How to Find Your First Customers on Reddit

"I will not promote" is a familiar opening line on Reddit. A founder has built something, and they're trying to get their first hundred users without sounding like an ad. It's an honest ask, and it shows up in a lot of places at once.

This isn't one thread. It's a pattern. On r/startups, r/AppBusiness, r/smallbusiness, and r/buildinpublic, the same question gets asked with slightly different wording every few days: how do I find the people who need what I built?

The discussions repeat themselves in useful ways. Here are the parts that come back, and the parts that work.

The "first users" problem is everywhere

A post in r/startups asked, plainly: "How do I get my first 100 users on my app?" Then it added, pointedly: "I will not promote." The disclaimer matters. They weren't asking for a shout-out. They were asking for a method.

Nearby, in r/AppBusiness: "How do you get your first users?" In r/smallbusiness, a developer who could build almost anything for small businesses said the problem wasn't the building. It was finding the clients.

Different products, same bottleneck. Distribution, not development.

What the threads actually recommend

Reading through the replies, the useful ones rather than the generic ones, a few things repeat.

1. Show up where the problem is being discussed. Not the "marketing" subreddits, but the ones where your customers actually hang out. A sales tool founder gets more from answering questions in r/sales than from posting ads.

2. Answer first, link second. The founders who got traction in these threads were the ones who gave genuinely useful answers. The pitch came later, if at all.

3. Be specific about who you help. "I help agencies manage multiple client accounts" beats "I have a SaaS product." The founders who framed their product as a solution to a named problem got the follow-up questions.

4. Cold outreach works when it's targeted. In r/buildinpublic, someone asked about cold DMs and outreach. The consensus wasn't "don't do it." It was "do it to people who already said they have the problem."

You're searching for demand, not building it

Here's the part that changes how you think about this. All the "find your first users" threads share an assumption: the customers exist, they're just not visible yet.

And they are visible. People post their problems in real time. Someone in r/MarketingHelp asked how to find potential clients. Someone in r/automation asked what tools people use to track Reddit mentions. A founder in r/NoCodeSaaS was building a Reddit lead-gen scraper from scratch, because the need was so obvious to them.

The demand isn't missing. It's scattered across threads, in the words people use when they describe their own problem, before anyone offers them a solution.

That's the whole game: find the people who are already describing the problem you solve, and be the one who shows up with a relevant answer.

A practical loop

A simple version of what the successful founders in these threads do:

1. Pick the subreddits where your customers talk about their problem, not where they talk about tools.

2. Spend a few minutes a day reading the new posts. Look for people describing the exact problem you solve.

3. Answer them genuinely. If your product is a real fit, one line of context helps. If it's not a fit, help anyway. It builds the reputation that makes step 4 work.

4. Keep a record of the patterns. Which problem statements repeat? Those repeated phrasings are your market research, and your first landing page copy.

We run a service that automates steps 1 through 3 for you. vibedollar watches Reddit for posts and comments from people looking for a solution like yours, and hands you the ones that match, with a note on why each one fits. We see these "find my first customers" threads every day through our own monitoring of public posts. It's how we know the demand is there.

But you don't need our tool to start. The threads above are public. Read a few, answer one question genuinely, and you'll be doing better than most founders in their first week.

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Sources: public Reddit discussions collected 2026-08. Posts may be removed after collection; records remain valid demand signals and authors are reachable via Reddit DMs or public channels.