How to get your first users with no budget.
Most advice on this is written after the fact, by someone who already won, leaving out everything that didn't work on the way there. This is written during: I work on marketing for Nexertise, a real product with real revenue of zero so far, and below are the actual counts from what we've tried this month to get our own first users with no ad spend — not a tidied version of it.
Marcus Hale, SEO and Content Lead, Nexertise · Published October 9, 2026
What cold outreach has actually done for us so far
As of the end of October 9, 2026 (UTC) we had sent 87 cold emails: 80 first messages and 7 follow-ups. All seven of those follow-ups went out on that last day — until October 9, every email this company had ever sent was a first message with nothing behind it. Two people have replied. One asked us to stop, and we suppressed the address the same day. One asked to hear more, and we wrote back the same day with our real pay figures. No call has been booked off any of it, and no campaign has been sold.
Read uncharitably, that looks like proof cold email doesn't work. It isn't, and the reason still matters more than the number: one day of follow-ups isn't a finished sequence, and two replies across 87 sends is too small a sample to call a verdict either way. What it is evidence of is that writing the follow-up step down and then actually sending it is the harder part — most of the record above, ours included until this week, is first messages with nothing behind them.
If you're doing cold outreach for your own launch: decide how many touches your sequence needs before you send touch one, and budget your time for all of them. A single blast with no follow-up is the version of cold outreach least likely to work, and it's the version almost everyone defaults to — us included, for our first week.
A traffic spike is not the same thing as a user
On October 9, 2026, our own HN submission landed. The site went from 6 visitors the day before to 59 that day, with 16 referred directly from news.ycombinator.com (14 of them arriving after the submission went up, the other 2 before it) and 30 of the 59 landing on the specific page the post pointed to.
It produced zero advertiser applications on the page it pointed to. We're still working out exactly why — that's an open internal question for us, not a settled answer we're handing you — but the top-line lesson doesn't depend on the cause: a spike in visits is a different metric from a user, and if you only watch the traffic number you can convince yourself a launch worked when nobody actually did the thing you wanted them to do.
Before you launch anywhere, know what the very next click after “interested” is supposed to be, and check that it's short. If you can't say in one sentence what a visitor does between landing and becoming a user, that's the thing to fix first — it's cheaper to fix than getting more visitors.
Where this actually leaves us
Eleven people have signed up for Nexertise since we started counting, none of them in the last seven days, and none of this week's visits turned into a new verified user. That's not a number we're hiding; it's the actual state of zero-budget growth for a real product right now, and it's why we think a page like this one is worth more than another list of channels: almost nobody writes down the part where it hasn't worked yet.
If you want the specific free channels worth trying first — and the math on why a small paid-ads budget usually isn't one of them — we wrote that up separately in alternatives to paid ads for indie hackers.
For what's changed about trusting traffic numbers at all, see companies are losing billions because of agents.
We'll keep this page's numbers current rather than quietly rewriting them once something works. If that changes, the update will say what changed and why, not just a better-looking total.
Marcus Hale is the SEO and Content Lead at Nexertise. The counts above are our own product and outreach records as of October 9, 2026, not industry averages.
See the channels we tried before this
The free channels worth trying first, and the math on paid ads.