You build the thing. You pick a date. You imagine the date arriving and something happening on it.
The date arrives. Four people visit. Two of them are you on different devices.
This is the normal outcome of launching without an audience, and it is not evidence that the product is bad. It is evidence that no message was sent to anyone. A launch is a broadcast, and a broadcast needs a channel. If you have no followers, no mailing list, no colleagues with followers, then your channel has one subscriber and you already live inside their head.
So the question is not how to have a good launch day. It is how to get a hundred people to try something when the total number of people currently aware of it is zero.
A hundred is a hundred, not a rounding error
People who write about growth treat a hundred users as the trivial part, the bit before the interesting curve starts. Starting from nothing, a hundred is a real number, and it is worth doing the arithmetic on it.
If you post a link somewhere and two per cent of the people who see it click, and a fifth of those who arrive actually sign up, you need roughly twenty-five thousand impressions to reach a hundred users. That is a lot of impressions to conjure from an account with no history. It is achievable with money, badly, or with a viral post, which is not a plan.
The other route needs no audience at all. If you speak to three hundred people individually, in places where the thing you built is relevant, and a third of them try it, you have your hundred. Three hundred conversations over six weeks is about seven a day. That is dull, and it is unreasonably effective, and it is why most advice about early distribution sounds like nothing at all: because it is just talking to people, one at a time, for longer than feels sensible.
The hundred you get this way are worth more, too. They arrived because you said something specific to them, which means when they leave you can ask why, and the answer will be about the product rather than about the ad.
Where the first hundred actually come from
Start with the places where your problem is already being named out loud by strangers. Subreddits, Discord servers, Facebook groups, niche forums that look like they were built in 2009 and still get forty posts a day, the comment sections under videos about the thing. Someone in those places has already described your product in the form of a complaint. Find those posts. Answer them properly, in public, and mention what you built only if it is the actual answer.
This has a failure mode worth naming. If you turn up, post a link, and leave, you will be removed and occasionally mocked, and you will have burned a room you could have used for a year. The rooms worth being in are the ones with rules against exactly what you are tempted to do. Read them, then be a normal member of the place for a while. This is slower than you want. It is still faster than building an audience from scratch.
Then there are directories and launch platforms. Product Hunt, Betalist, the various roundups of new tools. My read is that these work in proportion to the audience you already have, because ranking depends on early votes and early votes come from people who know you. Going in cold, expect a few hundred visits, a modest number of signups, and a decent share of those signups being other people who build things and will never use yours. It is not nothing. It costs an afternoon. It is not a strategy on its own.
Friends and family are a separate category. They will sign up out of loyalty, and they will not use it, which makes their numbers useless and their bug reports excellent. Let them find the broken password reset. Do not let them convince you the product works.
And there is the unfashionable option of going where people physically are. If you built something for market traders, go to a market. If it is for tattoo artists, the studios are on a map. A hundred conversations in person is a slog, but the conversion rate is unrecognisable compared to a link on the internet, and nobody scrolls past you.
The link you send three hundred times
All of this ends with you sending someone a link, over and over, in messages and comments and replies. Which means the thing on the other side of that link is doing more work than your launch post ever will.
A lot of early products send people to a homepage that explains nothing and asks for a card, or to an app store listing with two screenshots. What people want at that moment is a short answer to what is this, a way to see it moving, and a way to reach a human. That is three or four links, not a website.
This is the gap Relay sits in. It is a link-in-bio page: your photo, a line about what you are doing, and as many links as you want on every plan, including the free one, which needs no card and has no time limit. You get five themes, headings and dividers so the page reads as something organised rather than a stack of buttons, social icons, a QR code, and a story-sized share image. More useful than any of that is the counting. Relay shows views on the page and taps on each link, so when you are sending the link by hand you learn whether people click through to the demo or straight to signup, whether the pricing link is touched at all, whether one community pulls more taps than another. Pro is $30 a year or $4 a month plus VAT and adds all 47 themes, all 8 fonts, custom colours, a background image, per-link images, scheduled links, inline players, email capture and removal of the Relay badge. Email capture is the piece I would think about first here, because a list of forty people who asked for updates is the closest thing to an audience you can build in a first month.
Where Relay is part of the problem
Now the honest half. A link page does not create demand. It is a signpost, and a signpost in an empty field points at nothing for nobody. If your problem is that no one has heard of you, a tidy page will not fix it, and there is a version of this work where you spend a Saturday picking themes because it feels like progress and is not.
There are real gaps as well. No custom domains, so the address is relayme.bio/yourname. No payments, so if you are selling rather than signing people up, the money happens somewhere else: Shopify, Gumroad, Stripe, an app store, whatever fits. We wrote about choosing between those in TikTok Shop vs Shopify vs just a link, and there is a comparison with the obvious alternative at relayme.bio/vs-linktree which includes four rows where Linktree wins, because it does. Data sits in the European Union, fonts are self-hosted, and there is no advertising and no third-party analytics on the page. That matters to some people and not to others.
Small numbers lie, so stop taking percentages
One of the strange difficulties of early launches is that your metrics are statistically meaningless and emotionally overwhelming.
Seven people visited and two signed up. That is not a 28.6% conversion rate. That is two people. Next week it will be one out of nine, and you will conclude the product has collapsed. Nothing changed except noise.
Count absolute things while the numbers are small. Eleven signups this week. Four people who came back a second time. Two who replied to your message. One who asked when the Android version is coming. Those are facts. Ratios need volume before they mean anything, and you will not have volume for a while.
The other thing worth counting is reasons. Everyone who tried it and stopped had a reason, and at this scale you can go and ask. Most will not reply. Some will, and one sentence from a stranger about why they closed the tab is worth more than a dashboard. There is a version of this you can do in an hour a week, and it is the highest value hour in the whole operation.
Spending money on it, and when not to
The temptation, once the manual work gets boring, is to buy attention. It is worth knowing what that buys before you try. We looked at the small end of this in what $50 of ads actually buys you, and the short version is that fifty dollars buys a few thousand impressions and enough clicks to learn very little.
Ads multiply a message that already works. If you do not yet know which sentence makes strangers curious, paid traffic mostly buys an expensive way to be ignored. Get the sentence out of the three hundred conversations first, then consider paying to repeat it. And if your ad is rejected, which happens often to new accounts advertising new things, the rules are public and readable.
Things I do not know and will not pretend to: how long this takes for your particular product, what the right price is, whether the idea is any good. Those depend on the thing itself and I have not seen it. What I am reasonably confident about is the shape of the first stretch, which is set out in how long until the first sale. It is longer than launch posts imply and shorter than it feels at week three.
The unglamorous middle
There is no moment where the audience arrives. There is a week where you notice that someone signed up who you have never spoken to and cannot trace, and that is the first sign the thing has begun moving without you pushing it.
Until then it is you, a list of places, and a link you have sent so many times you can type it from memory. If you want that link to be one page rather than five scattered ones, Relay is free to start and stays free with no card. It will not find you the hundred people. It just makes sure the ones you find can see what you built.