Solo developer, no audience, no network, no community presence.I've shipped working products (open-source) but every distribution channel has a cold start problem. you need traction to get traction. Even posting about your work requires reputation you can only build by posting. For those who built something with no existing audience to launch to: what specifically worked to get your first real users? Less interested in theory, more in "I did X and it actually moved the needle."

If you have no one to launch to, who are you building for? How did you validate your idea?

The answer depends on what you are building and who you are building it for. The default approach is a little crowded, a little spammy. No one likes someone who joins a community just to self-promote.

More and more, my approach has been to build customer streams instead of finding them one by one. Don't sell to restaurants, sell to those who sell to restaurants. This has served me well.

Only read further if you did not validate the idea with a group of people first but solved it because you had that problem.

I did the same and now just 2 weeks back I started reaching out to people to try the tools which is now a product and the thing which helped me convert many of them were reaching out to them on linked in and talking about my own problem with them, I have gotten 35 users as of yet with this approach in the last 2 weeks.

Consider your experience up to now as an education.

The hard part is not building a working product. The hard part is finding people to use it.

Yes, building the working product is the fun part. Yes it's the part that overlaps your current skill set. Stop doing it.

Instead of building products, go find customers. It doesn't matter what they want, you can build anything, what matters is they have pain and are looking to pay to make it go away.

That initially means going out to talk to people. Ask about their lives. Find pain. Ask about how much they'd pay to make that pain go away.

The paying part is serious. No one likes tables that rock at the restaurant. But no one pays for a solution- you just push something under the rocking leg.

I know, I know, you just want to code, the customers should just find you, leave cash, and leave. Alas, you and everyone else. That's unfortunately not how it works.

I think the reality is no one really knows. You’ll hear things like post on socials, blog/content marketing, build a presence on Reddit…

But to me it seems like the lottery. You try enough things, in enough of the right places, for long enough and eventually something sticks and you get some traction. Most people don’t stick with it long enough to find something that connects for them though.

Ideally you’re working on a product where you already have some legitimacy, thus avoiding the cold start problem.