How to Get Your First 100 SaaS Users: 14 Real Startup Case Studies

Most advice about getting your first SaaS users sounds good in theory but becomes much less useful when you actually have to implement it.

“Launch on Product Hunt”
“Talk to users”
“Build an audience”
“Join communities”
“Do cold outreach”

None of these things are necessarily wrong, but they don't tell you what successful SaaS companies actually did when they had no users and needed to get off the ground, so I decided to research exactly that.

I picked 200 SaaS companies that had reached at least $100K MRR and went back to their early days, reading founder interviews, blog articles, old posts and watching hours of podcast videos.

The goal was to answer one question: how did they actually get their first 100 users?

For this article, I selected 14 of the most interesting examples and focused on what they did in practice.

One thing to keep in mind before starting: startup history isn't perfectly documented. Some founders report users, others report signups, customers, databases or waitlist members. When an exact first-100 timeline isn't publicly available, I've focused on the acquisition strategy that actually moved the company from its earliest users into meaningful traction.

1. Tally: from 0 users to $4M ARR

Tally is a form builder founded by Marie Martens and Filip Minev. It crossed $100K MRR in 2024 and later reached $4M ARR.

Starting point:

• No audience
• No marketing budget
• MVP not even fully working
• Started by getting feedback from friends and family

They started manually looking for people who already used form tools. They opened launches of similar products on Product Hunt and looked at who had upvoted or commented, used TweetDeck to find conversations around similar tools, joined no-code and startup Slack groups, and answered relevant questions on Reddit, Quora and Indie Hackers.

From there they built lists with hundreds of potential users and sent DMs asking them to try the MVP and give feedback. Most ignored them, but the ones who answered were invited into Tally's Slack community, where the founders handled support, collected feature requests and shipped improvements almost every week.

The numbers grew slowly at first. Tally had 184 users in October 2020, 344 in November and 750 by December. Before launching on Product Hunt in March 2021, they had already reached around 1,500 users.

Product Hunt then doubled the user base to around 3,000.

The important part is that Product Hunt wasn't how they got the first users. Most of the early work happened manually months before the big launch.

Source: Tally, "Year 1: How we bootstrapped Tally to 11k users and $5k MRR".

2. Supademo: free value for potential users, publicly

Supademo's founder didn't have an audience or an ad budget. He started inside active SaaS communities on Reddit.

He posted offers like: "Drop your product URL. I'll build you an interactive product demo for free."

When someone replied, he signed up for their product himself, read their docs, recorded the flow and built the interactive demo manually. Then he posted the finished result back in the Reddit thread where everyone could see it.

He basically turned every finished demo into public proof for the next person scrolling.

One post got more than 11,000 views in 24 hours, hundreds of comments and several thousand signups. Supademo says this offer-post strategy drove its first 2,000 signups.

The interesting part is that the work didn't happen privately. Every person who received a free demo also created another visible example of what Supademo could do.

Source: Supademo, "How to Get Your First 100 Users on Reddit".

3. Typefully: from side project to 1,432 signups in one day

Typefully started in 2020 as a side project from the team behind Mailbrew. They built the first version in a few weeks and already had a small audience of founders and makers on Twitter.

Instead of releasing quietly, they concentrated almost everything into one launch day across three channels:

• Twitter: they used their existing audience and network, bringing around 2,100 visits.
• Product Hunt: they launched there while also using their existing audience to support the release, bringing around 1,900 visits.
• Hacker News: Typefully was shared with the simple title "Write-Only Interface for Twitter", without a complicated marketing pitch. The post reached the front page and brought around 6,300 visits.

By the end of launch day, Typefully had 16,400 pageviews and 1,432 signups. Users had already created 1,843 drafts and published 256 threads.

From there, the free product started growing through word of mouth.

The launch worked because they didn't rely on one channel. They concentrated Twitter, Product Hunt and Hacker News around the same release and sent a large amount of attention toward the product at once.

Source: Francesco Di Lorenzo, "Launching Typefully".

4. OpusClip: 1,000 users in 3 days with a Discord bot

OpusClip started with basically no complete product.

Instead of building the whole web app first, the team manually created short clips from long-form videos using their own AI workflow and sent those finished clips directly to potential users to get feedback.

The important signal wasn't people saying the idea sounded interesting. Potential users were actually interested in using the output and publishing the clips.

Only then did the team build a version people could use by themselves, and even that wasn't a complete web application.

They launched OpusClip as a Discord bot, using an experience similar to early Midjourney.

Result: OpusClip reached around 1,000 users in its first three days.

The full product came later. The first goal was much simpler: manually produce the result, see if people wanted it and only then give users a way to generate that result themselves.

Source: Young Zhao's early OpusClip launch updates and founder interviews.

5. ListKit: give people the result before asking them to buy

ListKit sells B2B leads in a market where almost every SaaS says the same thing: "we have better leads."

At first, they used an approach similar to everyone else and didn't get the results they wanted. After testing different cold emails, they found a much more practical offer.

Instead of telling companies that ListKit had better data, they proved it.

Before contacting a prospect, they looked at the company's target audience and used ListKit to find 50 leads that matched the types of customers that company was already targeting.

The email was extremely simple. They told the prospect they had already prepared 50 sample leads based on the company's case studies and asked whether they wanted the list.

The prospect didn't need to believe the sales pitch. They could open the CSV and judge the quality themselves.

That cold-email system booked hundreds of sales calls, and ListKit went from $0 to $100K MRR in around three months.

They gave the prospect part of the result before asking them to pay for the product.

Source: Christian Bonnier's breakdown of ListKit's $0 to $100K MRR growth.

6. Cal.com: built the audience, then launched

Cal.com originally started as Calendso, an open-source alternative to Calendly.

Founder Peer Richelsen was building another startup when he needed a scheduling tool. He searched Google for "Calendly Open Source" and couldn't find what he wanted, so he asked the On Deck founder community if anyone knew an alternative.

Still nothing.

Instead of immediately spending months building a complete scheduling platform, he created Calendso and started collecting people interested in the idea.

The sequence was simple: waitlist, small Slack community, basic prototype.

At one point, Peer stopped working on the project because his other company was acquired. People continued joining the waitlist and Slack anyway.

One of those early users was Bailey Pumfleet. When Peer told the community that development was going to pause, Bailey reached out. They eventually became co-founders and started building again.

They worked on the product for around three weeks, then released the MVP on Product Hunt. The launch became Product of the Day and eventually Product of the Month.

But the launch wasn't the first step. They already had a group of people actively looking for the missing alternative while the first version was being built.

Source: Product Hunt, "How this open-source Calendly alternative rocketed to Product of the Day".

7. Submagic: from 0 followers to the first customers using TikTok

Submagic launched in 2023 with no large audience and no budget for paid acquisition.

Founder David Zitoun created a brand-new TikTok account with zero followers and started posting simple videos showing the product in action.

He posted for around ten days and almost nothing happened.

Then one demo reached approximately 100,000 views and brought in roughly 40 to 50 paying customers, each paying around €20 per month.

Instead of treating the viral video as luck, David tried to replicate the system through other people.

Submagic launched an affiliate program offering creators a 30% lifetime commission for the customers they brought. David recruited around 50 to 70 young creators and had them post product content regularly.

That system helped take Submagic from its first customers to $1M ARR in around 90 days.

The first account didn't need an audience. It needed one video that the algorithm decided to distribute, and once that worked, they multiplied the same type of distribution through creators.

Source: SaaS Club interview with David Zitoun.

8. beehiiv: turned a 400-person waitlist into the first 100 users

beehiiv is a newsletter platform founded by Tyler Denk and two other co-founders who had experience working at Morning Brew.

Starting point:

• Tyler had an existing audience, but it wasn't massive
• No money spent on user acquisition
• Product still approaching private beta
• Deep experience in the newsletter market

Before launching, Tyler started connecting with newsletter creators on social media and posting about what they were building. When they were getting close to beta, he announced the product and opened a waitlist.

Almost 400 people signed up.

Instead of collecting only an email address, the form also asked what platform they were currently using, how large their newsletter was and other information that helped beehiiv understand who was joining.

That waitlist became Tyler's prospect list for the following months.

He went through the people manually and emailed them one by one, week after week, trying to convert them into users.

Result: around 25% of the original waitlist eventually became early adopters.

That is roughly 100 users from a list of 400.

The waitlist didn't create the users by itself. The useful part was knowing exactly who had joined, what they were using and then following up manually.

Source: Tyler Denk, "Startup Revenue Playbook".

9. Supabase: a user launched the product for them

Supabase started in 2020 as an open-source alternative to Firebase.

To get their first customer, founders Ant Wilson and Paul Copplestone literally took a 50 minute bus to the office of a startup they already knew was using Postgres heavily.

They had been building Supabase for just a couple of weeks and, before even arriving, had already connected it to the startup's development database.

They showed the developers how Supabase could automatically generate API endpoints from their Postgres schema and stream database changes in real time.

That first customer ended up becoming Supabase's first full stack developer.

After that, they continued getting early users manually and letting developers test the product. The plan was to keep the alpha relatively small, collect feedback and launch properly later.

Then one of their early followers posted Supabase on Hacker News.

The founders didn't organize it, didn't prepare a launch campaign and didn't even choose the timing.

The post reached the top of Hacker News and stayed on the front page for more than 24 hours.

In the following week:

• around 30,000 people visited the website
• more than 1,400 signed up
• the platform passed 1,000 hosted databases

They were planning to launch properly later, and one of their own early users effectively did it for them.

Sources: Ant Wilson's account of Supabase's first customer and Supabase's "Alpha Launch Postmortem".

10. Rezi: the first product was literally a Word document

Rezi is an AI resume builder that eventually grew past $200K MRR, but the original product wasn't a SaaS, wasn't an AI tool and wasn't even really software.

It was a Microsoft Word document.

Founder Jacob Jacquet had a 2.2 GPA but was still getting interviews at companies like Google and Goldman Sachs. He believed the way he created and formatted his resume was a major reason why.

He shared the resume on Reddit: the post got viral and people started asking him for the template.

Instead of spending months building software, he created a simple website and sold basically the same resume as a Microsoft Word template together with a guide explaining how to use it for $9.69.

His first customers were people who had already seen the result and were asking him for the file.

Only after proving people wanted it did he start turning the idea into software. The SaaS version came years later, and Rezi eventually became one of the early resume builders to integrate GPT.

Instead of building an entire platform to test the idea, he sold the result first.

Literally a Word file.

Source: Jacob Jacquet's Rezi founder story.

11. Social Snowball: used other people's audience to reach $10K MRR

Social Snowball is a Shopify app for managing affiliate and creator programs.

Founder Noah Tucker already knew a few ecommerce creators personally when he launched, so this isn't an example of someone starting with absolutely zero connections.

Instead of trying to build his own audience first, he asked those creators to use Social Snowball and make content about it, then he expanded the strategy beyond people he knew.

He went on YouTube, found creators making ecommerce and marketing content, grabbed their contact information and cold contacted them: the offer wasn't just "please promote my SaaS". He asked them to actually try the product and create a video or case study around it.

Most of the early content came from YouTube, where the exact type of people who could use Social Snowball were already watching ecommerce tutorials.

Result: according to Noah, Social Snowball reached around $10K MRR in its first three months, and that first $10K came strictly from influencers.

They basically borrowed distribution from people who already had the audience they needed.

Source: Noah Tucker on Startups For the Rest of Us.

12. Relume: from Webflow agency to SaaS

Relume started as a Webflow agency, not a SaaS.

While building websites for clients, the founders kept creating the same types of sections and components over and over again, so they started building an internal component library to make their own work faster.

Before turning it into a product, they were already active inside the Webflow community. They made YouTube videos, appeared on podcasts and joined conversations with designers and Webflow developers.

So the sequence was basically:

• Agency
• Learn the problem
• Build components to use themselves
• Become active in the community
• Launch the product

When they finally launched Relume Library, they weren't launching to random people. The founders had already spent time becoming known inside the same community that would use the product, so they had distribution from day one.

According to founder Dan Anisse, the product was generating enough MRR within roughly five to six months for them to start moving away from the agency and focus on Relume.

Instead of building a SaaS first and then searching for a market, the problem, early product and initial distribution all came from the same place: doing agency work inside the Webflow ecosystem.

Source: Dan Anisse, "Productising Agency Insights".

13. RB2B: the founder became the distribution channel

RB2B is a B2B website visitor identification tool.

This case doesn't properly start from zero because Adam Robinson was already a successful SaaS founder. That advantage matters, but the way he used it is still interesting.

He didn't really market RB2B as a company at the beginning. He marketed it through himself.

For months before launching, Adam constantly posted on LinkedIn about what they were building. He shared numbers, screenshots, problems, mistakes, product decisions and things happening behind the scenes.

He basically turned the whole process of building RB2B into content.

The posts weren't just random build-in-public content either. Some had direct calls to action asking people to join the waitlist, book a discovery call or eventually try the product.

By launch they had:

• Around 1,600 people on the waitlist
• Around 300 meetings booked with potential customers

When the product finally launched, the people following Adam already knew what RB2B was, what problem it solved and why they might want to try it.

Instead of launching a completely unknown brand and then looking for distribution, Adam used founder-led growth and made himself the distribution channel for the product.

Source: Adam Robinson's RB2B launch and founder-led growth breakdown.

14. Postiz: open source + Reddit to enter a crowded market

Postiz is a social media scheduling tool competing with products like Buffer and Hootsuite, probably not the easiest market to enter.

Founder Nevo David didn't have a massive audience and realized that trying to compete through normal SEO or generic build-in-public content would be difficult.

Instead, he open-sourced the product and went directly where people interested in self-hosted software already were: r/selfhosted. His early Reddit launch got more than 500 upvotes and a large number of comments and feature requests.

Instead of posting once and leaving, he kept coming back with new versions of the product and showing what had changed based on user feedback.

From there he pushed the open-source project through GitHub, Reddit, Indie Hackers and eventually Product Hunt.

One of the most interesting parts of the Postiz story is how much positioning mattered. Nevo has described launching essentially the same product with different messaging and getting completely different reactions. When people could immediately understand Postiz as an open-source alternative to products like Buffer and Hootsuite, the response changed.

The product entered one of the most competitive SaaS categories by targeting an audience the established tools weren't serving in the same way: developers and companies that wanted to self-host.

Postiz later crossed $100K MRR, while the open-source repository continued acting as one of its main acquisition channels.

Sources: Nevo David's Postiz growth breakdowns and early r/selfhosted launch posts.

Conclusion

After analyzing these companies, I don't think there is one best way to get your first 100 SaaS users, and I definitely don't think there is a secret marketing channel that works for everyone.

The channels are different, but the logic behind them is surprisingly similar.

None of these companies simply finished the SaaS, published it somewhere and waited for people to arrive. They knew where at least some of the first potential users were, gave them a specific reason to try the product and did a lot of work manually before worrying about scale.

So if I were starting a SaaS from zero, I wouldn't begin by asking:

"What marketing channel should I use?"

I would start with:

"Where can I find 100 people with this exact problem, and what can I give them today that proves the product is useful before asking them to buy it?"

Getting the first 100 users is a very different problem from getting the next 10,000.

At the beginning, you don't need a perfect acquisition system. You need enough real people using the product to understand what should eventually become one.