How to get your first users when nobody knows you exist

Broadcasting is the default, and it does not work yet

The advice you find everywhere is the same list: tell your friends, post on Product Hunt, build in public, write content, go to events, ask for referrals. Read it closely and every single item is a broadcast. You push a message outward and hope the right person happens to be listening.

Broadcasting works when you already have reach. A launch post to forty thousand followers finds your first users. A launch post to forty followers finds forty people who already know you, none of whom needed the product, and most of whom scroll past. The advice is not wrong. It is just written for a version of you that has an audience, and on day one you do not have one. That is the entire problem. You cannot broadcast your way out of having nobody to broadcast to.

Interception means going to the conversation

Somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, a stranger posted a thread that reads something like "does anyone know a tool that does X" or "I have been struggling with Y for weeks". That person has the problem, has admitted it in public, and is actively reading the replies for an answer. They are a warmer prospect than anyone who will ever see your launch post, because they raised their hand first.

Your job is to find that thread and be useful in it before it goes cold. Founders who write up their early traction on communities like Indie Hackers say the same thing over and over: their first users did not come from a launch, they came from conversations they joined. The mechanism below is how you make that repeatable instead of lucky.

The interception loop, step by step

This is the whole method. Six steps, run in order, repeated daily. It is deliberately boring. The boredom is the point: a mechanical loop survives a bad week, a burst of inspiration does not.

What "find the conversation" looks like as code

Steps one through three of that loop are the discovery half, and the discovery half is mechanical enough to be a script. S4L ships it open source, and the file is small enough to read in a sitting: scripts/find_threads.py. Here is the part that matters, lightly trimmed:

Three details in that excerpt are the difference between interception and spam, and no general guide on getting first users mentions any of them:

• It reads the new feed. The request goes to /r/sub/new.json, not the hot or top feed. Every candidate is a thread posted recently, with an author still in the tab. Top posts are already saturated and the person who needed help left long ago.
• It stamps every thread with age_hours. Each candidate carries how many hours old it is, so you can prefer the three-hour-old thread over the three-day-old one. Freshness is a number you sort on, not a vibe.
• It drops anything you already touched. Before a thread ever reaches you, get_already_posted() pulls every thread_url the system has ever replied in and removes it from the candidates. One reply per thread, ever. That one query is what keeps a discovery loop from quietly turning into a spam loop.

The same file builds X search queries with min_faves:5 baked into the query, so it only surfaces tweets that already have a little traction. A reply on a tweet with zero engagement is a reply nobody will ever scroll to. Interception is not just finding the thread, it is finding the thread that someone other than the author is still reading.

What one discovery run actually produces

Run the discovery step against three communities and you do not get a wall of links. You get a short, sorted list of threads that passed the filters, with the stale and the already-touched already removed:

Notice what the run threw away. Twelve threads were dropped because the system had already replied in them. The 2024 megathread was skipped for being thousands of hours old. What survives is twenty-five threads where a real person, recently, said something you can genuinely help with. That list is your entire to-do for the day.

The reply is the whole game

Discovery is the easy half. A script can find the thread. No script can win the user. That happens in the reply, and the reply is where almost everyone fails, because the temptation is to treat a found thread as a free billboard.

The test is simple. Write your reply, then delete the sentence that mentions your product. If what is left still answers the question and would be worth posting on its own, you have a substance reply, and you can add the product line back in. If what is left collapses into nothing, you wrote an ad, and the room will read it as one. Answer the literal question first. Name your product once, by what it does rather than as a brand drop. Link only when the link is the answer, not as a reflex. And keep the one-reply-per-thread rule sacred: the moment you reply twice in a room, you stopped intercepting and started broadcasting again.

What to actually expect on the timeline

You will not get a hundred users this week, and any guide that promises that is selling you the broadcasting fantasy again. The interception loop is slow on day one and fast by day thirty, and the reason is worth understanding.

In week one you are guessing which communities hold your buyers, so most replies land in rooms that were never going to convert. By week two the feedback starts to separate: two or three rooms produce clicks and signups, the rest produce nothing. By week three you have a rough reply-to-signup rate per community, and you have stopped spending replies on the dead ones. The loop did not get faster because you worked harder. It got faster because you stopped wasting effort. That compounding is the whole return on running a boring loop every day instead of one big launch.