I Tried Cold Email, Reddit, and Twitter to Get My First Customers. Here's What Actually Worked.

The Experiment

Three months into building Trie, I decided to run a structured distribution experiment. Same product, three channels, tracked independently. The goal: figure out which approach actually moves the needle for an early-stage SaaS with no brand, no following, and no budget.

The channels: cold email, Twitter/X, and Reddit. Here's what happened — with real numbers. (If you're wondering how this connects to monetizing the expertise behind the product itself, that side of the model is covered here.)

Cold Email: 20+ Contacts, 0 Replies

This is the channel everyone recommends first. It sounds logical: find people who fit your ICP, write a personalized email, convert them. The playbooks are everywhere. The advice is confident. The results, in my case, were brutal.

What I did: 23 cold emails sent over two weeks. I built the list manually — founders who'd posted about customer acquisition problems on Indie Hackers and LinkedIn, people who'd commented on threads about "finding first customers," one person who'd literally tweeted "why is distribution so hard." I spent 10–15 minutes on each email. Personalized subject lines. Specific references to their work. No templates.

Results: 0 replies. Not one. I checked spam deliverability — emails landed in inbox. Open rate from one tracked batch: 34%. They opened it. They just didn't respond.

Post-mortem: cold email is a volume game at the top of the funnel and a trust game at the bottom. I had neither. Without brand recognition or a warm signal, even a relevant, personalized email reads as noise. The 0% reply rate isn't evidence of bad copy — it's evidence that cold email requires either volume (500+ sends) or a strong inbound signal (they already know who you are) to work. Neither condition was true.

Time invested: ~8 hours. Customers acquired: 0.

Twitter: Building in Public, What Actually Moved the Needle

Twitter/X is the canonical "build in public" channel for indie hackers. I expected it to be a slow burn — and it was, until it wasn't.

What I did: 6 weeks of consistent posting. Mix of formats: founder updates ("shipped X feature today"), problem-space observations ("here's why most no-code builders never find their first 10 customers"), and raw data drops ("20 cold emails, 0 replies — building in public means sharing failures too").

What didn't work: Product announcements. Pure milestone posts. Anything that led with "I built this." These got 3–8 impressions and died. The follower count at the time: ~180. You are invisible at 180 followers if you're posting about your product.

What worked: Problem-first content. Posts that articulated a pain point without mentioning the product at all. The top-performing tweet of the experiment described the cold email failure — honest, specific, self-deprecating. It got 47 impressions organically and three DMs asking what I was building.

Three DMs. That's not viral. But from 180 followers, three relevant, unprompted DMs from people who self-identified as potential users is a better signal than 500 cold emails to people who never asked.

Attribution: Two early users from Twitter. Both came from problem-space content, not product announcements. Both mentioned a specific post when they signed up.

Time invested: ~5 hours/week across 6 weeks. Customers acquired: 2. Not efficient on its own — but it compounds.

Reddit: Where the Real Conversations Happen

Reddit was the most research-intensive channel and, counterintuitively, the most useful — even though I wasn't allowed to post about my product directly.

What I did: Deep lurk across r/indiehackers, r/SaaS, r/nocode, r/startups. Not to promote — subreddit rules prohibit it and communities enforce them aggressively. To listen.

What I learned: The actual language people use to describe the problem Trie solves is nothing like the language I was using in my cold emails. My emails talked about "customer acquisition" and "distribution strategy." Reddit threads talked about "I've been building for 4 months and have zero paying users" and "does anyone else feel like the product is ready but no one cares?"

That's a vocabulary shift. Subtle, but it's the difference between writing for yourself and writing for your customer.

What worked: Being a genuine participant. Answering questions I actually knew answers to — not about my product, just about the problem space. One comment on a "how do you find first customers" thread got 12 upvotes and a DM from someone who eventually signed up. No mention of Trie in the comment. Just a useful answer.

Reddit also gave me a shareable link test. "Here's an article I wrote about what worked and what didn't" is a natural, non-promotional comment hook in threads where the topic is relevant. It's how this post will get shared.

Time invested: ~3 hours of research + 2 hours of participation. Customers acquired: 1 direct, ongoing signal value.

The Pattern: Distribution Compounds, Features Don't

Here's what the experiment actually taught me, beyond the channel-level results:

Cold email is a dead end without volume or warmth. As a solo founder without a list, without brand recognition, and without a warm referral network — it doesn't work. The math requires 500+ sends to get 10 conversations. I don't have that infrastructure. Revisit when there's a reason someone would recognize my name before opening the email.

Twitter compounds slowly, then suddenly. The two users I acquired aren't the point. The point is that the problem-space content I posted is still accumulating impressions. The cold email I sent two weeks ago is dead. The tweet is still alive.

Reddit is primary research disguised as distribution. I learned more about how to describe my product from 10 hours of Reddit lurking than from 3 months of building. The vocabulary shift alone was worth it.

The bigger pattern: each channel compounds on the others. Twitter content gives me shareable material for Reddit. Reddit gives me language to improve Twitter posts. The blog post I'm writing now (this one) becomes both a shareable link and a tweet thread and a Reddit comment. Start with one channel, use the output to feed the others.

Distribution isn't a campaign. It's a practice. The founders who figure out their first 10 customers aren't the ones who ran the perfect cold email sequence — they're the ones who showed up somewhere consistently enough to be recognized.

What's Next

Trie is built to automate the distribution mechanics I spent 50+ hours doing manually in this experiment: finding the right communities, identifying people with the problem, drafting the first outreach message. The goal isn't to remove the human element — it's to remove the 10 hours of research and drafting that precede the human moment.

If you're at the same stage — product built, distribution unsolved — early access is open. We're onboarding a small cohort of no-code founders to validate the approach with real users before scaling.

Get Early Access to Trie →