How to get your first 100 users in India without ads
The first 100 users are the hardest ones. Nobody knows your name, there are no reviews, and every ad platform wants money before it shows you to anyone. I'm in this stage myself with overbid.in, so this isn't advice from someone who made it years ago. It's what I'm doing now, and what I'd tell a friend starting out in India.
The short version: at this stage you don't need reach, you need the right hundred people. That's small enough to find one at a time.
Start with people who already know you
Your first users are usually friends, old colleagues, college batchmates and people you've worked with. It feels awkward to ask them, but don't ask them to "support" you. Ask the ones who actually have the problem you solve to try it and tell you what's wrong with it. A short personal message works better than a broadcast. "I built this for people like you, can you try it for five minutes and tell me where you got stuck?" gets answers. "Please check out my startup" mostly doesn't.
Go where your users already talk
In India a lot of that happens in WhatsApp and Telegram groups: groups for founders, for shop owners, for a city, for a trade, for parents, for students preparing for an exam. Join the ones your users are in, and be a useful member before you're a seller. When someone asks a question your product answers, that's the moment to share it, with one line on why it fits.
The same goes for Reddit and online communities. Read each community's rules first, because many don't allow self-promotion. Where it's allowed, a plain post about what you built and why, asking for honest feedback, does far better than a pitch.
Write on LinkedIn and X while you build
For anything sold to businesses in India, LinkedIn is where your buyers are. Don't wait for launch day. Write about the problem, what you're building, what you got wrong, and what a user told you. People follow a story more than a product. X works the same way, and it's stronger if your users are developers or other founders.
Reply to people too. A thoughtful reply under someone else's post often brings more people to your profile than your own post does.
Do things that don't scale
Talk to every early user yourself. Help them set up. Fix the thing they complained about and tell them you fixed it. A user who feels heard becomes the one who tells their friends, and at this stage that's worth more than any feature.
When someone likes your product, ask them one simple thing: who else do you know who has this problem? One introduction from a happy user beats a hundred cold messages.
Be findable
Some of your first users will come from search, and it costs nothing but time. Set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, send them your sitemap, and give each page a clear title and description that say what it does in the words people actually search. If you serve a city, a Google Business Profile matters more than almost anything else.
Write a few pages that answer real questions your users have. One honest, useful page can bring visitors for years.
Get listed where founders and buyers look
There are many free directories and launch sites where you can submit your product, and each one is a small door someone can walk through. None of them alone will bring you 100 users, but together, over a few weeks, they add up, and some of them help you get found in search too. I wrote a longer list in where to launch your startup in India.
overbid.in is one of those places, and it's mine, so take this with that in mind: you can list your brand free by posting about it, or bid from ₹49 to rank higher. Every listing gets a link to your site, a click count, and its own page Google can find.
What not to do
Don't buy followers, fake reviews or upvotes. They don't use your product, and they make the real numbers impossible to read. Don't spam groups with the same message. And don't spend weeks polishing before anyone sees it. The first hundred users will tell you what to build next, but only once they can use it.
If you're working on your first hundred right now, I'd like to hear what's working for you. Write to me at hello@overbid.in.
Ankit