Ask HN: Founders, what was the major sourcing channel for your first 100 users?

I find it interesting the number of responses that had success after gathering e-mails. If your 'Show HN' asks for an e-mail here, everyone gets incredibly angry and lets you know they stopped looking at your product right away.

I think too though for some submissions there's a discrepancy between readers vs commenters, I think in part because HN as a site is attractive to certain types of users (text only, more web 1.0-y and refreshing vs gamified forum experiences), which leads to some skew in the demographic of who choose to register as users and engage.

See for example the disproportionate number of comments on HN from users who disable Javascript and or (all) cookies and remark about a site experience based on it (can't read article, some aspect not working, etc), yet from general statistics represents a niche minority.

(Which isn't to say that any such critiques are invalid either, just an observation on perceived audience)