How I Got My First 100 Users: A Vibe Coding Growth Story

Getting your first 100 users is one of the hardest milestones for any new product. Unlike later-stage growth where you can rely on established channels and playbooks, early user acquisition demands creativity, persistence, and a willingness to do things that don't scale.

Through my journey building products using the Vibe Coding methodology—where speed, iteration, and real-world feedback drive development—I tested six different user acquisition strategies. Some delivered exceptional results, others failed spectacularly, and a few fell somewhere in between.

Here's what I learned about getting those crucial first 100 users, and how Vibe Coding principles helped me validate what works faster.

Why Your First 100 Users Matter

Before diving into the tactics, let's address why this milestone is so critical:

• Product-Market Fit Signals: Your first users provide invaluable feedback about whether you're solving a real problem
• Proof of Concept: 100 users demonstrate that strangers—not just friends—find value in what you've built
• Momentum Builder: Early traction creates psychological momentum and social proof for future growth
• Learning Laboratory: Each user interaction teaches you something about positioning, messaging, and product improvements

The Vibe Coding approach emphasizes rapid iteration based on real-world feedback. Getting to 100 users quickly means you can iterate faster and validate your assumptions before investing months in the wrong direction.

The 6 User Acquisition Strategies I Tested

1. Friends, Family, and Fools ❌

The Approach: Reaching out to your immediate network to try your product and provide feedback.

The Reality: This strategy sounds appealing because it's easy and low-risk. Your friends will be supportive, right? Unfortunately, chances are high that whatever you're building isn't relevant for them.

Why It Failed:

• Lack of genuine need: Your network likely doesn't match your target user profile
• Biased feedback: Friends want to be supportive, leading to artificially positive responses
• False validation: Early enthusiasm from your circle doesn't predict market demand
• Wasted iteration cycles: Building features based on non-target-user feedback derails product direction

Vibe Coding Insight: The methodology emphasizes building for real users with real problems. Friends and family create noise in your feedback loop, making it harder to feel the true "vibe" of your product-market fit.

Verdict: Skip this strategy unless your product happens to genuinely solve a problem for your network.

2. LinkedIn Posts ⚠️

The Approach: Sharing updates, insights, and product announcements on LinkedIn to attract attention from your professional network.

The Mixed Results: LinkedIn can work, but performance varies significantly based on content type and approach.

The Challenges:

• Algorithmic suppression: LinkedIn deprioritizes posts containing external links, limiting reach when you share your product URL
• Promotional penalty: Overtly promotional content receives reduced algorithmic promotion
• Audience mismatch: Your LinkedIn network may not align with your ideal customer profile
• Inconsistent engagement: Results can swing wildly from post to post

What Works Better:

• Share genuine insights and learnings from your building journey
• Create educational content that provides value independent of your product
• Use document carousels instead of external links to maintain reach
• Be strategic about when and how you mention your product

Vibe Coding Insight: Building in public aligns perfectly with Vibe Coding's emphasis on transparency and rapid feedback. Share your journey, not just your product.

Verdict: Useful as part of a broader strategy, but don't rely on it as your primary channel.

3. Personalized Loom Videos ✅

The Approach: Recording customized video walkthroughs of your product for individual prospects, showing them exactly how it solves their specific problem.

The Results: This gave me a 95+% response rate—by far the highest of any strategy I tested.

Why It Worked:

• Personalization at scale: Each prospect sees their name, their use case, and their specific pain point addressed
• Human connection: Video creates rapport and trust in ways that text simply cannot
• Demonstration power: Prospects see the product in action solving their exact problem
• Low-friction consumption: Watching a 2-minute video is easier than reading a long email or booking a demo call

The Implementation:

1. Research each prospect to understand their specific challenges
2. Record a 2-3 minute Loom showing how your product addresses those challenges
3. Send a brief, friendly email with the video link
4. Follow up based on whether they watched the video

The Limitation: This approach is incredibly labor-intensive. Recording personalized videos for hundreds of prospects isn't sustainable.

Vibe Coding Insight: This tactic embodies the "do things that don't scale" principle perfectly. Use personalized Looms to land your first 50-100 users while simultaneously gathering feedback to improve your product. The insights you gain make the time investment worthwhile.

Verdict: Pure gold for early-stage user acquisition. Time-consuming, but worth every minute.

4. Reddit Promotional Posts ❌

The Approach: Posting direct promotional content about your product in relevant subreddits.

The Reality: This strategy fails catastrophically for most founders and can actively damage your reputation.

Why It Backfired:

• Community norms violation: Reddit communities despise overt self-promotion
• Immediate removal: Moderators quickly delete promotional posts
• Ban risk: Repeated violations can get you banned from valuable communities
• Hostile responses: The community may turn against you, associating your brand with spam

The Aftermath: At best, your post gets removed silently. At worst, you become known as "that spammer" in communities where you could have built genuine relationships.

Vibe Coding Insight: Authenticity matters. Reddit communities can smell inauthenticity instantly, and forced promotion breaks trust faster than it builds awareness.

Verdict: Never do this. The short-term reach isn't worth the long-term damage to your reputation.

5. Helpful Reddit Comments ✅

The Approach: Genuinely participating in Reddit communities by providing value, answering questions, and transparently mentioning your product only when genuinely relevant.

The Results: Pure gold when you mean it. This strategy delivered both users and invaluable community connections.

Why It Worked:

• Genuine value-first approach: Help people solve problems whether or not they use your product
• Trust building: Transparency about being a builder while still prioritizing helpfulness builds credibility
• Natural discovery: When your product genuinely solves someone's expressed problem, the recommendation feels organic
• Community relationships: You become a recognized, helpful member rather than a drive-by promoter

The Implementation:

1. Identify 3-5 subreddits where your target users hang out
2. Spend time understanding community culture and norms
3. Answer questions and provide value consistently for weeks before mentioning your product
4. When someone describes a problem your product solves, offer a genuine, non-pushy suggestion
5. Disclose that you're the builder—transparency is critical

The Key Difference: Your goal is to help people, not to promote. Your product becomes a tool you happen to mention when it's genuinely relevant.

Vibe Coding Insight: This aligns perfectly with the Vibe Coding principle of building relationships alongside your product. The feedback from these communities also helps you understand user language and pain points, accelerating iteration.

Verdict: One of the best strategies for early-stage founders. Time-intensive but builds both users and invaluable community goodwill.

6. Paid Advertising ⚠️

The Approach: Running paid ads on platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, or Twitter to drive traffic to your product.

The Mixed Results: Paid advertising provides rapid traffic validation but raises more questions than it answers at the early stage.

Why It's Complicated:

• Quick traffic validation: You can get visitors immediately and test if people click on your value proposition
• Attribution confusion: When conversions are low, is it your product, your messaging, your targeting, or your landing page?
• Expensive learning: Every click costs money, making iteration expensive
• Premature scaling: Paid ads work best when you've already validated product-market fit organically

When It Makes Sense:

• Testing different value propositions to see which resonates (A/B test ad copy)
• Validating that your target audience exists and responds to your category
• Accelerating growth once you've found organic channels that work

When To Wait:

• Before you have any organic user acquisition channels working
• When you're still figuring out your positioning and messaging
• If you can't afford to spend $500-1000 learning

Vibe Coding Insight: Paid ads can accelerate validation, but they shouldn't replace building genuine relationships and understanding your users deeply. Use ads to test hypotheses quickly, but don't rely on them to mask fundamental product or messaging problems.

Verdict: Useful as a supplementary validation tool, but not recommended as your primary strategy for getting your first 100 users.

The Reality of Early User Acquisition

Here's the truth most founders don't want to hear: Your first 100 users aren't easy to get. Most of the tactics that work don't scale and require hard, door-to-door work.

This isn't about finding a growth hack or viral loop. It's about:

• Personal outreach: Recording those 50 personalized Loom videos
• Community participation: Spending hours answering questions on Reddit
• Iteration: Talking to every single user to understand what's working and what's not
• Persistence: Doing things that don't feel efficient because they're building relationships, not just metrics

How Vibe Coding Accelerates User Acquisition

The Vibe Coding methodology emphasizes speed, real-world feedback, and iterative development. Here's how these principles apply to getting your first 100 users:

1. Build in Public

Share your journey openly. Post about what you're building, the problems you're solving, and the lessons you're learning. This creates an authentic narrative that attracts early adopters who want to be part of your story.

2. Prioritize Real Conversations

Every user conversation is a goldmine of insights. The Vibe Coding approach encourages direct interaction with users to "feel" whether your product resonates. Those personalized Looms and Reddit comments aren't just acquisition tactics—they're research opportunities.

3. Iterate Based on Feedback

Don't wait until you have 1,000 users to iterate. With Vibe Coding, you're constantly shipping improvements based on feedback from your first 10, 20, 50 users. This rapid iteration makes your product better faster, which improves conversion and retention.

4. Focus on Genuine Value

Whether it's a Reddit comment or a LinkedIn post, lead with value. Vibe Coding isn't about building products in isolation—it's about creating things people genuinely need and communicating that value authentically.

5. Do Things That Don't Scale

This is perhaps the most important principle. Your first 100 users require manual, time-intensive work. Embrace it. Those personalized Looms and community conversations teach you things that will inform your scalable growth strategies later.

Actionable Steps to Get Your First 100 Users

Based on my experience, here's a practical action plan:

Week 1-2: Foundation

1. Identify 3-5 online communities where your target users spend time
2. Join these communities and start participating (no promotion yet)
3. Create a list of 20-30 potential users who match your ideal customer profile

Week 3-4: Personalized Outreach

1. Research each person on your list to understand their specific challenges
2. Record personalized Loom videos showing how your product solves their problems
3. Send friendly, brief emails with the video links
4. Follow up with responders and schedule conversations

Week 5-8: Community Value

1. Continue active, helpful participation in your target communities
2. Answer questions genuinely, providing value whether or not people use your product
3. When appropriate and relevant, transparently mention your product as a potential solution
4. Build relationships with community members

Week 9-12: Expand and Optimize

1. Analyze which tactics drove the highest quality users
2. Double down on what's working
3. Share your learnings publicly on LinkedIn and other platforms
4. Consider testing paid ads to validate messaging, but keep it supplementary

Ongoing: Iterate Relentlessly

1. Talk to every user who signs up
2. Ask about their experience, challenges, and needs
3. Ship improvements rapidly based on feedback
4. Document your journey and insights

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Based on my experience, here are the pitfalls to watch out for:

• Avoiding rejection: Fear of reaching out personally means you never get the high-quality feedback you need
• Optimizing too early: Don't worry about making your outreach "scalable" until you've validated what actually works
• Ignoring feedback: If users aren't converting or engaging, listen to what they're telling you
• Expecting overnight success: Getting 100 users typically takes 2-3 months of focused effort
• Forgetting to follow up: Many potential users need multiple touchpoints before converting

The Long-Term Payoff

While getting your first 100 users requires intensive, manual work, the payoff extends far beyond the user count:

• Product insights: You'll understand your users' language, pain points, and needs deeply
• Positioning clarity: Real conversations clarify how to talk about your product
• Community foundations: The relationships you build become advocates and evangelists
• Scalable playbook: The insights from manual outreach inform your future scalable channels

Conclusion: Embrace the Grind

Getting your first 100 users isn't about finding a silver bullet or growth hack. It's about rolling up your sleeves and doing the unglamorous work:

• Recording those personalized videos
• Participating genuinely in communities
• Having one-on-one conversations
• Iterating relentlessly based on feedback

The Vibe Coding methodology embraces this reality. By building quickly, gathering feedback constantly, and iterating based on real-world insights, you accelerate the path to product-market fit.

Your first 100 users won't come easy, but they'll teach you everything you need to know to reach your next 1,000, 10,000, and beyond.

What's Next?

Now it's your turn. Pick one strategy from this article—I recommend starting with personalized Looms or helpful Reddit comments—and commit to it for the next 30 days.

Track your results, learn from every interaction, and remember: the hard work you put in now builds the foundation for everything that comes after.

Want to learn more about building products using Vibe Coding principles? Check out my other articles on rapid prototyping, user feedback loops, and shipping fast without sacrificing quality.

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Have you tried any of these user acquisition strategies? What worked or didn't work for you? I'd love to hear about your experience—connect with me on LinkedIn.