About a month ago, I launched my side project and has grown to over 1000 users. It’s an AI stock bot that sends alerts based on Reddit sentiment. It’s a free product so my marketing budget was a big fat $0.
Here’s how I hustled with a $0 budget and got my first 1000 users.
Here’s how I hustled with a $0 budget and got my first 1000 users.
- Get your first 10 users - cold DMs. This part sucks. “Do things that don’t scale”. But it’s the quickest way to get started and directly talk to your users. The goal isn’t to get to a million users instantly but to talk intimately with a small set of users, see what they like/don’t like about your early version, and iterate based on feedback. For example, my first set of users helped me beta test & tune my AI bot’s summaries. In the beginning, it would try to summarize everything, which resulted in bad alerts.
- Get your next 100 users - share helpful content in communities. This one seems obvious but find small, active communities where your users hang. For me, it was small subreddits (
