If you were starting from zero today, how would you get the first 100 real users in a clean way? I would love specific ideas like where to share, what kind of write up works, how to approach niche communities, or what you would build into the product to make sharing natural.
Thanks.
I haven't solved it, but my experience has lead me to believe that building in public and blogging/vlogging your journey (why you started and what you learned) is promising. That type of content drives brand and product hype via views/engagement, helps you filter ideas (if your vlog is getting no traction, maybe not a great product?) and avoids promotional post rules in a lot of communities.
My new years resolution is to dial in my content driven development pipeline.
Product hype might be hard with developer/tech types of tools. Devs have very good BS radar and "hype" is sometimes all there is in a lot of content. I see and hear a lot of the "build in public" being promoted as the way to do things with the "build an audience" mantra.
There is a huge hurdle to produce good video content, it takes a lot of time to record, edit and publish quality videos. Publishing quality videos can help get traction/views/subscribers but that doesn't mean it will translate into paying customers either. Do people really want to watch software developers code or talk about it? There has to be other ways to market a product.
1. Just do split screen videos where you talking head with slides on the other, and read off the slides.
2. Record in segments, with a full reset between each segment. Makes editing really fast.
3. Don't stress about small mistakes. People are into authenticity, it's ok.
Lighting/"studio" design is still an art, but you can get something set up in a day or two. The harder part is coming up with good video ideas, and doing a compelling title/thumbnail/hook. That's a rabbit hole.
If you have a social media following you can leverage that. Cold calls can work if you're selling big ticket items, but you also need to be good at sales and do a lot of legwork so I wouldn't go down that route. I wouldn't start advertising until you can demonstrate product market fit.