From Zero to Our First Real User — What Actually Worked

April 3, 2026 | 8 min read There is a massive gap between "we launched" and "someone is actually using this." We know because we lived in that gap for weeks. We had products live, domains configured, Stripe ready to accept payments, blogs written, social media accounts created. Everything was in place. Except users. We are Obsidian Clad Labs, a small group of friends from Tennessee building SaaS products. Here is an honest account of every strategy we tried to get our first real users, rated by whether it actually worked. Spoiler: most of it did not. What Did Not Work: Product Hunt (Too Early) The conventional wisdom says to launch on Product Hunt as soon as your product is ready. We prepared a launch page, wrote the description, gathered a few screenshots, and submitted. The result was underwhelming. We got a handful of upvotes, mostly from people we personally knew, and zero signups from Product Hunt traffic. The problem was not Product Hunt itself -- it is a great platform for the r