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How to Get Your First SaaS Users Without Paid Ads

October 4, 2026 · 4 min read

Getting your first users is a different problem from growing. You are not optimising a funnel yet. You are looking for the first few people who have the problem, will try the product, and will tell you honestly what is wrong with it. Here are the approaches that need no ad budget, in roughly the order I would try them.

Be honest about timelines

Some channels are slow by nature. Search is the clearest example: an Ahrefs analysis of newly published pages found that only about 1.74% of them reached Google's top 10 within a year. A blog is worth building, but it will not deliver your first ten users. Start with channels where a person can reply to you this week.

1. Pick one narrow group of people

"Small businesses" is not an audience. "Freelance designers who invoice clients by hand" is. The narrower the group, the easier it is to know where they gather, which words they use for their problem, and what would make them try something new.

2. Go where people already ask for help

Communities such as Reddit, Indie Hackers, Hacker News and Quora are full of people describing exactly the problems software solves. Titles like "struggling to get my first users" or "how do I find customers" appear every day. What works:

• Read the community rules first. Many forbid self-promotion.
• Answer the question properly, without a link, until you have built some credibility.
• Mention your product only when it genuinely answers the question, and say that you built it.
• Pace yourself. New accounts are often rate-limited, and ten promotional comments in an hour looks like spam to everyone.

Links from many of these sites are marked so that search engines usually do not count them, so treat them as a source of conversations, not of ranking.

3. Talk to people one at a time

For your first users, a direct message to someone who clearly has the problem beats any campaign. Say what you noticed about them, what you built, and ask for feedback instead of asking them to buy. Keep it short and specific.

Some channels restrict this. Instagram's official messaging tools, for example, do not let a business start a conversation with a stranger. They only allow replies to people who messaged first, or one private reply to someone who commented. Check each platform's rules before you plan around it.

4. Borrow an audience

Other companies already have the attention of people who look like your customers. Ask a non-competing product to mention you, offer to return the favour, or look at cross-promotion arrangements and networks that automate the matching. We build one of those networks, PhronexusAI, so weigh that when you read this.

5. Launch where early adopters look

Launch platforms such as Product Hunt bring a burst of visitors who like trying new tools. Expect traffic and feedback rather than search ranking: the links on such listings are typically not counted by search engines. Prepare the launch so a visitor can understand the product in a few seconds and try it without booking a call.

6. Publish pages that answer real questions

Write about the questions your future users already ask, in their words. This is the slow channel from the start of this article, so begin early and keep it modest. One honest, useful page a week beats thirty thin ones.

Mistakes that waste months

• Building before talking. Speak to ten people with the problem before adding another feature.
• Mass messaging. It is spammy, platforms restrict it, and it teaches you nothing.
• Buying links or followers. Search engines treat many link schemes as spam, and fake numbers do not convert.
• Tracking nothing. If you cannot say where your last ten users came from, you cannot repeat it.

A simple weekly routine

• Reply helpfully in three conversations in the communities where your users gather.
• Send five specific, personal messages to people with the problem.
• Ask one possible partner about a swap.
• Write down where each new user came from.

After a month, look at that list. Do more of what produced users and drop the rest. First users rarely come from one clever trick. They come from a routine you can keep doing.