Bootstrapped founders: how did you get your first 100 customers without spending on ads? I'm interested in tactics that actually worked in 2026, not generic marketing advice.

For a SaaS we launched about 7 years ago, the initial people came from LinkedIn, so my suggestion would be to look for people on linkedin that fit your target profile and ask them for a bit of time to discuss their workflow/issues and how they are fixing them now. If not linkedin, find where people that fit your target profile hang out online (is it a sub-reddit, is there some kind of forum?). if not online, try to find an actual conference and visit it, chat to people in the hallways.

Don't pitch the product, talk about researching for the product (which is what you'll be doing anyway, but some of those initial interview people may become your best advocates). People that genuinely have the problem you want to solve will want to help.

Steve Blank has a nice segment on the ideal people to involve here in The Four Steps to the Epiphany, calling them Earlyvangelists. One big thing to look for is that people have identified a problem that you're solving, tried to solve it themselves, and in an ideal scenario have a budget for a better solution (see https://www.votito.com/methods/earlyvangelists/ for more).

_The Mom Test_ book is an excellent interview guide for this stage, and you'll figure out the questions to ask from there. here's my checklist from when I used it a while ago (not verbatim from the book, so best to actually read the book).

- how do you currently solve X - and how much time do you spend on it? can you show me how you do it? - what happened the last time X came up? talk me through the last time it happened. - if not solved, why not - have you tried finding a different solution for it? - why do you bother doing it? - what are the implications of that? - what else have you tried? - who else should I talk to? - anything else I should have asked?

to find if the problem you want to solve even matters at all: - how much time do you spend on it each week? - which tools and services are you using for it? - what have you already tried doing to improve this? - what are the 3 big things you’re trying to fix or improve right now?

I've had a brilliant product built for a specific niche. I personally know a few business owners in the niche, so I reached out to them and offered it to them for free.

"That's awesome! I'll try it out."

Not a single person tried it out. I also emailed every other business owner within a 30 mile radius to give it a go, for free. Nothing.

This wasn't my first rodeo, either. I've built so many projects since 2015 in the hopes of having a SaaS business.

I've completely given up on "SaaS", especially in the current year, with the rise of LLMs and perhaps hundreds of thousands of new projects released daily. It's completely draining, and I've burned through so much money trying to "make it". Never again.

I am working on this: https://pixoate.com/

It Has Remove Background From Images, Colorize Images, Upscale AI And A Full Fledge Photo Editor Like Canva. I am trying my best to give as much value as possible. But only lacking in marketing. But I will take all your suggestions.

I run a bootstrapped B2B SAAS (12+ years now) and I have seen it all, made all the mistakes possible and had enough wins over the years to keep going.

The first thing to understand is that there is no one size fits all. You have to start somewhere keep iterating. Ok you probably already knew that but wanted to preface anyway to set expectations.

Overall, You have to start with the WHO. Who is this product really for ? If your answer is generic or covers various horizontal segments, you are going to struggle a lot more. NO one builds a product that covers various horizontal segments on Day 1 and succeeds generally. You have to go really really niche and specific. The problem is that this scares new founders who think that if they don't think or aim big (translates to trying to sell to too many segments), they will fail or not make enough money to make it a real business. This is totally false thinking. Take it from a guy who has done it for 12+ years and still fails.

Once you have defined the "Who" (note that this may change with time but you have to start somewhere based on your best assumption as of now), you should have it written down very specifically. For example, don't say "I have a CRM". Instead say "I have a CRM that helps B2B SAAS founders in this specific way".

Also, 100 customers is too ambitious and unrealistic in early days. Start with getting first 5-10. Get them in first. Condition your mind that it is ok to have a really small set of customers who hopefully love your product. With that, you now have to go hunting also known as "outbound" in salesy terms. Sorry no magic wand here if you were expecting a different answer. You of course can do the usual like submitting to directories,writing blog posts etc and you must do all those as well on the side as everything adds up.But the most important thing is manually reaching out to prospective customers.

So now the question is: how do I find those prospective customers ? This will again depend on the "WHO". But more importantly, where do they typically hang out ? I don't mean necessarily in person (that of course helps a lot) but also online.

One tip is to look for customers in your niche already who may be using a competitor product. Websites like builtwith etc can give you a decent list of those customers (not 1005 accurate but they are reasonably accurate).

Bottomline is that you have to do manual outreach every day (minimum to 50 people if you can). Don't sell them the product. Start asking them for a conversation.

All the best. Happy to help if you have more questions.

Depends on the product niche, but most of the time if it's a b2c, posting tiktok/instagram content regularly helped a friend of mine a lot. And if b2b, twitter and reddit comments and cold dm worked for me personaly. Am currently at ~50 users, not 100 yet haha

Man, I'm literally in the exact same boat right now. I've been trying everything submitting to those tiny directories nobody visits, even doing manual cold outreach.

Distribution is the hardest rn and most marketing advice is absolute with AI.

So would love to know if something is working tbh

marketing is pay to play