How to Get Your First 100 Users as an Indie Developer in 2026
By Luis Krin, Founder, IndieAppCircle
Getting your first 100 users is usually harder than shipping the MVP, and it is harder in a specific way: nothing you did to build the product helps you here. You do not need ads or an audience. You need a small number of channels that actually return users for the time you put in, a plan for the first month, and a way to learn from the first ten so the next ninety are easier.
This guide is written for a solo developer with a working product and no budget. It covers which channels are worth it, which ones only look like they are, and how to sequence them.
Why the first ten are different from the next ninety
The first ten users are not a smaller version of the first hundred. They are recruited one at a time, by hand, and their job is to tell you what the product is actually for. Almost every indie developer discovers that the sentence they built the landing page around is not the sentence early users repeat back. The first ten fix that sentence. The next ninety arrive because the sentence is right.
So the sequence matters: hand-recruit, listen, rewrite, then scale the channels. Doing it in the other order means broadcasting the wrong message to more people.
1. Start where early adopters already are
Instead of posting everywhere, go where people actively look for new products: launch platforms, indie founder communities, and curated discovery sites. Share a clear problem, your solution, and who it is for, then invite honest feedback rather than asking for upvotes. A post that says “I built X because Y kept happening to me — does it happen to you?” gets replies. A post that says “Check out my app!” gets removed.
The honest caveat about communities: most of the big ones are tired of launches. r/SideProject and Indie Hackers still work if you engage first and post second. Most other subreddits ban self-promotion outright, so read the rules before you write the post, not after it is removed. Two or three niche communities where you are a known helpful person will outperform twenty drive-by posts.
2. Use launch spikes and discovery drips
Pair a launch “spike” — Product Hunt, a Show HN, one big community post — with slower, ongoing discovery channels. The spike gives you a day of attention and a few dozen signups. Listings on directories, newsletters, testing exchanges and search send a steady trickle each week long after launch day, and for most indie apps the trickle ends up bigger than the spike within a couple of months.
If you have not launched yet, the pre-launch checklist covers what needs to be in place before the spike so it does not land on a broken first session.
3. Get listed on AI and indie-friendly directories
Directories focused on AI tools, SaaS, and indie products are powerful early channels: they bring in targeted users and also help your SEO. Submitting your project to platforms like NextGen Tools puts you in front of people actively browsing for new products and can generate both signups and a valuable dofollow backlink. Product Hunt, BetaList and the smaller niche directories for your category do the same job. Each submission takes ten minutes; do a batch of them in one evening and then stop thinking about it.
4. Trade tests with other developers
The most underused channel for the first ten. Other indie developers will actually install your app, use it, and write down where they got confused — because they want the same from you. On IndieAppCircle you earn credits by testing other people’s apps and spend them to get yours tested; the people who test it are your first users and your first feedback in one step. It is slower than a launch spike and far more useful for fixing the product, which is what the first ten are for.
5. Build in public to warm up demand
Share your journey on X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, or a small personal newsletter: features you are shipping, decisions you are making, mistakes you are fixing. Over time this builds a warm audience that is much more likely to try your product when you open it up. The trick is to post what you learned rather than “I launched!” — a specific story about a bug, a pricing change or a user conversation travels much further than an announcement.
Be realistic about the timescale. Building in public compounds over months, not days. Start it now, do not count on it for launch week.
6. Turn early users into collaborators
Treat your first users like collaborators, not numbers. Jump on short calls, ask what they were doing right before they found your tool, and which parts felt confusing or magical. Ship small improvements quickly and tell them when you have implemented their ideas — a two-line “you asked, it’s live” email is the cheapest retention tool there is.
Give them a reason to bring the next user. Early-access pricing, a founding-member badge, a feature they asked for named after them. It does not need to be expensive; it needs to be specific to them.
What not to do
- Do not buy anything. Bought followers, bought upvotes, bought reviews and bought testers all produce a number and none of them produce a user. Several will get the account banned.
- Do not launch before ten people have used it. A launch is the one day you get strangers’ attention for free. Spending it on a first session that testers would have flagged in an afternoon is the most common indie launch mistake.
- Do not spread across ten channels. Pick three. Do them properly. Add a fourth when one of the three is clearly working.
- Do not measure signups. Measure people who did the core thing and came back. A hundred signups with two returners is not a hundred users.
A four-week plan
- Week 1: Hand-recruit ten testers — other developers, a testing exchange, two niche communities. Watch them use it. Rewrite the one-sentence pitch.
- Week 2: Fix what the ten found. Submit to a batch of directories. Start posting in public. Draft the launch post.
- Week 3: Launch spike. Reply to everything. Email every signup who does not return within three days and ask why.
- Week 4: Switch to drip. Keep testing other apps, keep posting, keep listing. Talk to the returners and go find more people like them.
💡 Tip: Your first 10–20 users are the template for the next 100. If you deeply understand their problems and context, distribution gets easier with every new feature and every new launch.
Final thoughts
A hundred users is a small number, and it is reachable without an audience or a budget if you recruit the first ten by hand and let them fix the message. If you need those first ten and do not know where to find them, other developers on IndieAppCircle are testing each other’s apps right now — browse the apps looking for testers, test a couple, and put yours in the feed.