"Do things that don't scale"—what worked for you?

Question

In the spirit of Paul Graham's classic "do things that don't scale" advice. What helped you get your first 100 (or 1000!) users?

Was it manually DMing hundreds of users on Twitter? Cold calling? Manually onboarding early users at great expense?

Looking forward to hearing some stories.

Philip Snyder · Accepted Answer

For a previous endeavor of mine, we got our first 100 signups by "conveniently mentioning" our product across like ~45 different crypto discords

Lucas Barnes · Answer

Our first 300 or so was a long grind of just telling family, friends, and acquaintances about it. We even went door-to-door to get signups and user interviews one time lmao.

After a round of SEO, ASO, reddit mentions, and paid ads, the base started seemingly compounding on itself and 1000 came more easily I think

Michael Flux · Answer

@philipsnyder Reckon something like that you can scale quite well - hire someone to be doing nothing but casually mentioning your product where relevant.  Probably will get more targeted signups that most other marketing methods too.

"Do things that don't scale"—what worked for you?

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