You built an app. Now how do you get users?

You shipped. The thing works. You paid for the domain, you fixed the mobile layout, you wrote the onboarding email nobody has received yet. And now you’re staring at an analytics page showing four visitors, three of which were you.

Here’s the part nobody warns you about: building the product was the part with instructions. There was a docs page, a Stack Overflow answer, a model that would write the migration for you. Distribution has none of that. It has a thousand blog posts that all say “build in public” and none that say what to do on Tuesday.

Stop looking for the channel

The first instinct is to pick a channel. SEO, or X, or Reddit, or a newsletter, or ads. This is the wrong first question, and it burns months.

The right first question is: who has this problem badly enough to go looking for a fix? Not who might like your product. Who is, right now, annoyed enough to type something into a search box or complain about it in a forum.

People don’t search for your category. They complain about their problem.

This distinction is the whole game. Someone building a tool for golf societies will spend weeks trying to rank for “golf society management software” — a term with about eleven searches a month, nine of which are competitors. Meanwhile there are society organisers posting every week about losing an evening to a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group full of scores. Those people have the problem. They have never once used the phrase “management software”.

The four questions worth answering first

• What problem does this solve, in the words of someone who has it? Not your words. Theirs. If you can’t write the sentence they’d say out loud, you don’t know it yet.
• What are they doing about it today? A spreadsheet. A group chat. Doing it by hand. Paying an assistant. Ignoring it. That’s your real competition, far more than any funded startup in your category.
• What happens right before they start looking? Someone takes over organising the society. The membership passes eighty and the spreadsheet stops coping. A migration breaks production. That moment is when you become findable.
• Where do they already gather? Not where you’d like them to be. Where they are.

Answer those four honestly and most of your channel questions answer themselves. Get them wrong and no amount of posting will save you.

Then do the unscalable thing

Here’s the uncomfortable bit. For your first ten customers, the activity that works is almost never a channel. It’s finding individual people with the problem and talking to them — in threads they started, in replies to their complaints, in emails that aren’t templated.

This feels wrong to engineers because it doesn’t scale, and we are trained to distrust things that don’t scale. But you don’t need scale. You need ten. Ten conversations will teach you more about your positioning than ten thousand impressions.

Fix the page before you fill it

Before you send anyone anywhere, read your own homepage as a stranger with three seconds and no context. Does it say what breaks, and what you fix? Or does it say something like “the modern platform for teams”?

Every visit you generate gets multiplied by whatever that page already does. If it converts at zero, a brilliant Reddit reply produces nothing, and — worse — you’ll conclude Reddit doesn’t work and go somewhere else.

What not to do this month

• Don’t start an SEO programme. Six-month payback. You have a this-month problem.
• Don’t buy ads. You’re paying to test a page you haven’t validated with free traffic yet.
• Don’t launch on Product Hunt. Not until there’s something on your page suggesting another human has used this. You get one launch.
• Don’t build another feature. You know why.

The actual answer

How do you get users? You work out precisely who has the problem, you find where they’re already talking about it, you make sure your page doesn’t waste them when they arrive, and then you show up and be useful — repeatedly, specifically, and without pitching in the first sentence.

It’s not complicated. It’s just not a plan you can write down in advance, which is why every article that tries ends up saying “build your social presence”.