How to Find Your First 100 Users as a Startup Founder (When No One Knows Who You Are)
Your MVP is live. Your team is taking shape. Now comes the hard part: convincing real people—strangers, not friends—to use what you’ve built.
One of the most underwhelming moments in any startup journey is after you launch your product, nothing happens.
No sign-ups. No feedback. Just the digital equivalent of silence.
Going from 0 to 100 users sounds like a small milestone. But it’s the step that kills most startups before they ever really start. Not because the product was bad. But because no one ever saw it, used it, or cared enough to share it.
And that’s not just anecdotal. A study by CB Insights found that 42% of startups fail because they couldn’t find a market need, but often, the real issue is that they never got in front of users to test that need properly.
So, how do first-time founders, especially those building in resource-constrained ecosystems like Nigeria or India, actually get their first users without spending a fortune on ads or growth consultants?
They go back to basics: distribution, conversation, community, and clarity. Here's what I learned after speaking to a few early-stage founders in these regions:
Kelechi Edeh
/1. Forget virality. Think proximity.
When no one knows who you are, the game isn’t reach but relevance. You don’t need a billboard. You need to show up in the exact digital rooms where your potential users are already asking for help, venting frustrations, or cobbling together workarounds.
Slack groups. Twitter replies. Product Hunt comment threads. Reddit subs. WhatsApp communities. These are your first traction channels, not because they scale fast, but because they’re already warm.
Instead of writing cold emails, founders are reading what people complain about. Instead of running ads, they’re answering public questions—honestly, usefully—then dropping a link to their tool only when it actually fits.
This kind of “strategic helpfulness” doesn’t just land you your first users. It builds trust with an invisible audience of lurkers who come back days or weeks later to try your product when they’re finally ready.
/2. Simplify the try → feedback loop
You don’t just want 100 users. You want 100 people who give you a signal.
That means reducing the friction to try your product to the bare minimum. A landing page that loads fast on 3G. A demo that works without creating an account. A signup process that doesn’t ask for six things when one would do.
In Lagos and Bengaluru, early-stage founders are designing onboarding around one core idea: “How fast can I show someone that this works?” The best ones are skipping fancy tours and focusing on utility: templates, default setups, dummy data, anything that shortens time to value.
Because when a user feels the product doing its job, they’re more likely to stick, and more likely to tell someone else.
/3. You don’t need content. You need answers.
A lot of startup advice tells you to “do content marketing.” But unless you’re playing the long SEO game, writing a blog post titled “5 ways to be productive in 2025” is going to do absolutely nothing for your user count.
Instead, smart founders are creating content as ammo—resources built to solve hyper-specific problems their audience already talks about.
If you’re building a tool for digital freelancers, don’t write a listicle. Write “How I track Nigerian clients who ghost me after sending a proposal.” Then drop that link into the next relevant Twitter thread or Slack convo that asks about late payments.
Content isn’t about traffic in the early days. It’s about having a link that’s so useful, people share it before they finish reading it.
/4. Build in public, but with intention
There’s a difference between tweeting every time you fix a bug and building a narrative people can follow. The founders who grow through “build in public” aren’t just documenting progress but shaping a story around it.
They’re sharing why they made that pricing decision. What happened after a user churned. What they learned after 10 failed cold DMs.
This kind of transparency attracts two things: other builders (who amplify your work) and early adopters (who want to be part of something unfinished but promising). And if you’re consistent, it compounds.
Startups that gain their first 100 users this way usually aren’t the loudest but the most real.
/5. You only need one flywheel to start
There’s no single tactic that works for every startup. Some grow through community. Some through SEO. Some through obsessive user referrals. But the pattern is always the same: one channel works first, then everything else follows.
So, the goal isn’t to try 20 things. It’s to try 3–4, double down on the one that moves, and ride that until it plateaus.
For some MVPs, that first spike comes from Product Hunt. For others, it’s WhatsApp DMs, Google Forms, a killer tweet thread, or a free tool embedded in a Notion doc. What matters is that it starts real conversations, gets feedback, and puts something valuable in the hands of someone new.
Kelechi Edeh
Conclusion
The first 100 users don’t care about your roadmap or your pitch deck. They care if your product solves a problem they have right now.
If you want them to show up, you have to do the unscalable things. Show up where they are. Speak their language. Answer their questions. Let them see you building, not selling.
Because at this stage, you’re not optimizing a funnel. You’re earning trust; one user, one conversation, one honest post at a time. And when that starts to work, you won’t need to chase your next 100. They’ll start showing up on their own.
