How solo founders secure their first 10 users in 2026

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

Editor's Take — Tomáš Cina, CEO at Discury

The thing founders consistently get wrong about "first users" is treating it as a growth-marketing exercise when it's really a research exercise with revenue attached. At Discury we learned the hard way that a launch on a founder-heavy platform is almost useless for validating anything except how well your headline hooks other founders — who are not your customers. The applause you get on a maker feed has almost nothing to do with whether a real user will still be opening the product in three weeks.

The pivot that unlocked real early traction for us was boring and manual: stop trying to reach everyone, pick one narrow community where the pain was obvious, and be a genuinely useful presence there before the product even came up. The first ten users aren't a marketing target; they're a signal of whether you're in the right room at all. If the room is wrong, no funnel fixes it — you just spend the next quarter optimising a message your audience was never going to care about.

What I'd do differently than most founders reading these threads: force yourself to personally onboard the first ten users, one at a time, on a call. Not a Loom. A call. You'll learn more in those five hours than in a month of dashboard gazing, and you'll find the three or four language changes that make your landing page actually convert. Scale comes later. The first phase is about being in the right conversation with the right ten people.

How the first-users conversation actually unfolded on r/startups

If you read the r/startups threads in the order they appeared, the discussion has the arc of a slow-motion intervention. Six different posts from six different founders, surfacing at different moments, kept pulling the same thread from the same tangle — and by the end, the collective answer had moved from "which channel should I try" to something nearly the opposite of that question.

The conversation opens with anxiety. In a thread on early-traction anxiety, u/Trotriii was debugging a product at the level of copy, onboarding flow, and pricing pages — with, in their own telling, barely any users coming through the door. The replies didn't engage with the copy at all. u/Apart_Kangaroo_3949 stepped in with a reframe that reset the entire thread:

"It's a distribution problem. You literally don't have enough data to know if the app is any good yet." — u/Apart_Kangaroo_3949

That single reply reappears, in paraphrased form, in almost every later thread. Founders kept rediscovering the same diagnosis: you can't optimize a funnel that doesn't have water in it yet, and no amount of copy-tuning produces water.

The next beat named where not to be. In a discussion on early-adopter sourcing, u/Ambitious_Car_7118 pointed out that the launch venues most founders default to — Product Hunt, TikTok without an existing audience, maker forums — are populated by people critiquing launches, not people living with the pain. The applause you get in those rooms correlates with nothing useful. The same poster returned later in the arc with the sharper version:

"Early 'power users' don't come from virality, they come from weirdly obsessed corners of the internet." — u/Ambitious_Car_7118

Once the conversation had named the wrong rooms, it turned toward the right ones — and specifically toward the uncomfortable observation that the first customers rarely come from rooms at all. They come from people. A thread on sourcing the first ten customers surfaced that directly:

"Your first 10 customers should come from people who already trust you or can be introduced by someone who does." — u/LilyTormento

The replies pushed on this with a close companion pattern. In a thread on consulting-led early sales, u/krisolch described a first B2B customer who bought because of the founder's reputation and willingness to do hands-on consulting alongside the software — not because the product was finished:

"They didn't really subscribe for the product as much as they did for the initial consulting we did for them." — u/krisolch

The consulting-first motion earns revenue and, more importantly, earns the unvarnished feedback that drags the product toward something scalable. Between the "trust-network first" and "consulting-first" posts, the thread had quietly built up a consistent picture: the first handful of customers are almost always a function of an existing relationship plus a manual, hands-on delivery — not a signup funnel.

The arc then moved from "first ten" to "first fifty," where the shape starts shifting from relationships to communities. In a thread on reaching the first fifty users, u/Born_Difficulty8309 described an approach that sounds underwhelming and works: hang out inside communities where the target users already are, have many one-to-one conversations before any broadcast, and let the signups come out of those conversations rather than out of campaigns.

"The first ~50 for me came from just being in communities where my target users already hang out." — u/Born_Difficulty8309

The final beat of the conversation was a pushback against the temptation to shortcut the slow work with a modest paid budget. In a thread on zero-budget acquisition, u/Shot_Percentage_1996 summed up the whole arc in two sentences that have stuck with me:

"You do not need 1,000 users first. You need 10 who stay. … zero-budget acquisition works when you pick one painful problem, spend … time in the same two communities..." — u/Shot_Percentage_1996

Read in sequence, the six threads trace a single movement — from a founder tuning onboarding copy in isolation, through a reframing of the problem as distribution, past the wrong rooms and into the right ones, and finally to a definition of "first users" that has almost nothing to do with traffic numbers and almost everything to do with who stays.

What to take away

A handful of signups is a sample size too small to tell you whether the product is good, confusing, or simply invisible — and the only way to generate a useful sample is to personally put the product in front of people who have publicly named the pain you solve. Relationships, consulting-style hand-holding, and patient community presence outperform any paid channel at this stage. Ten users who stay are worth more than a thousand who glance.

A minimum-viable action plan

Three moves, run this week, before any funnel tuning:

1. Pick two communities where your target user already complains about the pain — and only two. Show up usefully for a couple of weeks before any pitch. Earn the right to say what you're working on.
2. List five people in your existing network who could plausibly use the product or introduce you to someone who could. Message them with a specific ask, not a landing page.
3. White-glove onboard the first ten users on a live call, one at a time. Not a Loom, not an email sequence — a call. Track which single source produces users who are still active after three weeks, and don't widen the funnel until at least a small handful have stayed.

Sources

This analysis draws on six r/startups threads (all cited inline above), surfaced via Discury's cross-subreddit monitoring. Each was chosen because it contained first-person accounts of specific early-user acquisition experiences and the distribution tactics that did or didn't work.