Thread by @johnrushx

How I got my first 100 users for each of my 24 startups:

1. Cold emails:

- go for quality, not quantity
send to 20 people; if no reply, change the copy and resend. repeat until 2 replies.
- make it super short and include the outcome E.g. for @listingbott I'd send this "100 backlinks from relevant directories in one click"

2. Social media DMs (Li, X, IG, FB, RD, etc)
- send 15 sec loom with an audit of their biz/site/profile...where the preview makes it obvious it's personalized.
- impress them with your quick effort
- e.g. for @seobotai it'd be: "SEO audit of their website"

3. Free pilot.
- Offer people a free early adopter deal
- They get a free yearly plan for trying & give you feedback
- Often people find it cool to be approached this way, but make sure to start by explaining why you picked them to be your early adopter

4. Podcasts.
- reach out to relevant podcast hosts and offer yourself as a speaker. If you go for smaller pods, they are short on guests, so there is high chance to get in.
- while being on the pod, demo your tool as a part of the talk, viewers actually love demos

5. Webinars.
- Clickbat title (e.g. for @unicornplatform I'd go for "Master Landing Pages: Boost Conversions to 31% in Just 30 Minutes!"
- Create it as an event on Linkedin, invite your network and find one relevant influencer who would invite their network too, if u have none

6. ROI case study
- if u had at least 1 customer, create case study, where you convince the readers
- if u had no customers, be ur own customer. e.g., I was the first one to build a successful directory ( @allgpts_ ) using @unicornplatform . And it solved the distribution for me

7. Communities on Slack & Discord
- find relevant communities
- join them and introduce yourself and the product in the Intro channel
- do it super short, like a tweet, so that people actually read
- when u attach the URL, remove the preview banner

8. Sponsor micro-newsletters
- find relevant newsletters below 10k subscribers
- it'll cost you a few hundreds dollars only
- the ROI from small newsletters is far better than from large ones

9. Launch on @ProductHunt , @devhunt_ and other launchpads
- make sure you market your launch
- few weeks before launch, upvote other launches and DM them saying "cool product, I upvoted.."
- on your own launch day, DM them again just telling them you've launched too now

10. List on web directories, forums and marketplaces
- find your competitors, check their backlinks using ahrefs/semrush/ubersuggest
- see what web directories they are listed on
- list on the same and find more places to list by asking @grok
- (or @listingbott can do it for u)

11. Launch free tools
- free chrome extenssion
- free AI generator
- free web directory
- free calculator
- use @wrapifai to build such tools using prompts if you dont wanna code them

12. Cross promo
- find someone small(10-100 users)
- do a cross promo(newsletters, place links to each other, or in social media)
- since you and they both are struggling with growth, it'll be a win-win or at least won't make it worse

13. Lifetime deals
- you'll have to give them huge discount
- the platforms take a huge cut
- the users who buy LTDs aren't super nice
- but you still move forward by doing this, so it's not bad

14. Reddit/Quora
- find relevant topics
- reply with your solution(dont use the link)
- people will ask for a link
- then place the link, or better just name the tool, so that they google it and find it there (high chance to be banned from reddit for links)

15. Find bad comments about the competitor
- enter the comments to share your solution to those problems
- dont do it to fellow bootstrappers, only do it to corporations and well funded startups (we must not hurt each other, we fight against the big guys)

16. Guest posts & Blogging
- hackernoon
- dev to
- medium
- hashnode
- and many other blogging platforms can be used to share your story. Try to go for smaller blogs, that tend to have fewer authors

17. Sponsor hackatons or small events
- find those with relevant audience
- pay around $500 to sponsor them
- ideally they should use your tool during the hackaton
- find them on social media, the small players usually respond

18. Paid ads
- @tinyadz_ (my own ad network, for b2b). It works pretty well, it's in beta, give it a try
- I've tried ads on FB/Google/X and it never worked. Most likely I'm not good at making those banners, so make sure to hire someone who is great at banners if u go for it

19. Introduce your product in social media every day until it goes viral.

See other viral product launch posts, copy their templates. Do it 100 days in a row and one day you’ll go viral (if you copy the viral templates).

Here is the prompt for grok:

20. Run an AI SEO agent that generates articles for you every day on autopilot ( e.g. @seobotai ) or build those articles yourself using grok deep research and post them manually one by one (50 articles is a good start). Also make sure to grow your domain rating to at least 15.

21. Buy a tiny free app that already had some users and channel those users into your product.
- gonna cost you around $1k-$10k
- works best if the audience totally overlaps

22. Integrate products with each other
> there is "boost your DR" button in @seobotai that links to @listingbott
> all my agents are integrated natively into @unicornplatform

The end!