I got 500 users with $0 marketing. Here's the exact breakdown.

Everyone asks about growth hacks.
Nobody asks about the unglamorous stuff that actually worked.
Here's the honest breakdown of every user XEdge got in 3 months:
Discord — ~200 users
Not from posting links. From genuinely answering questions in startup and AI servers for two weeks before mentioning XEdge once. Trust first. Product second.
Direct / word of mouth — ~150 users
People telling other people. This only happens when the product actually does something useful. Build useful first.
Social media — ~100 users
One tweet hit 1K views: "Your competition isn't AI. It's someone using AI better than you." Everything else averaged 100-200 views. One post did 10x the work of everything else combined.
SEO — ~50 users
Early but compounding. Three months of indexed pages starting to show up in searches.
The honest lesson:
There is no hack. There is just showing up in the right rooms, being genuinely useful, and saying something true that makes people stop scrolling.
Building xedge.tech — solo, 18, India, still going.
What's your highest converting channel at early stage?