Where a side project's first users come from

The first ten users of a side project come mostly from three places: direct one-to-one conversations with people who have the problem, one community where you already participate, and search, if your project answers a narrow question better than anyone else. They almost never come from a launch. Posting your link in twelve places on launch day feels like marketing, but for most side projects it produces a spike of curious visitors and zero users who stay. The first ten users are found one at a time, by hand, and it usually takes weeks. That is normal, and it is the actual work.

Why is this the part where side projects stall?

Because it is a different job from the one you have been doing. Building the thing, in an evening with Lovable or over a year of weekends, has a feedback loop you control: you change code, you see results. Finding users has a feedback loop other people control, and most of the time the feedback is silence.

One developer on Hacker News put it plainly:

The hard part is not building a working product. The hard part is finding people to use it.

bruce511 on Hacker News, April 2026.

If your project exists but nobody uses it, you have not failed at a side quest. You have arrived at the main quest. In the four jobs of starting a business, this is the third job, finding what sells, and it is the one no tool does for you.

Why does posting everywhere not work?

Because communities can smell it. Dropping a link into a subreddit, a Discord or a forum you joined yesterday reads as what it is: an ask with no history behind it. From a thread on announcing projects:

One thing I can say from my experience is that you get out of social media what you put in. For example, the equivalent of “cold calling” on subreddits, HN, etc. tends to elicit a lukewarm response if you haven't shown that you are willing to participate in the community itself.

vunderba on Hacker News, September 2026.

This is the line between distribution and spam, and it is not subtle. Spam is asking strangers for attention. Distribution is being useful somewhere specific, repeatedly, so that when you do share your project it lands as a contribution.

So where do the first ten actually come from?

From a small number of unglamorous channels, worked consistently.

One at a time, by hand. Make a list of twenty people who visibly have the problem your project solves: people who posted about it, colleagues, members of a group you are in. Write to each one personally. Not a blast, a short note that shows you know their situation. If you cannot name twenty people with the problem, that is important information about the project itself.

One community, as a participant. Pick a single place where the people you built this for already ask questions, and show up there before you share anything. One builder's version of the discipline:

Pick one forum where your buyers already ask questions.

Answer five relevant threads each week, without pitching.

Track profile visits and signups before adding another channel.

theicreatoriam on Hacker News, August 2026.

In person, if your users are local. It sounds slow because it is, but it compounds:

Meetup talks. Small audiences but the post-talk conversations are where the first users come from. A single talk does not much but giving 5 talks in the same scene is a network.

markusnissl on Hacker News, April 2026.

Search, for one narrow question. If your project serves a niche, one page that directly answers the question that niche types into Google can quietly outwork every social channel. This takes weeks to rank, which is another reason to start now rather than after the next feature.

How long does this really take?

Longer than building took, in most cases. We have written before about the real timeline: setting things up takes days, finding what sells takes weeks to months, and no tool shortens the second part, ours included. One more voice from the same thread, on what the middle of it feels like:

You try enough things, in enough of the right places, for long enough and eventually something sticks and you get some traction. Most people don’t stick with it long enough to find something that connects for them though.

shakermaker83 on Hacker News, April 2026.

What should you do this week?

Three things, none of which involve touching the code. Write down who the project is for in one sentence. List twenty named people or places where those people already are. Start the first five conversations. If your project is vibe coded and you are wondering what else sits between the app and a business, we walked through the whole gap, and the general version is in how to turn a side project into a real business. And if you want to see what week one of doing this for real looks like, our own numbers are public: we built a real business in 7 days with baget

baget gives your side project the business side: a team for the admin, the offer and the first-customer work, while you keep building. One line is enough to start, and it costs nothing to look.