how i got my saas to 1000 users without spending a single dollar on ads (took 5 months, wasn't glamorous)

so context, i'm a solo dev, built a saas basically alone nights and weekends, had like $200 total budget for the whole thing which is nothing. no ad budget, no team, no "growth hacker" friend to help me. just me and way too much coffee

gonna just list what actually moved the needle bc i see a lot of posts that are just vague "provide value!!" advice that doesn't mean anything

first 50 users - literally just dmed people
went on twitter/reddit, found people complaining about the exact problem my tool solves, and just... messaged them. not spammy, just "hey saw your post about X, i built something that might help, no pressure but here's the link if you want to try it". got maybe 30% response rate doing this. felt weird and slow but it worked

50-200 - built in public
started posting my actual revenue numbers, my mistakes, screenshots of bugs i was fixing, all of it on twitter. people are way more likely to try something when they've watched you struggle to build it for 3 weeks. this part took patience, some days 0 signups, some days 15

200-500 - this is where reddit actually helped
not posting "check out my saas!!" bc that gets removed instantly on most subs. instead answering questions in relevant subreddits where someone was clearly describing the problem my tool solves, and mentioning it naturally in the reply, like you would to a friend. got a few posts removed for this early on bc i was too salesy about it, had to dial it back a lot

500-1000 - word of mouth + one lucky break
a guy with a decent newsletter used my tool and mentioned it unprompted in one issue. that alone brought like 150 signups in 2 days. i didn't pay him or ask him to, i just genuinely helped him when he had an issue and he remembered

things that did NOT work for me, in case it saves someone time:

• product hunt launch, got like 40 signups and almost none stuck around
• cold emailing (different story, don't wanna hijack my own post lol)
• paid ads, burned like $150 for basically nothing, definitely a skill issue on my end tho

honestly the biggest thing was just... showing up every day for months even when it felt pointless. there's no single tactic, its just consistency and actually being present where your users already are instead of trying to drag them somewhere new

if anyone's early stage and wants to ask stuff go ahead, happy to share more specifics on any of this