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

Targeted Google ads (for the type of product we were building) pointing to a landing page where we collected email addresses.

Ads for me, too. Google, Capterra, Microsoft, and LinkedIn were my main ad channels.

Most new founders think that blasting your 'startup' to Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Twitter, etc. will result in first customers -- that that's 'marketing' -- but that's far from the truth for the majority of products. And contrary to popular belief, the chances your product is one of the exceptions is near-zero.

Those social media platforms bring in 'tire-kickers' and devs that value their time at $0, not customers. These aren't the first users that you should be listening to, because they will always complain about price, lack of niche functionality, etc., yet it's pointless to listen to them -- because they aren't buyers.

You want to market towards buyers, not just users, and ads are a good way to do that for early companies that have no brand awareness or distribution.

I would expect those channels (PH, HN…) would be helpful in getting early adopters to click around and point out what is wrong with app - not getting really customers.

For me personally PH would be more like ideas to copy from.

Finding bugs maybe sure. Further up this thread someone commented about “images getting cut off” on Hypership. It’s feedback but it’s not valuable. Feedback from real users who are actually trying to execute tasks with your product is valuable

I would say I agree because validating your product with early adopters also can lead to false conclusions that it is useful - when in reality early adopters would just like to use it to see what it is and leave it for next shiny thing as something pops up.