Cold outreach is the only way I found to actually find users early on. No amount of blogs or social media stuff will get you users.

I had a product that got thousands of views from a Reddit post. Out of those, literally 0 clicked anywhere besides the page they landed on. I've been #2 on Product Hunt, 0 have actually used the product after clicking into it the first time.

Most products have a very tiny customer base, and they're not just casually browsing social media looking to find your exact product. You need to find these people and reach out to them directly.

Don't lie, but do little things that show them that you respect their time. Keep it short, tell them what the product is in plain English. Do some amount of research to qualify them as a potential customer. Try to tailor it to be relevant to them. Put your real name behind it. Ask them for feedback even if they wouldn't pay for your product. And don't follow up more than once or maybe twice.

It sucks. No one likes doing it. But if something is actually relevant for me, I would at least be curious enough to take a meeting. Unfortunately the only cold emails I get is from dev pod-shops or venture debt type people which are uninteresting.

Right there with you. All the products I have built are not interesting to the HN or ProductHunt crowd. I don't even bother in those channels. Anyone reading this, find the places that are actually relevant to your customers.

I get a lot of office cleaning / janitorial spam (I don't have an office) alongside the dev shop spam. Just checked my junk SMS folder, I had 5 SMS messages for "fundraising" for a company gone 10 years ago. It is non-stop.