How to get your first 200 SaaS users without paid ads

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

Editor's Take — Tomáš Cina, CEO at Discury

The honest thing to say about early-stage acquisition is that founders already know this playbook — they just don't want it to be true. Manual outreach feels slow, embarrassing, and non-leveraged compared to the fantasy of a paid channel that scales cleanly. But in our own early days at Discury, every meaningful cohort of users came from one-to-one conversations in specific subreddits and from pages we wrote for exactly one search intent, sometimes one person at a time.

The trap I see repeatedly in these threads is founders treating the manual phase as something to escape as quickly as possible. That framing costs them the most valuable artefact of the early months — the vocabulary, the objections, the specific pains you only hear when you're replying to a person by name. Automation erases that signal. Every time we've tried to shortcut it at Discury, the scalable campaigns we built afterwards underperformed compared to the ones written with a notebook full of real user sentences sitting next to us.

What I'd do differently than most founders reading these threads: stop measuring the early phase by user counts and start measuring it by conversation counts. Two hundred users is downstream of maybe fifty real conversations and ten honest landing-page rewrites based on what those conversations said. If you skip the conversation work, you'll hit two hundred users eventually — but you'll be a year further from product-market fit than you think.

Manual outreach beats automation, early and often

The common thread across these posts is that automation is the wrong shape of tool for pre-product-market-fit acquisition. u/farhadnawab, in a r/SaaS thread on finding the first ten paying customers, described a routine that sounds almost anachronistic: live on Reddit and X, scroll for people naming the exact problem the product solves, and reach out offering to help them for free before any payment conversation.

"I just looked for people complaining about the specific problem i was solving. when i found someone, i'd reach out and offer to help them for free at first." — u/farhadnawab

u/Character_Cable_1531, in a thread on community-led early traction, described a close variant: show up with genuine value in niche communities, answer questions without a link in sight, and let the curiosity-driven DMs come to you. The shared lesson across both accounts is about intent quality, not outreach volume. A small number of conversations with people who have already publicly declared the problem converts at a different rate than any untargeted sequence.

Niche content that leads with the problem, not the product

A discussion of a slideshow-driven TikTok approach from u/Complex-Assistant661 captures a pattern that works across written and visual formats: lead with a painful, specific problem your target user recognizes on sight, withhold the product mention until nearly the end, and spend the middle telling a real story with a concrete detail. Production polish matters far less than the strength of the opening hook.

"slide 1 = one painful problem, no product mention. slides 2-7 = tell the story … slide 8 = something real, number, proof, result." — u/Complex-Assistant661

Long-form SEO is the slower-burn version of the same idea. u/SamFuturelab described, in the community-led thread above, the habit of exporting Google Search Console data regularly and quietly rewriting pages to match the queries that were actually landing on the site — not the queries the team hoped would. A separate r/SaaS discussion on early organic traction reinforces the same point: a small number of deliberate, intent-matched articles published over several months compounds into a steady trickle of qualified signups long after the articles were written, in a way that social posts never do.

Where this playbook breaks: if you're selling into a small enterprise buyer pool — say, fewer than two hundred potential accounts worldwide with six-figure contract values — problem-led content and niche SEO are usually the wrong lever. In those markets the first two hundred "users" are twenty named accounts, and founder-led outbound with account research beats anything content-driven. The advice in this section is written for horizontal SaaS with a reachable long tail; adjust accordingly if your ACV and market size don't match.

Directory listings are cheap surface area

u/shirish320, in a r/SaaS thread on early-stage visibility, made the unglamorous case for manually submitting a product to every directory that will accept it. The tactic sounds almost quaint, but it does two useful things at once: it puts the product in front of the exact users who go looking for new tools in these catalogues, and it slowly builds the kind of external references that help a new domain get taken seriously by search engines.

"Stalk your competitors. See where they're listed. Submit your product there. Manually. Or use a tool. Just do it." — u/shirish320

u/Neither-Bass2083, writing from founding Gubb in a thread on maximizing launch surface area, argued for treating launch as a plural — not "the launch," but a list of ten to twenty platforms hit in the same month. Each one individually is low-signal; collectively they put the product in front of early adopters who specifically go looking for new tools in those spaces, and they build the kind of external references that make later SEO work easier.

A decision tree for your next two weeks

Run through this from the top. The branches are structured so each "otherwise" funnels toward the move that's most likely to move the user count in the window you have.

• Is your landing page obviously about a specific problem in the first few seconds?

  • If no → Don't push more traffic to the page. Rewrite the headline and first paragraph in the exact words of five real users this week — pulled from complaints in your niche subreddit. Everything else on this tree is wasted until the page actually reads as aimed at a real person.
  • If yes → Continue.

• Can you find fifty public complaints about your exact problem this week on Reddit, X, or review sites?

  • If yes → Do manual outreach first. Message them one at a time, in their own voice, offering help before payment. This is the farhadnawab/Character_Cable_1531 branch — conversations first, scalable channels after. Do not batch and do not automate at this stage.
  • If no → Your problem surface is narrower than you think, or your vocabulary doesn't match how users describe it. Spend a week reading complaints in adjacent categories until you find the words users actually use, then restart this branch.

• Have you published fewer than ten pages targeting specific search intents in your niche?

  • If yes → Write one page per intent, not a general blog. Export Search Console data monthly and rewrite to match the queries actually landing. This is a multi-month commitment — start now but don't measure it for six weeks.
  • If no, and the pages aren't ranking → The issue is usually one of two things: the intent doesn't match any real query (fix with keyword research), or the page buries the answer below fluff (cut the first third). Otherwise, keep publishing at a sustainable cadence; rankings for non-brand terms rarely appear in under three months.

• Have you submitted the product to every directory where your competitors appear?

  • If yes → Move on; it's one-time work, don't re-litigate it.
  • Otherwise → Spend one afternoon doing the competitor directory audit and submitting. It's boring, it's finite, and it keeps paying out.

Sources

This analysis draws on r/SaaS threads surfaced via Discury's cross-subreddit monitoring. We prioritized recent discussions where founders shared first-person accounts of reaching early user milestones without paid acquisition.