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

Reddit.

1. I made an app for the colorblind in 2015 and got my first 100 (and more) users from the r/colorblind subreddit.

2. I made a breathing app in 2017 and got my first users from r/breathing, r/breathwork, and r/meditation subreddits.

3. I recently made a productivity app for the mac and got my first users from r/macapps subreddit.

Reddit is incredibly powerful if you are building something niche and are already a part of the community. Also, the results are compounding because some of my posts get good SEO traffic so I still get a handful of users from Reddit every day.

> Reddit is incredibly powerful if you are building something niche and are already a part of the community

I generally agree with this but I will say (at least in my niche) that I’ve been pretty surprised recently with both how 1) anti ‘self-promotion’ some subreddits have become and 2) how brutal people will be if your thing is not fully free and open source. I understand where they’re coming from, but I’d recommend software founders know this when trying to use Reddit as a distribution channel.

I think it depends heavily on the sub. E.g. in some subs it's an instant permaban from the sub for self promotion, and in others they don't really care one way or the other. Either because there's so little promotional spam in that sub, or something else.

> I think it depends heavily on the sub

I think you're right. And this is one of the reasons I like HN so much. You're not seen as evil for sharing a software project that is paid and closed-source. It's much more friendly for this kind of stuff.