How to find your first 100 users when you have zero audience

You shipped the thing. Nobody came. This is not a marketing-budget problem, and it is not usually a product problem either. It is almost always a fishing-in-empty-water problem: you are shouting into the internet instead of into the specific rooms where your buyer already stands.

The manual method, free, one afternoon

1. Search for the problem, not your product. Use a search engine with site:reddit.com plus the exact problem your product solves. Note which communities keep appearing across multiple searches, not just the first one.
2. Read the rules before anything else. Open each community you found and read its rules tab first. Most ban outright link drops; some allow a link only in a weekly self-promotion thread; a few tolerate a mention when the comment leads with real value. This single step is what separates a real answer from a list a bot could generate.
3. Study what actually gets upvoted. Sort each community by top posts of the year. Notice the shape of what works there: a story, a teardown, a free tool, a blunt opinion. Match that shape, do not fight it.
4. Widen past Reddit.Run the same search pattern against Indie Hackers, niche Slack and Discord communities, and any forum specific to your buyer's profession. Reddit is the easiest to find, not the only place that matters.
5. Write the value first, mention the product once. A genuinely useful answer that happens to mention what you built outperforms a disguised ad every time, and it is the only version most communities actually allow.

Why most founders skip this and pay for ads instead

Step 1 and step 2 above take real hours, and step 2 specifically requires judgment: which rule actually matters, which candidate community is worth the time, which thread is stale versus genuinely live. That judgment cost, not laziness, is why paid ads look tempting even when they cost more per customer than a well-placed community post ever would.

The paid shortcut, if your time is worth more than $65

A SellSniper report does exactly the five steps above, by hand, for your specific product: 10 named communities where your buyers already gather, each one's posting rules already read for you, and 3 drafted posts written to fit each community's actual culture. Delivered in 48 hours, for $65, once. Not a subscription, not a dashboard to babysit.

If none of the communities in your report actually contain your buyer, it is a full refund. The risk sits with us, not you.

Ready for the full report? Claim a founding report for $65.