How to get your first 100 users for an app you built with Lovable, Cursor or Bolt

You prompted your way to a working app. It has a domain, a login and a Stripe button. What it does not have is users, and the people who make AI builders never tell you that this part is slower than building was.

The first 100 users almost never come from one launch. They come from a few dozen small, specific actions: one Reddit reply here, one Show HN there, one DM to a person who complained about the exact problem you solved. This is the plan, in the order that works.

What does the first week after shipping an AI-built app look like?

The first week after shipping is one job a day, and none of the seven days is a campaign. Each one fits in an evening.

What should the landing page say before you send anyone to it?

A landing page for a new app has to answer three questions on the first screen: what is it, who is it for, and what do I do now. Most AI-generated landing pages fail that test, opening with a slogan, three feature cards and a gradient while the visitor still cannot tell what the product does.

1. Headline: the outcome, in plain words. "Turn Notion pages into a client portal" beats "Reimagine collaboration". If a stranger cannot repeat what your app does after reading the headline once, rewrite it.
2. Subhead: who it is for and what it replaces. Name the audience and the thing they do today. "For freelance designers who send Google Drive links to clients."
3. One button. Sign up, start free, or book a call. Not three.
4. Proof, even if small. A 20-second screen recording (Loom or QuickTime) of the app doing the thing. With three users, quote one of them by name with permission.
5. Make it crawlable. A real <title>, a meta description, an Open Graph image, and a sitemap. Run it through our free site grader or Google's Rich Results Test; both take a minute. Lovable and Bolt projects often ship with the default title and no OG image, which makes every link you share look blank.

Install analytics before posting the app anywhere. PostHog and Plausible both have free tiers and a one-line script. A founder who skips this cannot tell which of the actions below brought people, and keeps repeating the ones that felt good instead of the ones that worked.

Where are people already asking for the app you built?

People are asking for tools like yours on Reddit, on Hacker News, on X and in niche forums, in their own words rather than your words. Finding those threads and answering them is the highest-return hour in the whole plan, because the person asking is already looking for the thing you built. How to search:

• On Google: site:reddit.com "is there a tool" [your problem], site:reddit.com "recommend" [category], site:news.ycombinator.com "Ask HN" [category]. Use the "Past year" filter.
• On Reddit itself: search the phrase your customer uses, sort by New, and read the comments. The best threads are questions with two or three answers and no clear winner.
• On X: search "anyone know" [category] and "looking for a" [category], filter to Latest.
• Set up alerts for the future. F5Bot emails you free whenever a keyword appears on Reddit or Hacker News; Google Alerts covers the wider web.

Build a list of ten threads, then answer each one properly: solve the person's problem first, in two or three sentences, and mention your app in one sentence at the end with a disclosure ("I built this, so take that into account"). Threads a year old still get search traffic, so a good answer on an old thread keeps sending visitors for months.

Answer these threads by hand, from your own account. Reddit's spam filters and moderators are good at spotting accounts whose only activity is dropping the same link, and a ban is permanent for that account. AutoTraction, on a waitlist for an October 2026 launch, drafts these replies and hands them over for you to paste for exactly this reason.

Where should a founder post an app built with Lovable, Cursor or Bolt?

A handful of sites exist specifically for showing what you built, and those are the ones worth a new app's first week: Lovable Launched, r/SideProject, Show HN and the smaller launch boards. Product Hunt comes later. Post one per day, in this order, so there is time to answer every comment.

• Lovable Launched (launched.lovable.dev) if you built with Lovable. It is a directory of Lovable apps and the audience is other builders, which is useful if your product serves them.
• r/SideProject. Self-promotion is the point of the subreddit, but moderators remove bare links, waitlist pages and reposts. Show the working product, say what you built it with and why, and reply to every comment.
• Show HN on Hacker News, only if people can try the app without signing up. The Show HN guidelines exclude landing pages and sign-up pages, and asking friends to upvote gets the post killed. Title format: "Show HN: [Name], [what it does in plain words]". Add a first comment on why you built it and what you are unsure about.
• Peerlist Launchpad, Uneed, Tiny Startups and MicroLaunch. Smaller launch boards, all active as of mid-2026. Each brings a handful of visitors; the value is the backlink and the habit of writing a tight description.
• Product Hunt, later. Since the Featured/All split, only launches the editorial team picks as Featured appear on the homepage and in the app, and unfeatured launches get very little. Wait until you have a polished product and a few users who will comment, then launch on a weekday.

The full list, with the rules for each site, is in Where to post your side project in 2026.

Does cold outreach work when an app has no users yet?

Cold outreach works better with no users than it ever will again, because twenty messages written one at a time are personal in a way a campaign never is. Find twenty people who described the problem your app solves in public: a tweet complaining about it, a LinkedIn post, a Reddit comment, a review of a competitor. Message each one with three sentences:

Saw your post about [the problem]. I built [name], which does [the outcome] for [the audience]. If you want to try it, here is a link and I will personally set it up with you.

Offer a call. A 15-minute call with one user teaches a founder more than a hundred sign-ups nobody ever speaks to. Use Cal.com or Calendly for the link, and track who you contacted in a spreadsheet, because you will forget.

What happens in the days after the launch posts go up?

Days 5 to 7 are for replying, not posting. Everything posted on day 3 is now generating comments, and the quality of the founder's answers is what readers judge, not the launch post itself. Answer all of them the same day.

Follow up once with everyone who signed up but never came back: a plain email, from you, asking what stopped them. Half will not answer; the ones who do will tell you what to fix next.

Then write one post about what happened, on X or LinkedIn or your own blog: what you built, what you tried, what worked, the numbers. Founders who build in public get their next hundred users from the people who watched them get the first hundred. Keep it factual. "Posted to five places, 212 visitors, 19 sign-ups, 4 people on calls" beats any launch announcement.

What should a founder chasing the first 100 users skip?

Four things are not worth a founder's time before 100 users: paid ads, blanket cross-posting, SEO content and influencers. Each multiplies something a new app does not have yet.

• Paid ads. You do not know your conversion rate or your pitch yet. Ads amplify whatever you already have, and right now you have a guess.
• Posting in every subreddit at once. Cross-posting the same link across ten subreddits in an hour is the most common way new accounts get banned. Read the rules by subreddit first.
• SEO content. Articles take months to rank. Write them, but do not expect them to bring your first users.
• Influencers and affiliates. Nobody promotes a product with no users. Come back to this at 1,000.

What happens after the first week?

The first 100 users usually take a few weeks of this, not one week. Once the launch burst is over, what matters is showing up daily: check your alerts, answer one or two threads, message a couple of people, and post one thing. That is about four minutes a day when the searching and drafting are done for you, and it is the four-minute-a-day routine. It is also the job we are building AutoTraction to do. Until then, do it by hand and keep the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is the marketing plan.