How SaaS founders find their first users in 2026

By Tomáš Cina, CEO at Discury · AI-assisted research, human-edited

Editor's Take — Tomáš Cina, CEO at Discury

The mistake that's hardest to unlearn is the one that feels the most professional: building a launch plan before you've had the painful conversations that would tell you whether the product is worth launching. At Discury we wasted real weeks polishing a landing page for an audience we hadn't talked to in any serious way, and we started making progress only when we stopped "marketing" and started answering specific questions in communities where our buyers already hung out. There's no shortcut to founder-led discovery in the first hundred users.

What strikes me most about these threads is how reliably the founders who break out describe their early work in verbs that don't sound like marketing at all — "answering," "helping," "doing it by hand," "sending a question." The ones who stall describe their work in marketing nouns: "waitlist," "campaign," "funnel." That vocabulary gap is a leading indicator. Nouns suggest machinery; verbs suggest attention.

The harder lesson, and the one I'm still internalizing, is that sharp positioning is a kindness to the prospect, not a loss of opportunity. A narrow description of who the product is for lets the wrong user opt out in four seconds and lets the right user recognize themselves in four seconds. Both outcomes are wins. The founders in these threads who found their first ten paying customers didn't widen their framing to catch more fish — they narrowed it until the fish recognized the hook.

Why "build it and they will come" fails at zero users

The most consistent early-stage failure mode in these threads isn't bad product — it's a mismatch between what the founder thinks is painful and what the user actually feels acutely. In a thread on a launch that went nowhere despite positive beta signal, u/vesseltask described having multiple beta testers confirm interest during development, and none of them actually adopting the tool once it was live. Enthusiasm in a feedback conversation is cheap; switching tools is expensive, and the gap between those two is where most MVPs die.

"Finding product market fit with first 10 customers is the hardest part, almost impossible. Two courses of action. Talk to 100 more of your ICP and see if any of them will buy." — u/growthfunder

A related trap shows up in a thread on positioning "all-in-one" products: u/Extra-Pomegranate-50 pointed out that "we do everything" reads to prospects as "we do nothing in particular," because it forces them to do the work of figuring out which specific pain your product solves for them. A narrow, sharp tool gets evaluated faster, generates feedback faster, and doesn't force the founder to compete across a sprawling set of incumbents from day one.

Niche community engagement beats cold outreach (and cheap traffic)

The channel that over-performs for early-stage founders isn't a channel at all — it's consistent, non-promotional presence in the communities where your buyers already complain. In a thread on distribution for early SaaS, u/NeedleworkerSmart486 described ignoring standard content advice entirely and focusing on answering specific workflow questions in Discord servers and Facebook groups. The payoff isn't instantaneous — it takes weeks of actually being helpful before people in a community treat you as a resource rather than a visitor — but it compounds in a way that ads and content calendars don't.

"Distribution is honestly the whole game. The idea barely matters compared to whether you can get it in front of people who care." — u/NeedleworkerSmart486

A complementary move from the same thread: u/Potential_Product_61, building a loyalty product for restaurants, reported success with cold DMs that opened with a single specific question about the recipient's Google reviews rather than a pitch. You earn the right to talk about your product by first demonstrating that you understand the prospect's actual problem.

A note on what "free" does in this context — it's worth pausing on, because it's the most commonly mis-implemented lever in early SaaS. A counter-pattern that works is building a free asset adjacent to the paid product, not a scaled-down version of it. u/mert_jh, in a thread on launching Plottie, described shipping a searchable database of scientific figures before introducing the paid AI tool, and letting the free utility do the work of attracting users with high-intent search behavior. u/m2e_chris, commenting on that launch, noted: "The discovery site as a top of funnel play is really smart. most people try to go straight to the paid product and then wonder why nobody finds them." The second-order effect matters as much as the acquisition effect — a free asset generates usage data that tells you which adjacent problems to build for, which is a much more honest roadmap input than internal hypotheses.

By contrast, u/teced, in a thread on a waitlist that failed to convert, described the opposite experience: homepage visitors turning into zero revenue, because the traffic wasn't qualified and the email broadcast never triggered the kind of specific dialogue a DM can. Cheap traffic is a dashboard metric, not a validation signal.

Pre-sales, concierge MVPs, and where a small budget actually belongs

The highest-signal validation is money, and the highest-signal form of early operation is doing the job manually. In a thread on concierge MVPs, u/mylifemygoals argued that performing the work by hand for the first customers is the single most valuable customer discovery you can do — because the nuances you discover by doing the job are invisible in a survey or a waitlist signup.

"Doing the work manually at the start is like getting paid to do the most valuable customer discovery you could ever ask for." — u/mylifemygoals

The compounding effect shows up in the positioning thread, where u/Forsaken_Lie_8606 described spending weeks helping people in Discord before anyone asked whether a tool existed — creating a pull market where the product was requested rather than pitched.

When a founder has modest capital and zero users, the temptation is ads. In a thread on allocating a small early-stage budget, u/zazonia pushed in the other direction — toward CRM, email infrastructure, and tools that make personalized outreach scalable enough to be useful. The objective at this stage isn't traffic; it's booking discovery calls.

"I'd spend almost nothing on ads and focus on direct outreach—identify your ICP, send personalized cold emails/LinkedIn messages, and book calls." — u/zazonia

Early capital belongs on anything that increases the number of specific conversations with the right people — niche data access, outreach tooling, software that surfaces complaints about the problem you solve — and almost never on broad paid acquisition.

A decision tree for your next two weeks

Stop thinking in steps; start thinking in branches. The right next move depends on which specific condition is true for you today. Run down the tree once, and commit to the branch it lands you on.

Q1: In the last 30 days, have you had at least five prospect conversations where the other person described a specific pain in their own words?

• No → Go to Q2. You do not have a channel problem; you have a conversation-volume problem.
• Yes → Go to Q3. You have enough signal to diagnose positioning.

Q2: Do you know, in one plain-English sentence, which community (subreddit, Discord, Facebook group, Slack workspace) your buyer complains about this problem in?

• No → Spend one week reading in three candidate communities without posting. Your only goal is to write down the exact words people use when they hit this pain. Do not pitch, do not link, do not build. Return to Q1 in two weeks.
• Yes → Show up in that community daily for two weeks, answering workflow questions without any mention of your product. On day 15, DM the three most specific repliers and ask for a 15-minute call framed as "I'm trying to understand this properly before I build anything." Return to Q1 after the calls.

Q3: When prospects describe the pain, do they use the same two or three phrases without prompting, or does every conversation sound different?

• Different → Your ICP is too wide. Pick one of the patterns you've heard and narrow the landing page to address only that persona. Wrong users will opt out in seconds; right users will recognize themselves.
• Same → Move to Q4. Your positioning has a consistent pain anchor.

Q4: Have you done at least one customer's job manually, end-to-end, for a real payment?

• No → Offer to run the workflow by hand for three prospects from your last round of calls, at a concierge price. The goal isn't revenue — it's the specific nuances you can only discover by doing the job. Ship product only for the pains the concierge work exposed.
• Yes → You are past the zero-user problem. The next bottleneck is repeatability, not discovery — and a different set of threads, on retention and onboarding, is where you should be reading next.

Three signals mean you are not yet ready for paid acquisition: fewer than five prospect conversations in the last month, no named community where the pain is discussed, or no concierge experience doing the job manually. Any paid channel on top of those gaps is expensive ICP research with poor signal. Fix the gap the tree surfaces first.

Sources

This analysis draws on recent r/SaaS threads surfaced via Discury's cross-subreddit monitoring. Threads were selected for founders writing from direct early-stage acquisition experience, not generic growth advice.