From Zero to Our First Real User — What Actually Worked (and What Didn't)

There is a massive gap between "we launched" and "someone is actually using this." We know because we lived in that gap for weeks. We had products live, domains configured, Stripe ready to accept payments, blogs written, social media accounts created. Everything was in place. Except users.

We are Obsidian Clad Labs, a small group of friends from Tennessee building SaaS products. Here is an honest account of every strategy we tried to get our first real users, rated by whether it actually worked. Spoiler: most of it did not.

What Did Not Work: Product Hunt (Too Early)

The conventional wisdom says to launch on Product Hunt as soon as your product is ready. We prepared a launch page, wrote the description, gathered a few screenshots, and submitted. The result was underwhelming. We got a handful of upvotes, mostly from people we personally knew, and zero signups from Product Hunt traffic.

The problem was not Product Hunt itself — it is a great platform for the right product at the right stage. The problem was us. We had no existing audience, no community presence, and no social proof. Product Hunt rewards products that already have momentum. Launching there as a completely unknown team with zero users is like entering a talent show where the judges score based on applause and you brought zero fans. We will try Product Hunt again later, when we have users, testimonials, and a story to tell. But as a cold-start strategy, it did nothing for us.

What Did Not Work: Reddit Posts (Got Flagged)

We posted in relevant subreddits — communities where our target users spend time. We tried to be helpful rather than promotional, sharing insights and mentioning our product only when it was genuinely relevant. Several posts got flagged as spam anyway. A couple got removed by moderators. One got us temporarily banned from a subreddit.

Reddit communities are (understandably) hostile to marketing. Even well-intentioned posts from founders get flagged if the account is new and the post mentions a product. The path to success on Reddit is a long one: you need to be a genuine, active community member for months before anyone will trust a product recommendation from you. We did not have months. We had impatience and a product nobody had heard of.

What Did Not Work: Automated Social Media (Nobody Cared)

We set up automated posting to social media accounts — scheduled posts with product updates, blog links, and tips related to our products' domains. The engagement was effectively zero. Not low. Zero. No likes, no comments, no clicks, no follows.

Social media for a brand-new SaaS with no followers is shouting into an empty room. The algorithms do not show your content to anyone because nobody has engaged with you before. You are competing against established accounts with thousands of followers and years of algorithmic trust. Automated posting makes this worse because the content feels generic and impersonal. People can tell when a post was written for a queue rather than written for them.

What Did Not Work: Cold Email Outreach (Dangerous)

We tried sending cold emails to people who might benefit from our products. The results ranged from no response to actively harmful. Most emails were ignored. Some bounced (which nearly killed our email provider — we wrote a whole separate blog post about that disaster). A few people responded just to tell us they did not appreciate unsolicited email. Net users acquired from cold email: zero. Damage to our email sending reputation: significant. We do not recommend cold email for early-stage SaaS unless you have a highly validated, clean list and a compelling reason for someone to open your email.

What Actually Worked: Field Sales (Walking Into Businesses)

This is the one that worked. One member of our team started doing in-person outreach — literally walking into businesses and schools where our target users work, introducing the product, and offering to demo it on the spot. No scheduled meetings. No pitch decks. Just showing up with a laptop and saying, "Hey, we built something that might help. Can I show you for two minutes?"

The conversion rate was not high in percentage terms. Most people politely declined or said they would check it out later (they did not). But the ones who engaged were genuinely interested, and a few of them signed up on the spot. More importantly, they gave us real feedback — the kind you cannot get from analytics dashboards or user surveys.

One person told us the onboarding was confusing. Another said the pricing page did not make the free tier clear enough. A third asked for a feature we had not considered. Every one of those conversations was worth more than a thousand impressions on social media. Field sales is unglamorous. It is physically tiring. It requires a team member who is comfortable with rejection and willing to drive around town all day. But for a product with zero market presence and zero social proof, there is no substitute for putting a real person in front of a real potential user.

What Actually Worked: Asking Users to Talk to Us

Once we had a handful of signups from field sales, we emailed each one personally (not automated, actually personal) and asked if they would be willing to get on a 15-minute call to tell us what they thought. Two out of five said yes. Those two calls were the most valuable 30 minutes we have spent on this company.

One user told us they loved the core functionality but found the interface overwhelming. The other said they had tried a feature once, did not understand the output, and never came back. Both of those were fixable problems that we would never have discovered from signup metrics alone. The users who talk to you are the ones who make your product better. A hundred signups who never log in again teach you nothing.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Early Growth

Here is what we wish someone had told us before we launched. The first 10 users of any SaaS product come from personal effort, not marketing channels. They come from someone on your team talking to real people, showing the product, following up personally, and building relationships one at a time. There is no shortcut, no growth hack, and no automation that replaces this.

The marketing channels start working once you have those first 10 users. Because then you have testimonials. You have case studies. You have word-of-mouth. You have people who can vouch for your product when a stranger asks "has anyone used this?" in a forum. The flywheel starts spinning, but someone has to push it by hand first.

We are still early in our journey. We have dozens of signups across our products, not thousands. But every one of our real, active users came from one of two sources: someone on our team talking to them in person, or a referral from someone we had already talked to in person. Everything else was noise.

What We Would Do Differently

If we were starting over, we would skip every digital marketing channel for the first month and go straight to field sales. We would spend less time writing blog posts (ironic, we know) and more time talking to potential users face-to-face. We would not worry about social media followers, SEO rankings, or Product Hunt launches until we had at least 10 paying customers who could tell us exactly why they pay.

The code is the easy part. The marketing is the hard part. But the hardest part of all is the thing nobody wants to do: getting in your car, driving to where your users are, and asking them to give your product a chance. That is what works.