Where to Find First Users?

I second the feedback on directly reaching out to pixel game developers and getting feedback from them on your product.

Unrelated to your question, here are some thoughts on the product. The forced login will be a barrier to anyone curious to try this out. Yes, you do show examples, but I want to verify that my example would work. And...is this solving a real pain point? I am unfamiliar with pixel game creation. I would guess the hard parts are consistency of style for all assets. And animating the pixels into sprites would also be valuable. Would your product be able to handle these cases?

URL?

Do you have a blog? Some samples? Screenshots of the program?

A good idea is to write an interesting blog post about a problem you had making your program and how you solved it, or a blog post about how you used your program. But it must be interesting, imagine you are meeting a technical friend and you want to share and interesting anecdote ...

Being a visual topic makes it easier. Remember to include a few images.

You can talk about the project organically here on related posts and hope people jump on it. Do this on related subreddits too. It's not blatant advertisements, just find a way to incorporate your game into conversations.

Or, you could do direct advertisements on social media platforms. It will cost you, though. If you have some money, you can go this route while still doing the first one too.

I built a chrome extension for teachers that grew to 200k users with no marketing budget.

It solved a pressing problem for teachers. But I built it and showed it to teachers and.... crickets. Absolutely no one found it organically by searching the chrome extension store. I emailed every teacher I know and a few installed it just to humor me, but no one used it. But eventually I got it to grow organically. I'm not saying this process is repeatable, but here's what I learned:

1) Finding the first 10 users was painfully hard. I had to beg people to install it. None of them cared.

2) Finding the right users at the right time is important. I went on to teacher forums on facebook and whenever someone posted something relevant to my app, I privately messaged them. This failed most of the time, but occasionally worked.

3) After lots of messages and begging, I clawed my way to maybe 10-20 users. That's when I started to see the first signs of organic growth. People would tell their friend about it. I'd see 1 or 2 people installing it per day who were hearing about it from friends

4) At 300 users, I got my first "influencer". Someone who had access to a email distro list that goes out to a few thousand teachers. They posted something there and my user count doubled in the next few days.

5) At 30k users, I got a viral video that someone posted about it on tiktok. Got 10k install over the next week.

6) Going from 300 to 200k users was easy... once the ball was rolling, I didn't have hunt down users myself... they would tell each other about it.

Going from 0 to 200k took about 18 months.

Lessons learned:

- Dont worry about your first 1000 users or even 100 users. Worry about your first 5. Do whatever it takes to get them. Finding them is a manual process.

- You will be rejected early on. A lot. It might mean your product sucks, but even if your product is great, you need to find the right person, at the right time. On top of that, most people aren't early adopters.

- Here's what probably won't work for finding those early users unless you really know what you are doing in an existing market: google ads, facebook ads, pretty much anything that isn't manual outreach.

I think if you solve a real problem there is no way you don't already know some users. Otherwise how do you know you build something worth anyone's attention?

Directly reach out to game devs. Email, LinkedIn, you name it. Ask what they think of it.

good question