---
title: "Get Your First 100 Users: A 4-Week Plan"
description: "How to get your first 100 users for a side project: pick one channel, message 30 people you know, join one community, ask one partner, and set a stop rule."
canonical_url: "https://builderscamp.com/guides/other/how-to-get-your-first-100-users"
date_published: "2026-10-12"
date_modified: "2026-10-12"
author: "Mário Araújo"
publisher: "Builders Camp"
guide_class: "other"
---

# How to get your first 100 users for a side project

**TL;DR:** Pick one channel, give it two weeks, and recruit the first 100 users by hand: Paul Graham calls manual recruiting the most common unscalable thing founders do at the start. Start with 30 direct messages to people you know, add one community where your users already talk and one partner who already has their attention, and switch channels only when the number you wrote down in advance says to.

You get your first 100 users by recruiting them one at a time, on purpose, through a single channel you chose before launch. Paul Graham writes in [Do Things That Don't Scale](https://paulgraham.com/ds.html): "The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you." The pace is slower than a launch-day spike suggests. Ryan Hoover, in a first-hand account collected in [Lenny Rachitsky's research on how consumer apps got their first 1,000 users](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-the-biggest-consumer-apps-got), says Product Hunt acquired its first 30 users on the day it emailed its supporters and had 100 users by the end of that week. Those supporters came from the email list Product Hunt started as and from people Hoover had contacted personally, so that week was the payoff, not the start.

A side project has the same problem with less time. You have evenings, not a team, so the plan below spends that time on the three channels that need no audience: direct messages, one community, and one partner.

## Which channel should a side project start with?

Start with one channel, picked by where your first users already are, and add a second only after the first is working or has clearly failed. Rachitsky's consumer research found that most startups got their early users from a single strategy, and he writes: "No one found success from more than three." His [follow-up on B2B companies](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-todays-fastest-growing-b2b-businesses) found only three sourcing strategies behind every company's very early growth: your personal network, going where customers already spend time, and press.

| Channel | Use it first when | First action this week | Number to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct outbound to people you know | You know 30 people who have the problem, or work next to them | Write 30 individual messages | Replies, then calls booked |
| One community | Your users already ask about the problem in a subreddit, forum, Slack or Discord | Answer 5 questions without mentioning your project | Profile clicks and direct messages after you post |
| One partnership | Someone else already holds your users' attention and trust | Make one specific ask to one partner | Signups that arrive through the partner's link or code |

Press is missing from that table on purpose. Rachitsky's B2B summary says "Getting press is rarely the way to get started", and a side project rarely has a story a journalist needs.

## How do you get the first users from people you already know?

Send 30 individual messages to people you have worked with, studied with, or bought from, each naming the problem you think that person has. Rachitsky's B2B research puts the choice this way: "The question isn't which of these two routes to pursue, but instead how far your own network will take you before you move on." Gusto's founders, quoted in the same post, went "around telling everyone we knew that we're building a modern delightful payroll and HR system and asked if they'd know someone who'd be interested in trying it out."

Thirty is a working number, not a benchmark: enough people to see whether replies come, small enough to write each message by hand in an evening. Build the list in a spreadsheet with one column for the problem you think each person has. If you cannot fill that column for someone, they do not go on the list.

A message that gets answered fits on a phone screen:

> Hi Marta, you mentioned last year that chasing parents for lesson payments eats your Sunday evenings. I built a small tool that sends the reminders and marks who has paid. Could I show it to you on a 15-minute call this week? If it does not save you time, tell me and I will stop there.

When someone says yes, set them up while you are on the call. Graham describes how the Stripe founders handled a yes: "When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say 'Right then, give me your laptop' and set them up on the spot." A user you onboard yourself is a user who actually completes the core action, and you watch where they get stuck.

When your own list runs out, go one step out. Dylan Field, quoted in Rachitsky's B2B post, says that for Figma he "cold emailed / found introductions to many of these people and showed them Figma", after filtering a list of influential designers down to the ones he personally admired. A cold message works when it is as specific as a warm one.

## How do you post in a community without getting removed?

Pick one community where people already describe the problem in their own words, contribute there for a week, and then post once, disclosing that you built the thing. Shopify, New Relic and Atlassian all grew out of developer communities in Rachitsky's B2B roundup; Segment's and Dropbox's first users came from Hacker News posts.

Read the rules before you write anything. Many subreddits and Slack groups ban self-promotion or confine it to one weekly thread, and a removed post costs you the community, not only the post. Then answer five questions from people who have your problem, without a link. Your answers show you know the problem, and the questions themselves are free research for your landing page copy.

When you do post, write about the problem and what you learned building for it, put the link at the end, and say in the first line that it is your project. Rachitsky's consumer post includes Netflix's early tactic of posing as an enthusiast in DVD forums without disclosing the connection; do not copy that part. Moderators remove undisclosed promotion, and users who find out stop trusting the product.

Community traffic is also where you meet the wrong users. The practice exercise in [the landing page conversion diagnosis challenge](https://builderscamp.com/guides/challenges/from-idea-to-launch-with-ai-landing-page-conversion-diagnosis) starts from a Reddit post that sent 847 visitors and produced 31 waitlist signups and no active users. Read the comment thread as carefully as the visitor count.

## What does a partnership look like at 100-user scale?

At this scale a partnership is one specific ask to one person or organisation that already holds your users' attention, not a contract. Sarah Leary describes in Rachitsky's consumer post how Nextdoor started in one neighbourhood: "We reached out to board members of the homeowners association, and they were more than willing to hear us out." The board then invited the team to present at its next meeting. Lyft used the same shape with startup offices: Emily Castor Warren describes asking the team for its contacts at startups and offering each company a free Bi-Rite ice cream sundae delivery that came with Lyft credits.

Both cases follow the same shape: find who already gathers your users, then offer that person something that helps their own audience. For a side project that might be:

- a newsletter writer in your niche, offered a free account for every reader for a month
- a teacher, coach or consultant whose clients have your problem, offered a tool they can hand to those clients
- an event or meetup organiser, offered a ten-minute demo slot that teaches something useful

Make one ask, with a date and a tracked link or code, so you can count what the partnership actually brought.

## What does a four-week first-100 plan look like in practice?

Here is an illustrative plan for a hypothetical side project: a payment-reminder tool for independent music teachers. The targets are the kind of numbers you write down before you start, not results anyone reported.

| Week | Channel | Actions | Written-down target |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Direct outbound | 30 individual messages to teachers you know or have met; onboard every yes on a call | 10 replies, 5 calls, 5 users who send one real reminder |
| 2 | Direct outbound, then intros | Ask each of the 5 users for one teacher who has the same problem; message each intro the same day | 10 more users who send a reminder |
| 3 | One community | Answer questions in one music teachers' group all week; post once, disclosed, about how you stopped chasing payments | 15 users from the post and the direct messages it triggers |
| 4 | One partnership | Ask one music school or teacher association to share a free month with its members, with its own signup link | 20 users through the partner link |

That adds up to 50 at the end of week 4 if every target lands, which is the point: four weeks on a part-time schedule gets you halfway, and the second half comes from repeating whichever row worked. Some rows will miss. The numbers are there so a miss is visible, not so the plan looks complete.

## How do you know when to switch channels?

Decide the stop number before you start each channel, then switch when two weeks have passed below it. Write it as a sentence, for example: *if 30 messages produce fewer than 5 people who complete the core action, the problem is the audience or the message, and I change one of them before I send more.* Counting completed actions, not signups, keeps a flattering visitor count from hiding a product nobody uses; [how to define an activation metric](https://builderscamp.com/guides/other/how-to-define-an-activation-metric) shows how to pick that action.

Graham explains why 100 is worth the effort even though the number is small: "If you have 100 users, you need to get 10 more next week to grow 10% a week." He adds that at a steady 10 percent a week, "After a year you'll have 14,000 users". The point for a side project is the rate, not the total: 10 new users a week from a channel you can repeat tells you more than 300 from a one-off post.

## Does recruiting users by hand stop working past the first 100?

Manual recruiting does stop working once you need users by the thousand, and that is not a reason to skip it. Rachitsky writes that "The tactics that you use to get your first 1,000 users are very different from your next 10,000." Graham makes the same point: "You'll be doing different things when you're acquiring users a thousand at a time, and growth has to slow down eventually."

The strongest objection is time. A side project has a few hours a week, and 30 hand-written messages plus a week of community answers can eat all of them, leaving nothing for the product. The answer is to treat recruiting as the product work for those four weeks: every call shows you where onboarding breaks, and an MVP scoped to one core flow, as in [building an MVP as a solo founder](https://builderscamp.com/guides/other/mvp-as-a-solo-founder), leaves fewer things to fix. If you have not yet checked that the problem is real, do that first with [how to validate a startup idea](https://builderscamp.com/guides/other/how-to-validate-a-startup-idea); recruiting users for an unvalidated idea burns your network on a product you may throw away.

## What should you set up before user 101?

Before user 101, pick the repeatable mechanism that replaces your evenings: a referral, a content habit, or a partner channel that keeps sending people. [Growth loops](https://builderscamp.com/guides/other/growth-loops) covers how to measure each one, and [B2B or B2C for solo founders](https://builderscamp.com/guides/other/b2b-vs-b2c-for-solo-founders) covers which kind of weekly work each model asks of you.

From Idea to Launch with AI is a 1 week Builders Camp bootcamp with 2 live sessions and 8 self-paced microlessons, led by its own programme director and part of the Vibe Coding Expert Track and the Discovery Expert Track. It is described as a fast, practical path from an idea to a focused MVP and a real launch plan.

[See the From Idea to Launch with AI bootcamp](https://builderscamp.com/bootcamps/from-idea-to-launch-with-ai?utm_source=guide&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=how-to-get-your-first-100-users)

## Frequently asked questions

### How long does it take to get 100 users for a side project?

Plan on weeks, not a launch day. Ryan Hoover reached 100 Product Hunt users by the end of the first week, but Product Hunt had started as an email list, and he had already shared early mocks with its contributors before launch. Starting from zero, give one channel two weeks before you judge it and expect the first 100 to take a month or more.

### Should I launch on Product Hunt to get my first users?

Only once you already have people who will show up for you. Loom's Shahed Khan says its first roughly 3,000 users came from Product Hunt on launch day and the one or two days after, but a launch-day spike tells you little about who will keep using the product. Get your first 20 to 30 users by hand first, then launch to them and their contacts.

### What should the first message to people I know say?

Name the person, the specific problem you think they have, what you built, and one small ask: a 15-minute call or trying it while you watch. Do not ask them to share it, and do not send a link with no context. A message that is clearly written for one person gets answered; a broadcast gets ignored.

### Is it OK to post my side project in a subreddit or Slack community?

Read the community's rules first, because many ban self-promotion outright or limit it to one thread. Answer other people's questions for a week before you mention your project, say plainly that you built it, and post only where the thread is about the problem you solve.

### Do paid ads work for the first 100 users?

They are the wrong first channel. Paid acquisition does not appear in either of Lenny Rachitsky's lists: seven strategies for consumer apps and three for B2B companies. At 100 users you need conversations that tell you why people use the product, and an ad click tells you almost nothing about that.

### What counts as a user when I am counting to 100?

Someone who completed the core action of your product at least once, not someone who signed up for a waitlist. Signups are a reach number; completed actions are a value number. Write down the core action before you start counting.

### Is the plan different for a B2B side project?

The channels are fewer. Lenny Rachitsky found three sourcing strategies behind early B2B growth (your personal network, going where customers already spend time, and press) against seven for consumer apps. For B2B, start with the 30 people you have worked with, because a buyer needs a reason to trust a product from one person.

## Sources

- [Paul Graham: Do Things That Don't Scale (July 2013)](https://paulgraham.com/ds.html)
- [Lenny Rachitsky: How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users (May 2020)](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-the-biggest-consumer-apps-got)
- [Lenny Rachitsky: How today's fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers (July 2020)](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-todays-fastest-growing-b2b-businesses)

## How this guide was made

Researched from Builders Camp's bootcamp, track and masterclass material and the sources listed on this page, drafted with AI, and fact-checked against every source cited.