The usual first launch goes like this. You post on Product Hunt, a couple of launch sites and your own X account. You get a spike of visitors, mostly other makers clicking through a feed of new products. A few sign up. A week later, traffic is back to almost nothing.
That doesn’t mean the app is bad. Launch boards are great at reaching people who like new products, and terrible at reaching people who have your specific problem. Your first ten users have to be found more deliberately, and mostly one at a time. Paul Graham, a co-founder of Y Combinator, the startup program behind Airbnb and Stripe, wrote the best-known essay on this: Do things that don’t scale. Airbnb’s founders went door to door in New York, photographing hosts’ homes themselves.
Know who you’re looking for
“People who keep killing their houseplants” is someone you can go and find. “Plant lovers” isn’t. Before you post anywhere, write down three things: who has the problem, where they already spend time online, and the words they use for the problem. Note that last one carefully. People search for “basil keeps dying”, not for “smart plant care platform”.
Go where they already talk
Search for the problem, not your solution: basil keeps dying reddit, forgot to water plants. You’ll find the subreddits, Facebook groups, Discord servers, forums and small newsletters where your people already ask for help.
Pick two or three. Showing up in the same few places every day for a couple of weeks does far more than one post in twenty communities.
Help first, mention the app later
Every community has rules about self-promotion, and moderators enforce them. Read the rules and the pinned posts before you write a word. Many communities ban links in your first posts, and some only allow promotion on one day of the week.
Then spend your first days answering questions. Real answers, in your own words, that would be useful even if your app didn’t exist. When someone asks for exactly what your app does, mention it, and say you built it. People are surprisingly kind to a founder who’s honest and helpful, and quick to downvote one who isn’t.
Message people one by one
Find twenty people who described your problem in public recently, and write to each one personally. Something like:
Hi Sam, I saw your post about losing another basil plant. I built a small app that reminds you when each plant needs water, because I kept doing the same thing. Would you try it and tell me what’s missing? No pressure either way.
You’re asking for feedback, not a sign-up, and you mean it. Expect most people not to reply. The few who do often become your best early users.
Use the network you already have
Friends, former colleagues, the group chat. Ask them less to use the app and more “who do you know who has this problem?” A short, honest post on your own LinkedIn or X, about why you built it, often brings the first handful of real users.
List it in a few places that fit
Directories won’t make your launch, but they bring a slow trickle of visitors and help search engines discover your app. Pick the five that fit your category best and write a proper description with real screenshots. A hundred low-quality listings won’t help.
Give every post its own link
If you can’t tell which post brought your users, you can’t do more of what works. Add a small tag to each link you share:
Your analytics then shows “12 visitors from Reddit, 2 signed up”, not a guess. LaunchPal creates these links for every post and turns the results into plain sentences, but any analytics tool can read the tags.
Talk to everyone who signs up
At ten users, you can email every single one, so do. A short, personal question works better than a survey:
Thanks for trying Bloomly! Quick question: what made you sign up, and did anything almost stop you?
The first half gives you their words for your next post. The second tells you what to fix on your page.
Save the big launch for later
Product Hunt and Hacker News work better once you have a few real users, a couple of honest quotes and a page that turns visitors into sign-ups. Treat them as your second wave.
What a good first month looks like
Ten sign-ups from strangers, or a first payment, is a good start for a first launch. When you get there, look at which channel brought most of them and do more of exactly that. If you don’t, the problem is usually who the app is for or where you’re looking for them, not how hard you’re working.