Cold-Starting a Product With Zero Audience

Everyone assumes you need an audience before you launch. I didn't have one for the first few products — no following, no email list, no existing platform. Here's the actual framework for getting a product's first users when nobody's waiting for it.

Go where the problem already has a crowd, not where you have a following

You don't need people who follow you. You need people who already have the exact problem your product solves, gathered somewhere you can reach them — a subreddit, a niche forum, a Discord, a comment section under content about the same problem. The audience you're borrowing is theirs, not yours, and that's fine for a first batch of users.

For Haunt, there wasn't one single subreddit that did it — it was more scattered than that. Cold DMs on X to investors and founders who'd actually hit the problem, LinkedIn posts, a presence on Indie Hackers. Reddit didn't even work — the account hit karma limits before it could post anywhere useful. If there's a lesson in that, it's less 'find the one perfect community' and more 'go to wherever the people are and don't expect one channel to carry it.'

Make the first version demo-able in one sentence

If explaining what your product does takes a paragraph, most people scroll past before finishing it. Haunt's whole pitch fits in one sentence: founders anonymously report investors who ghost them, and it generates public scores you can look up. That's the entire value proposition in one read — no demo needed to get why someone would want it. The products that got traction fastest were the ones where the value was obvious from the name and one sentence, not the ones that needed a demo video to land.

Ask for the reaction, not the sale, first

The first post anywhere shouldn't be asking people to sign up. It should be showing the thing working and asking if it's useful — "built this because X annoyed me, does anyone else want this" gets real reactions and real feedback. "Sign up for my new SaaS" gets ignored. The signups come from people reacting to something real, not from an ask.

Ten real users beats a hundred passive visitors

Traffic without conversation is close to worthless at this stage. A handful of people who actually used the product, hit a bug, and told you about it is worth more than a spike of visitors who bounced. Go find the ten, talk to them directly, fix what they hit, and let word of that spread instead of chasing volume first.

What doesn't work

Posting the same generic "check out my new SaaS" across ten unrelated subreddits or communities gets you ignored and sometimes banned — it reads as spam because it is spam, structurally, even if the product's good. The audience-borrowing only works if the post is genuinely useful to that specific community, not a copy-pasted plug.

Zero audience isn't the blocker most people think it is. The blocker is usually trying to get attention from everyone instead of getting genuine reaction from the twenty people who already have the exact problem.