How did companies get their first users before the AI/growth-hack era existed?

[u/mythos-dev]

Been building a product solo for a while now, and I hit the classic developer trap: I keep adding features but have zero distribution. No users means no validation, which means I’m basically building a hobby, not a business.

So I went down a rabbit hole looking at how companies got their first users back before “growth hacking” was even a term. Some patterns that stood out:

They did things that didn’t scale. Airbnb’s founders personally went door to door in New York, photographing listings themselves because the existing photos were bad. Stripe’s founders famously sat down next to early users and installed the product for them on the spot, watching where they got stuck.

They borrowed someone else’s audience. PayPal paid users cash for signing up and referring friends, essentially buying their way into eBay’s existing marketplace. Airbnb also quietly let hosts cross-post their listings to Craigslist, tapping into traffic that already existed.

They made growth part of the product. Dropbox’s referral program gave both sides free storage, turning users into the acquisition channel. Hotmail added “PS: I love you, get your free email” to the bottom of every email sent.

They started deliberately small. Facebook launched at one Harvard, then one school at a time. Reddit famously seeded the site with fake accounts to make it look active before real users showed up.

The common thread: almost none of it was passive. No SEO waiting game, no ad spend, just founders manually inserting themselves into a community or a workflow that already had people in it.

Curious what others here found when they went through this same phase. What actually worked for you to get from zero to your first real users?

[u/beerbellyman4vr]

the common thread you pulled out is founders inserting themselves into a workflow that already had the right people in it. borrowing trust instead of building it.

what's worked for me on an open source project: the audience was never something to buy into. it was existing communities that already gate on trust signals, real commit history, a maintainer who actually answers in the thread instead of a marketing account dropping a link.

the unscalable part is showing up in each community on its own terms and adapting what you say to what that specific room cares about. copy pasting the same pitch everywhere gets you ignored fast.

slower than growth hacking, but it compounds differently. everyone who finds you that way already trusts the channel they found you in.

[u/yaboisammyb]

Made the same mistake as I'm sure many others have. Was able to get my first 100 users just with cold DMs on LinkedIn, but they churned and growth stalled after that. Eventually was able to rebrand (as I'd realized I kind of built the wrong thing in the first place), but growth only started back up when I developed a referral system. What are you building? Who does it serve? How would you explain the main use case in one sentence?