. As a DOD/DOW employ i cant broadcast my project inside the walls of my building, and this is my way of spreading the love (at a small cost to cover my dev tools)

I love this weird world we live in now lol

codingdave 28 days ago |

If you built this for yourself, then you are your entire market. Either you like it and it is good, or you don't and it is not.

But if you built this to sell to others, you skipped the most important step: Researching the market to know what people want. Your first users come from your research - you call the people who you talked to and say: "I built it."

If you skipped that step, you are just throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping it sticks. Fun for builders, not reliable for actual success.

deadcatfound 28 days ago | |

Honestly it's a bit of both. It started as something for me and a few colleagues, and they actually use it day to day, so I skipped the "research what people want" step because the first users were just us. This is the honest truth.

-Chris

NarcisMirandes 28 days ago |

I am also in a similar situation. This is something I try to learn. Those are some sources that has been useful to me:

- How to get your 100 users. Sam Altman. Oct 3, 2024. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da7z-RcS6dM

- 50 Founders Share How They Got Their First Customers. YCombinator. Aug 9, 2023. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZp5j5hvn9I

- How to Get Your First 10 Customers. YCombinator. Jun 22, 2026. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FBivfgOvuE&list=WL

deadcatfound 28 days ago | |

Saving all of these, thank you. The Sam Altman "do things that don't scale" idea is basically the opposite of what I've been doing lol

Super useful!

-Chris

zloy88 25 days ago |

I am a Developer and I am building projects for 8 years already - they kinda all failed but every failure made me learn very important things. Currently I am again onto a new project and I got ~130 users now after 9 days - basically my biggest success I ever made so far.

What worked for me is the following:

1. Don't build everything before it is not really validated, you're wasting time. Maybe your idea sounds good in your head, but is it really solving any issues? You need to find out if there is actually really a demand for it.

2. I've launched my Idea as a closed beta first and I searched for high intend users, this means I searched online where my target audience actually complains about the problem I think my app solves. So a closed beta was my first approach to test if anyone would even have interest to join and I could test my apps core loop if it works.

3. The closed beta validated that the Idea could work but still the product is not validated, you have no Idea from a few closed beta users if they'd be ready to actually pay for it - so you either ask the few closed beta users in a google form poll or something equal if they would pay for any specific features and in general you ask for feedback there. I did it a bit different though, but it brought me to step 4

4. If you got that far, you should open your beta to get more users. For me a lot of my target audience is actually on reddit. I found many extremely relevant subreddits. It was still very difficult there, replies to pain signals converted extremely bad. I found some subreddits that allowed me to post about my project and just explain the idea - it wasn't really written like a pitch, I just asked people if they would use something I've built and I basically just explained the Idea - some posts alone brought me like 40+ users in 2 days - it is not much for some people who are extremely successful, but for me this was insanely much. I never managed this before with any project from the past.

5. You have to be dead honest with yourself and sometimes just shut down your own projects early, try not to be sad about it, you have to learn about every project you've tried what you did wrong and what you could do better next time. I am still unsure about my project as well, if it really pops off.

I wish you good luck though!

If you're curious, this is my current project https://valuepair.app

deadcatfound 24 days ago | |

Congrats on the 130, that's a real result. Point 2 is the one I skipped hardest. I never went looking for where people already complain about the problem, I just assumed my own itch and pain was everyone's.

-Chris

austin-cheney 26 days ago |

I once had this diff tool that blew up in popularity. It had features users wanted that did not exist before. Its popularity was all word of mouth spreading among developer tools. The real shock was when I joined Bank of America in 2017 and found a ton of people there using it either directly or embedded in some other tool.

deadcatfound 24 days ago | |

Thats WILD! I can only hope to have half that level of success. But honestly, if not...This has been a fun and great learning experience for me.

-Chris

desktopentree 27 days ago |

Six days and three posts isn't really a hard launch. A stress test with trusted users is really important before a hard launch to work out the bugs.

I'm going through the same thing with my product launched last week. I'm going through the sequence of posting on reddit, HN, PH, etc. to build that first base to develop organically but it's a struggle.

deadcatfound 27 days ago | |

Fair hit on the hard launch. I skipped the stress test with trusted users entirely and went straight to posting. In hindsight that's backwards, and it's probably why I have no idea whether the thing is any good.

If you share the link below, i would be happy to take a look and give you feed back.

-Chris

NishanStepak 28 days ago |

Reddit has a magic quality to it. There are a ton of groups. Some of the groups I have used so far are Betatesters, Buildinpublic, Earlystageapps, Indiehackers, Sideproject, Startup Ideas, Y Combinator. There are also specific groups like Public Domain and Borges which I posted my app to. Some of the other social media Like LinkedIn and here have helped as well.

deadcatfound 27 days ago | |

Thanks, saving this list.

So it's a bit chicken-and-egg — need karma to post, need to post to get karma. Guessing the honest answer is to go comment like a normal person for a while first.

-Chris

NishanStepak 26 days ago | | |

A lot of sites require you to wait a bit before doing anything. Metafilter makes you wait a week before posting for example. They want long term people.

mjkl7896 27 days ago |

I'm in a similar situation to yours.

I've been posting here and there for about a week, but the actual user traffic was so low I could count it on my fingers!

I hope you don't get discouraged and keep looking for a solution. Stay strong!

deadcatfound 27 days ago | |

Counting users on your fingers, yeah, I know that exact feeling. Thanks for saying it, genuinely.

I'll follow your comment and review your project. Us new guys on the block need to take care of each other lol.

-Chris

rdegges 29 days ago |

I've built quite a few projects from 0 -> business over the last 20 years, and I think the fundamentals are still true today.

First rule: if you're building the product solo, is it something you're the target user of? I've always felt like the biggest "cheat code" for building successful products is just making them for people like you. I know that goes against a lot of lean startup methodology (talk to users, etc.), but it has always worked in my experience. Use your unique domain knowledge to make something meaningfully better, cheaper, more accessible/simple than the competition.

Second rule: marketing is important. Almost all the things I've built are developer services, so to get user feedback and early traction, I'd submit to go speak at the local meetup groups in my area, talk about the tech stuff I worked on as part of the product, then give people a free shirt if they'd give me some in-person feedback after the event. I made some good friends that way (hello, SoCal Pythonistas!), and also made meaningful product growth. Don't be a shill, just genuinely nerd out about the things you're doing in an authentic way. People like that.

Third rule: write well. Don't use LLMs to spam blog content that's low quality about your product. Write about it yourself. Show examples, highlight features. Don't use marketing words, use simple descriptions.

pickleglitch 28 days ago |

6 days and 3 posts? What did you expect to get out of that? Some people spend years building an audience. I don't know why you would think you can do it in 6 days with barely any effort.

deadcatfound 27 days ago | |

Fair. I came in naive about the timeline, I thought shipping was the hard part.

-Chris

PaiDxng 29 days ago |

Your first hundred users probably won’t come from crowded feeds; for a trading-risk tool, I’d recruit ten traders manually and watch where they hesitate before chasing reach.

deadcatfound 28 days ago | |

This is the most useful thing anyone's said to me in this whole thread. I've been chasing reach when I have zero signal on whether the thing is even usable by someone who isn't me and close non-quint friends.

-Chris

owebmaster 28 days ago |

Yes you can tell if it's good: it's not. Finding the customers is part of your job and if you can't do that it's your own fault

deadcatfound 28 days ago | |

Fair... I'd rather know why than not. The demo's open, no signup, and I put the whole thing out in public specifically so people could tell me what's garbage.

I would be grateful for any feedback, even if they are drive by jabs at the project. I have nothing to hide, and respect this community.

-Chris