How did you find your first real user?

I’m genuinely curious how people here found their first real user.

I’ve been building a B2B product called Rectiva (https://rectiva.io/) based on a problem I encountered while working at a design agency.

We were working with a global brand that had local teams across multiple countries. They already had detailed brand guidelines and Figma templates, but keeping the actual output consistent across markets was still difficult.

That experience made me think there might be a product opportunity there, especially for people working in Brand Operations, Brand Governance, Global Brand, Creative Operations, Brand Design, or Marketing Design.

So I built it.

But now I’m realizing that finding even one real user is much harder than I expected.

I’ve posted about it on LinkedIn, Indie Hackers, and Peerlist. People have given me thoughtful feedback, which I’m really grateful for, but I still haven’t had a real team sign up and actually use it.

The beta is free, so I thought getting a few people to try it would be easier. Apparently not ..

I’m not trying to get hundreds of users right now. I really just want to find one team that actually has this problem and see whether the hypothesis holds up when they use the product in a real workflow.

So I’m curious:

How did you find your first user who wasn’t a friend, tester, or someone you already knew?

Did you do cold outreach? Find a niche community? Just keep posting until someone showed up?

And how long did it take?

I’d love to hear what the early days actually looked like for you.