About

Last updated: June 30, 2026

I built HowTheyGotUsers because I got tired of watching good products die quietly. The hardest part of starting something isn't writing the code or designing the logo. It's the moment after launch when you realize building the thing was the easy part, and nobody is showing up. Most founders then spend months guessing their way through growth, copying whatever tactic is loudest on Twitter that week, and quietly burning the runway they can't get back.

The frustrating thing is that the answers already exist. Founders talk. They go on podcasts, write honest post-mortems, do AMAs, and explain in plain detail exactly how they got their first hundred, thousand, or ten thousand users. The problem is that this knowledge is scattered across hundreds of hours of interviews and buried in old blog posts. Nobody has time to mine all of it. So I did.

Here is how the library is built. I study public founder interviews, podcasts, and write-ups, and for each one I distill the actual playbook into an original, step-by-step write-up you can act on, not a vague "they did content marketing" summary. Then I link every single tactic back to its real public source, so you can verify it yourself, hear it in the founder's own words, and go deeper whenever you want. These are my own plain-English summaries of techniques discussed publicly. We do not host anyone else's copyrighted text. Think of it as the index and field notes that the internet never had.

Inside, you will find around 3,000+ tactics organized across 13 channels and product types, from cold outreach and community building to SEO, partnerships, launches, paid acquisition, and the weird one-off hustles that actually moved the needle. You can search by what you're building and by how you want to grow, and pull up a shortlist of moves that real companies have already used to win.

It's for founders, indie hackers, and early teams who would rather start from what already worked than start from a blank page. You don't need another framework or another guru. You need to see the specific, concrete things that people in your exact situation did, and then go do your own version. That's the whole promise: start from evidence, not from zero.

If that sounds like what you've been missing, take a look at what a subscription includes. And if you have a question first, I read every message at our contact page.