People always ask about paid acquisition before they've figured out free acquisition, and I think that's backwards. Here's the exact path I used to get the first 100 paying customers for my design resource pack in 2025.
First 10: direct asks. I sent personal messages to people I knew who fit the profile. Not a mass DM. Individual, specific messages. 'Hey, I made this thing that I think you'd actually use for X, want to be a beta tester and then pay if it's useful?' Got 6 paying customers from this. Felt slow, was actually fast.
10-35: community posts in the right places. I found 3 communities where my target user (product designers doing freelance side work) hung out. I didn't make a 'check out my product' post. I answered questions in threads where the product was clearly relevant, and mentioned it at the bottom as 'I actually built something for this exact problem.' Every single one of those comments drove multiple signups. Ratio of good answers to product mentions was about 8:1.
35-70: SEO + content that wasn't garbage. I wrote 4 posts about specific problems my product solves. Not 'best Figma resources 2025' keyword soup. Actual tutorials: 'how to create a client-ready design handoff in Figma without any plugins.' That post ranks now. It took about 6 weeks to start getting organic traffic.
70-100: product hunt launch (modest). Launched on Product Hunt. Came in around #8 that day. Not a top launch. Got about 40 trial signups and 15 conversions from it. Useful but not the magic bullet people treat it as.
Total timeline: about 6 months to 100 customers. Monthly recurring was around $2,100 at that point.
The anti-insight: the more specific the channel and the more specific the problem you're solving in any given post, the better it converts. Generic exposure is nearly worthless. A comment in a 200-person niche Slack that exactly matches someone's problem beats a tweet with 2,000 likes from a tangentially relevant influencer.