Getting customers · 8 min read
How to get first users for your app
Getting users is a habit problem, not a persuasion problem. Find a place where people already have the itch, give them something useful before asking for a signup, and then check whether anybody comes back on day two — because a hundred users who don't return is worse than ten who do.
“Users” and “customers” get used interchangeably, and conflating them is how founders end up with a thousand signups, a dead retention curve, and no idea what went wrong.
A customer has decided your product is worth money. A user has decided it’s worth a bit of attention. Those are different bars, and they need different approaches.
Getting users is a habit problem
Nobody adopts a new tool because it’s good. They adopt it because it slots into something they were already doing, at a moment they were already doing it.
You’re not competing with other apps. You’re competing with the thing they do instead, which is usually nothing.
So the question isn’t “how do I reach more people” but “where is someone already mid-task and mildly annoyed?” That moment is the only reliable entry point.
Give before you ask
The highest-converting thing most early apps can do is make a piece of their value available without a signup at all — a free tool, a calculator, a single-use version, a public example. Something that works in one click and demonstrates the thing.
This feels like giving away the product. It isn’t. The signup wall isn’t protecting value; it’s preventing you from finding out whether anyone wants it.
Where the first hundred actually come from
- Communities where the problem is discussed — not where your users nominally hang out, but where the specific annoyance gets posted.
- People you already know who have the problem. Ten personal messages beat any broadcast at this stage, and you get real answers back.
- One genuinely useful public artefact — a teardown, a dataset, a tool. Something linkable that exists whether or not anyone signs up.
- Being visibly present where the problem lives, for longer than feels comfortable. Most founders quit at week three.
The number that decides whether any of it counts
Day-two return. Not signups, not visits, not upvotes.
If a hundred people sign up and four come back tomorrow, more acquisition is actively harmful — you’re spending effort filling a bucket that empties, and you’re burning the communities you posted in while you do it.
A hundred users who don’t return is a worse position than ten who do, because the first number feels like progress and the second one tells you the truth.
When users should become customers
There’s a common trap here: founders delay charging because they’re “still growing the user base”. Free users answer a question you’ve mostly already answered by a few hundred, and stop telling you anything new.
If your plan is to charge eventually, find out early whether anyone would. Getting your first paying customers is a different exercise and worth starting sooner than feels comfortable.
What not to do
- Buy installs or run growth hacks. You get numbers, not information.
- Post the same link in twenty communities. One coordinated spam run costs you all twenty.
- Chase a viral moment. Unrepeatable, unattributable, and it teaches you nothing you can do again on Tuesday.
- Add features to fix retention before asking the people who left why they left.
The short version
Find where the itch already is. Give something useful without a wall. Watch day two. Fix whatever day two tells you. Then do it again — and if you’ve just shipped and haven’t started any of this, how to market an app is the place to begin.