How to get first 100 users: win three customers the same way before you try ten channels

The best answer to how to get first 100 users is to stop spreading effort across ten channels. Pick one place where your buyers already describe the problem, recruit them there by hand, and keep doing it until three similar customers have arrived the same way. Only then add launches, directories and content.

By the end of this guide you'll have a way to choose that first channel, a test that tells you when it has started to repeat, and a view on where Reddit, Product Hunt, Upfynd and paid ads fit. It matters because the channel you pick decides what you learn about your customers in the first months.

Three customers won the same way beat ten won ten different ways

The sharpest version of this argument came from Luke Arno, go-to-market lead at Lovable, on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. As TechCrunch reported on October 22, Arno said that if he brings on "10 new customers in 10 different ways to solve 10 different problems," he has revenue but no way to scale a go-to-market. If he brings "three customers in with a similar motion to solve a similar problem," he has "high confidence" that he can.

Arno's warning is about mistaking early revenue for proof. The same TechCrunch piece notes that startups can reach high ARR figures and then fail within a few months, and quotes Arno telling founders: "Don't rush to build out a top-down go-to-market motion if you're not there yet." Ben Broca of Polsia, who said he is its only employee, put the same idea more plainly: "The general rule is always to be talking to customers."

The strongest counter-argument came from the same panel. Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures called Lovable's growth the exception but said founders still need to move fast, because "the expectations for overall execution speed are absolutely tremendous." That is fair, and it is not a contradiction. Running one channel hard is the fast option. Running ten at once feels fast and teaches you nothing you can repeat.

Lovable's scale is also the reason to listen. TechCrunch reports that its investors value it at more than $13 billion and that its ARR has passed $600 million. Its go-to-market lead is still telling early founders to find a repeatable pattern before they build a sales machine.

How to get first 100 users with one repeatable motion

A motion is the full path a customer takes to you: where they were when they noticed the problem, what you said to them, and what made them try the product. "We posted on Reddit" is a channel. "We replied to people asking for a tool to make product demos and offered to build one for them" is a motion. Here is how to find yours.

1. Write the problem in your buyer's words, not your product's. If you can't say it the way a frustrated user would type it into a search box or a forum, you can't find the people who have it.
2. Find the places where that sentence is already being written: subreddits, founder forums, Slack and Discord groups, support threads for tools your product replaces, job posts that describe the work.
3. Recruit people by hand. Paul Graham's 2013 essay Do Things That Don't Scale calls this "the most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start." He describes Stripe's founders setting users up on the spot and Airbnb's founders "going door to door in New York, recruiting new users."
4. Log every new user: where they came from, the exact message that got the reply, and the problem they wanted solved. A spreadsheet is enough.
5. When three similar users have arrived through the same route with the same problem, you have a motion. Run it until it stops producing, then add a second channel.

The log in step four is the part most founders skip, and it's the part that makes Arno's test usable. Without it, ten signups from ten places look like momentum.

Where startups find their first customers

Each channel suits a different kind of product. The table below is our summary of where the pain tends to be written down and when each one is the wrong choice; it is a starting map, not a ranking.

How to get first 10 customers for B2B SaaS

For B2B, the motion is often cold outreach to a short list. Tools such as Apollo.io, which describes itself on its own site as an AI sales platform covering data, intelligence and execution, and Saleshandy, which calls itself an all-in-one cold outreach platform, handle prospect lists and email sequences. They automate a motion; they don't find one. Write your first fifty messages by hand, find the one that gets replies, and only then load it into a tool.

How to get first 100 users from Reddit without getting banned

Reddit's sitewide rules are short. Rule 2 of the Reddit Rules says: "Participate authentically in communities where you have a personal interest, and do not spam or engage in disruptive behaviors (including content manipulation) that interfere with Reddit communities." Each subreddit adds its own rules on top, so read them before you post anywhere.

The most detailed recent playbook we found is Supademo's account of using Reddit, last updated in August 2026. The author says one offer post got more than 11,000 views in a day and brought in hundreds of signups, and that the company reached $1M a year in revenue in 11 months. The method, as the post describes it:

• Start with founder subreddits such as r/SaaS, r/startups, r/Entrepreneur and r/indiehackers, then move to smaller niche ones.
• Leave helpful comments with no promotion until the account has about 10 to 20 karma, and keep more than half of roughly 15 daily comments free of any product mention.
• Name the product without a link, and share a link only when someone asks.
• Around day four, publish an offer post: say what you're building and offer to make something free for each commenter. Supademo's offer was an interactive demo of each commenter's product.
• Post results back in the thread rather than in DMs, so people reading along see the value.

Read it with the caveats it carries. It is a vendor's post about its own product, the karma thresholds are the author's rules of thumb rather than Reddit policy, and it does not say how many of those signups became paying customers or how much of the revenue came from Reddit. The author is candid about the cost: "None of it is clever, and none of it scales." That is the point. A Reddit motion works when the free offer is something only your product can produce, and it fails when it is a link drop.

Does launching on Product Hunt get you users?

A launch gets you attention for a day, and whether that turns into users depends on what you've built before it. Paul Graham's essay is blunt: "one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch." He adds that "all you need from a launch is some initial core of users."

The rules are simple. Product Hunt's launch guide says the platform is free, suggests 12:01 am Pacific Time for makers who are planning ahead, and lets you launch again when you have significant new product iterations. Its one firm promotion rule is that "you cannot ask people directly to upvote your product." Ask them to visit and comment instead.

Upfynd, which is our site, works the same way on a smaller scale. Listing a product is free, a person on our team checks every submission before it goes live, and launches are ranked by upvotes on daily, weekly and monthly boards. Each person gets one upvote per product. Our FAQ on asking for upvotes says telling your audience you've launched is fine, while buying, trading or coordinating votes is not. We publish no launch results, so we won't promise you any.

The useful way to treat any launch board is as an amplifier for a motion you already have. Send the people you recruited by hand, reply to every comment, and log anyone new the same way you log everyone else. Skip a launch for now if nobody uses the product yet; you'll get a day of visits and no one to learn from.

Should you use paid ads for your first users?

Our view is usually not first. Ads buy reach, but early on you don't yet know which problem, wording or buyer converts, and a campaign spread across several audiences can produce exactly the ten-customers-ten-ways pattern Arno warned about.

The best case for ads is real: a small budget can test two headlines against each other faster than a forum thread can. If buyers already search for a clear phrase that names your category, a modest search campaign is a legitimate way to hear from them. Use it as a message test with a fixed budget, and count what the visitors do after they sign up, not the clicks. Upfynd lists 176 products in Advertising & PR as of October 2026 if you get to that stage.

What counts as a real user for an early startup

A signup is not a user. For counting toward your first 100, we'd suggest a user is someone who completed the action your product exists for and came back to do it again. That threshold is often called activation, and it is the number that tells you whether a motion works.

The Supademo post shows why the distinction matters: "hundreds of signups" from one thread is a strong top of funnel, but the post does not report how many of them paid. Your own log should answer that question for every channel you try. If the same route keeps producing people who activate, that's the motion. If it produces signups who never return, it's attention.

When the first motion repeats, add one channel at a time

Once three similar customers have come through one route, add a second channel that reaches the same buyer, and test it the same way. Most products end up with a handful of channels that work, and the tools for each are worth comparing before you commit.

As of October 23, 2026, Upfynd lists 230 products in Social Media, 140 in Email & Newsletters and 350 in SEO & Growth, each with pricing and similar products on the page. When you're ready to put your own product in front of people looking for new software, submit it to Upfynd and use launch day to bring the users you've already won back to give feedback.