My last three products all hit their first 10 paying users the same way: not through ads, not through a launch on Product Hunt, and definitely not through some viral growth hack. They came from conversations.
Every time I start something new, I resist the urge to "launch." Instead, I go find people who already have the problem I'm solving and talk to them directly. It's slower than buying ads. It's also the only thing that's ever worked for me at the zero-to-ten stage.
The cold DM that actually works
I send about 30 direct messages per product launch. Not spray-and-pray. I find specific people on Twitter, Reddit, or niche Slack communities who've publicly complained about the exact problem my product solves. Someone posts "I waste two hours every week doing X manually"? That's my opening.
The message is short: I saw your post about X, I built something that fixes it, would you try the beta for free? No pitch deck. No feature list. Just a direct connection between their pain and my solution.
My hit rate is around 20-30%. Out of 30 messages, maybe 8 people respond, 5 actually try it, and 2-3 stick. That's not a funnel. That's a conversation.
Build where your users already hang out
The biggest mistake I made early on was building a product, then going looking for users. Now I do it the other way around: I spend time in communities first, contribute for real, and only build once I've heard the same complaint five times.
For my last SaaS, I lurked in three indie hacker Discord servers for two weeks before writing a line of code. I answered questions, shared my own experiences, and paid attention to what people kept struggling with. By the time I had a working prototype, I already had a dozen people who wanted to try it because they'd seen me actually help others.
This only works if you're genuine about it. People can smell a drive-by promo from a mile away. If your only contribution to a community is a link to your product, you'll get ignored or banned. Show up as a person first.
The build-in-public advantage
I post progress updates on Twitter while I'm building. Not polished marketing content. Raw screenshots, decisions I'm wrestling with, bugs I'm debugging. This does two things: it attracts people who care about the problem space, and it builds trust before the product even exists.
By launch day, I usually have 15-20 people following along who've watched the product take shape over weeks. They feel invested. They want it to succeed because they've been part of the journey, even as spectators.
One of my products got its first 7 paying users entirely from people who'd been watching my build-in-public thread. I didn't ask them to pay. They offered because they'd seen the work go in and trusted it was real.
Why this beats ads at the early stage
Paid acquisition makes sense when you've validated your product and know your conversion metrics. At the zero-to-ten stage, you don't know any of that. You're still figuring out if the thing you built actually solves a real problem for real people.
Buying traffic at this point is like pouring water into a bucket you haven't checked for holes. You'll get signups, but you won't learn anything useful about why people stay or leave.
Direct conversations teach you everything. The person who says "this is cool but I'd need it to do Y" just handed you your next feature. The person who signs up and disappears just showed you a retention problem. You can't get this signal from a Facebook ad dashboard.
The uncomfortable truth
Finding your first 10 users is manual, awkward, and slow. There's no shortcut that scales. But those first 10 users will teach you more about your product than the next 1,000 ever will, if you actually talk to them.
Every product I've shipped started this way. The growth playbook can come later. First, go have 30 conversations.