You shipped it. The landing page is up, the signup flow works, the database is empty and staying that way.
This is the part nobody warns you about, and the advice you find is useless in a specific way: it's all written for companies that already have 10,000 users and want 100,000. Growth loops, paid acquisition, funnel optimization — none of that applies when your funnel has four people in it and two of them are your co-founder's browsers.
Getting to 100 is a completely different job. It isn't marketing. It's about a hundred individual conversations plus two or three assets that keep working after you stop pushing them. Here's the order I'd do it in.
"Solo Django devs who freelance and hate writing invoices" is an audience — because you can list them. You can name the subreddit, the Discord, the three newsletters, the GitHub topic, the hashtag. If you can't write down five specific places your user already hangs out, you haven't picked an audience, you've picked a demographic.
The test: could you make a spreadsheet of 100 real names? If yes, you're ready. If no, narrow it until you can. You will widen later — every company does — but you cannot start wide. Wide means invisible.
The single highest-leverage thing a technical founder can build for distribution is a small free tool that fully solves one query.
Not a demo. Not a "free trial." A page that does one useful thing, immediately, for a stranger who has never heard of you: a converter, a calculator, a formatter, a validator, a generator. Whatever the smallest atom of your product's value is, extract it and put it on a public URL.
Why this beats writing blog posts: an article is a promise that you're smart. A tool is proof. And unlike an article, you can generate many of them from one registry:
Every entry is one more long-tail search query you now answer. On the product I work on we run about 62 of these — regex tester, JSON formatter, currency, loan, contrast checker, QR — and the point isn't the tools themselves, it's that each one is an entrance that keeps existing while I sleep.
Two rules that decide whether this works: The tool must completely solve the problem. A calculator that shows 80% of the answer and then asks for an email converts once and burns your name permanently. The upsell is one line at the bottom. "Need this as part of a bigger workflow? →" That's it. No modal, no banner.
Everyone tells you to "post on Reddit and Twitter." Then you post, and nothing happens, because you broadcast into a feed that owes you no attention.
Invert it. Instead of publishing, search — every day, for the words your user types when they're frustrated: Reddit and HN search for your problem phrased as a complaint GitHub issues on adjacent repos ("is there a way to…") Discord/Slack community search Stack Overflow questions with no accepted answer X/Bluesky search for the phrasing, not the category
Then answer the question completely, for free, without linking to yourself. If your answer is genuinely the best one in the thread, one of two things happens: someone asks what you use, or someone clicks your profile. Both convert far better than a link nobody asked for.
This is slow. Ten to twenty minutes a day. It is also the single most reliable source of the first 30 users I've ever seen, and it has a zero dollar CAC.
Take the spreadsheet from step 0. Message ten of them. Not a template — an actual message that proves you looked at what they do.
Hey — saw your post about spending Sundays on invoices. I built a thing that generates them from a sentence. Not selling you anything, genuinely just want to know if it's useless. Here's a link, no signup: [link]
What makes this work is the no signup. You are asking for two minutes, not a relationship. Half will ignore you. A few will try it. One or two will reply with the most valuable thing you'll get all month: the reason they wouldn't use it.
Ten a day for two weeks is 140 messages. That's your first 20–30 users and your entire early roadmap.