Developers who got their first 100 users — what actually worked?

Built and deployed a side project recently. It's live on a Vercel URL right now and a handful of people have tried it.

I've been reading about growth and everyone says different things:

- "Post on Product Hunt"

- "Build in public on Twitter"

- "Get on Hacker News"

- "Cold email people"

- "Just build a great product and it spreads itself"

None of this tells me what to do on day 1 with zero audience and zero budget.

So I'm asking people who've actually done it:

How did you get your first 10 users? Were they people you knew personally or strangers?

How did you get from 10 to 100? Was there one thing that worked or a combination?

Did having a proper domain name matter early on or did people not care about the .vercel.app URL?

Did social media actually bring users or just followers who never converted?

I'm not asking for theory. I want to know what you literally did. Even if it was embarrassing or manual or doesn't scale.