i will not promote: what actually worked for your first 10 users?

Most early growth advice jumps straight to reach: launch on Product Hunt, post everywhere, wait for SEO, buy ads. But the founder discussions I keep reading point to a less exciting sequence: Find the subreddit or community where people have the actual problem, not just where founders talk about building. Read the rules and the top posts before saying anything. Comment on existing threads and answer the question completely. Product mention comes later, if it belongs at all. When somebody is a real fit, offer a small manual result or a narrow test. "Send me your workflow and I’ll run it" is a much easier first step than "please sign up for my SaaS." Use short, specific outreach for people who have already signaled the problem. One reason for writing, one clear benefit, one easy ask. Track replies, activated users, repeat use, and the objections that keep coming up. Visits are useful, but curiosity clicks are not the same as demand. The correction I keep coming back to: the 90/10 idea is not a universal Reddit law. Some communities use it, some are stricter, and some ban self-promotion entirely. The official spam policy is about repeated, unwanted, unsolicited behavior, and each subreddit has its own rules. Cold outreach seems to work for the same reason good Reddit comments work: specificity. The useful version is not a sequence to thousands of people. It is a short message to one person who has already told you what hurts. What actually worked for your first 10 users? And which channel produced a lot of attention but almost no real usage?