Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?

I've never done any kind of user acquisition besides posting to Reddit and HN. I realize that this is, needless to say, not a working strategy. What do you people do?

Advertising. AdWords PPC and banners on relevant sites. You can use tools like http://mixrank.com/ (YC S11) to see where your competitors advertise and what ads they use.

Adwords, Forums, facebook groups, blog audiences, commenting, twitter, pinterest.

Go and find out where you customer hangs out online. Who already has your perfect audience on their mailing list? See if you can write something of value for their audience and tap into existing groups.

When you do get users, ask how they found you then double down on promoting in that channel.

It can be a working strategy if you're building a lifestyle business and don't care about hockey-stick growth or making millions.

I'm an armchair entrepreneur for now (just getting that out of the way), but the advice I've seen over and over again can be generalized as: "Go out and talk to peope". You'll want to avoid starting with a sales pitch. Instead, talk to them about their business (or life) and see if your product is a fit (ie: don't try to sell a social network for cats to a dog owner). If it seems like there's some product fit, ask how they are filling the need now. If appropriate, give the the elevator pitch and a 1min demo on your live product. Ideally, convert them by having them sign up for a trial right then and there on your computer, followed by walking them through the COOLEST thing they can do on your product.

Rinse, repeat.

That's my 2 cents. Also interested what others think.

What's your general field? B2B, especially for big industries, tends to call for networking and possibly cold calls. Individual sales tends to call for advertising with a focus on high relevance sites. Social or two-sided markets (think credit card companies and users) tend to call for narrow early focus via outreach to online or physical communities. This simulates widespread use by creating a regionally high use space.

If you're in a specific field (e.g. online cello sales), do outreach to things like relevant forums and subreddits. You'll get targeted use which will provide quality feedback, hopefully. If it's a broad spectrum project, buy up relevant and cheap(ish) ads in several venues. Push use with some definable group that you can interact with directly, get emails via a newsletter, etc.