[smalter]

Good points. Social news (HN, reddit) is a great place to find early adopters, and interact directly with them.

I launched http://iDoneThis.com here on HN in January and now we have 5,000 users. A benefit to that was not only finding early adopters and engaging with them, but in that engagement, you have the opportunity to find what people want and improve the product. One thing we discovered from the international audience at HN is that our site didn't work with unicode, and folks abroad wanted to be able to adjust their timezone from the default US/Pacific. We added those features and now we have a huge following in Japan.

I wrote a bit more about how we got our first 5,000 users here: http://blog.idonethis.com/post/4779807862/how-we-got-our-fir...