There are twelve ways to get users.
Most of them are closed to you.
178 products taken apart channel by channel. Answer five questions and watch the ones you cannot run go dark.
Do you already have an audience?
All twelve open
One generated page per entity (city, tool, integration, comparison) captures thousands of long-tail queries.
Hand-written content on the queries your buyers type, with authority built one article at a time.
Short-form content published at volume on TikTok, Reels or Shorts, where the algorithm does the distribution.
The founder's personal audience is the launchpad for every release.
A community (Reddit, Discord, forum, Slack) carries the product and manufactures word of mouth.
Normal use of the product exposes it to non-users: a share, an invite, a public artifact.
Buying attention on Meta, Google, TikTok or Apple Search Ads, paid back by LTV.
Creators make the content and lend their audience, for free, for affiliate, or for cash.
The user searches the function in the store and lands on your listing. Conversion is won on the icon, the title and the first three screenshots.
Distribution is delegated to an ecosystem: Chrome Web Store, Shopify, Figma, Notion, GPT Store, Raycast.
A concentrated spike of attention: Product Hunt, Hacker News, tech press, X.
Humans contact target accounts one at a time, by email, LinkedIn or phone.
Why elimination and not a ranking
Founders do not fail because they picked the wrong channel. They fail because they ran four of them badly instead of one properly. Knowing which nine are closed to you is worth more than a list of twelve you could theoretically try.
These five questions are blunt on purpose. For an answer grounded in what your product actually is, rather than in how you describe it, run the skill on your codebase.