Building is the half people plan for. Getting anyone to use the thing is the half that decides how it goes, and it's usually harder.
The uncomfortable version: there are good apps with almost no users, and mediocre apps with plenty. The difference is rarely quality.
Nobody arrives by accident
A common belief, and it's wrong in an expensive way: if the app is good enough, people will find it.
They won't. The App Store has millions of apps and search results that favour things already popular. Nobody stumbles across you.
Every single early user comes from somewhere specific that you made happen. That's not a temporary condition until you get discovered. It's the job.
Go where they already are
The most reliable early source is somewhere your specific people already gather.
A subreddit about the problem. A Discord for that profession. A forum, a Facebook group, a Slack community. Somewhere people already discuss the thing your app is about.
The advantage over posting into the void is that these people are pre-selected. They have the problem, they've self-identified, and they're in a room together.
The catch is that every one of those communities has been spammed by people launching things, and they can spot it instantly. Which brings us to the only rule that matters here.
Give before you take
If you show up in a community solely to promote your app, it goes badly. Removed, downvoted, occasionally publicly criticised, and you've burned that community permanently.
If you've been around, answered questions, been useful, then mentioning what you've built is fine and often welcomed.
You don't need six months of good citizenship. But you do need to have participated before you promote, and to read the rules, because plenty of communities have an explicit policy about self-promotion that you can simply follow.
The honest version works well when you're small: "I built this because I had this problem, it's rough, I'd like to know what's wrong with it." People respond to that far better than to a polished announcement, because it asks for help rather than attention.
Talking to people directly
Unscalable and underrated.
Finding twenty people who have this problem and messaging each of them personally feels like it doesn't count, because it obviously won't work at scale.
It's how most things start. Twenty individual conversations gets you your first few real users, and more importantly gets you the reasons the other fifteen said no, which is information you can't buy.
The channels, briefly
Launch platforms like Product Hunt give a spike of attention on one day, mostly from other builders. Good for a burst, rarely for lasting users unless you're building for that crowd.
Content, meaning writing or video that answers the questions your customers are already asking, compounds slowly and keeps working for years. It's the best long-term channel and it takes months before anything happens, which is why most people quit it.
Posting on social media builds an audience over time and rewards consistency far more than brilliance.
Paid ads work only after you know that people stick around and pay. Paying to send strangers into an app that doesn't retain them just spends money faster. This one is for later.
Pick one or two
The instinct is to be everywhere. Nobody manages that alone, and thin presence across six channels does less than genuine presence in one.
Two considerations: where your people actually are, and what you can keep doing. A channel you sustain for six months beats four you abandon in three weeks.
There's a practical dimension people forget too. Check what you can actually use from where you live, and what fits how you like to work. A plan built around a platform you can't access, or a format you hate making, quietly dies.
A quick story. My content plan for my app leaned heavily on TikTok, which is where a lot of that audience is.
TikTok is banned in India, where I am. So the plan was unusable before it started, and I had to rebuild it around YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels instead.
Slightly embarrassing to discover late, but the general lesson is worth having: check your actual constraints before designing around a channel. Where you can operate, how much time you really have, what kind of content you can stand to make every week. A distribution plan that ignores those is a plan for a different person.
If you want to work out your channels
Point three matters more than it looks. The right channel you'll actually keep doing beats the theoretically best one you'll drop.
Next: Which numbers are worth watching →
Go deeper: Chapter 44, Pre-launch: Audience and Waitlists and Chapter 47, Social, Short-form and Community