I built a chrome extension for teachers that grew to 200k users with no marketing budget.

It solved a pressing problem for teachers. But I built it and showed it to teachers and.... crickets. Absolutely no one found it organically by searching the chrome extension store. I emailed every teacher I know and a few installed it just to humor me, but no one used it. But eventually I got it to grow organically. I'm not saying this process is repeatable, but here's what I learned:

1) Finding the first 10 users was painfully hard. I had to beg people to install it. None of them cared.

2) Finding the right users at the right time is important. I went on to teacher forums on facebook and whenever someone posted something relevant to my app, I privately messaged them. This failed most of the time, but occasionally worked.

3) After lots of messages and begging, I clawed my way to maybe 10-20 users. That's when I started to see the first signs of organic growth. People would tell their friend about it. I'd see 1 or 2 people installing it per day who were hearing about it from friends

4) At 300 users, I got my first "influencer". Someone who had access to a email distro list that goes out to a few thousand teachers. They posted something there and my user count doubled in the next few days.

5) At 30k users, I got a viral video that someone posted about it on tiktok. Got 10k install over the next week.

6) Going from 300 to 200k users was easy... once the ball was rolling, I didn't have hunt down users myself... they would tell each other about it.

Going from 0 to 200k took about 18 months.

Lessons learned:

- Dont worry about your first 1000 users or even 100 users. Worry about your first 5. Do whatever it takes to get them. Finding them is a manual process.

- You will be rejected early on. A lot. It might mean your product sucks, but even if your product is great, you need to find the right person, at the right time. On top of that, most people aren't early adopters.

- Here's what probably won't work for finding those early users unless you really know what you are doing in an existing market: google ads, facebook ads, pretty much anything that isn't manual outreach.

Where to Find First Users?