0 users is painful. You try marketing. Post on X. Post on LinkedIn. 100 views. 0 signups. Nobody reaches out. So you assume the product is broken. Maybe you need a new feature. Maybe the landing page sucks. Maybe you need to rebuild everything. But there’s another possibility: Nobody has actually seen your creation. Then you try SEO. You publish a few articles and wait. Nothing. Then you hire creators. They generate views, but mostly raise awareness because they either: - Don’t know how to trigger their audience - Are promoting your product to people who aren’t even problem-aware You still don’t know where your customers’ attention actually is. And technically, you have a product nobody cares about. Yet. So here’s the boring work I’d do if I had 0 users: 1. Pick ONE painfully specific customer Not “startups.” “Solo SaaS founders who launched in the last 6 months and have under $5k MRR.” 2. Find 100 of them manually LinkedIn. X. Reddit. Slack groups. Facebook groups. Product Hunt. Indie Hackers. Competitors’ comment sections. 3. Don’t ask where your audience hangs out. Go find them. Read before selling Collect: what they complain about what they already pay for what they tried what they hate exact words they use to describe the problem Your first marketing research database should be screenshots, not personas. DM 20-30 people every day Not: “Hey, check out my startup.” Instead: “Saw you’re trying to solve X. I built something that does Y. Happy to set it up for you personally if you want to test it.” 4. Your goal isn’t scale. Your goal is conversations. Onboard the first users manually Zoom calls. Loom videos. Done-for-you setup. WhatsApp support. Do things that would look stupid at 10,000 users. You have 0. 5. Rewrite your positioning after every 10 conversations If people don’t immediately understand why they need the product, you probably don’t have a feature problem. You have a messaging problem. Steal distribution before building your own List your product where customers are already searching. Directories. Marketplaces. Communities. Newsletters. Comparison pages. Partner audiences. 6. Borrow traffic before trying to manufacture it. Turn every tiny win into content First signup. First customer conversation. First surprising use case. First result. First testimonial. People trust evidence more than “5 tips for founders.” Only then scale what works SEO. Creators. Paid ads. Content. These are multipliers. But multiplying zero still gives you zero. 7. Your first 10 users probably won’t come from some genius growth hack. They’ll come from doing embarrassingly manual work until you understand exactly: Who wants your product. Why they want it. And where they already spend their attention.