Small win + a bug I didn't know I had

One of my comparison pages (mine vs. a competitor) climbed from position 25 to 19 on Google in just a few days. Nothing huge, but it's the first page that's actually moving instead of just sitting there.

While digging into why, I found something a bit embarrassing: a "competitor analysis" feature I built a while ago was silently calling the wrong API endpoint. It never crashed, never threw an error - it just always returned an empty result for one specific field. Nobody complained, probably because nobody trusted a feature that looked half-broken. I only caught it today because I finally tested it against real data instead of assuming it worked since it shipped. Makes me wonder how many other quiet-fail bugs are sitting in features I built early on and never touched again.

Anyway, the question I keep struggling with: how did you get your first real users, beyond friends and family? Everything I try (SEO content, comparison pages, cold outreach) feels like it takes forever to show any signal.

Curious what actually worked for people here.