How We Got Our First 2,000 Users by Using Engineering as Marketing Channel

Sharing actionable experience to build AI products and drive growth

I'm often asked how we bootstrapped and scaled to 100,000 users. It is a question that comes up in coffee chats, and while I appreciate the interest, it skips past the most important part of the story. It ignores the terrifying, exhilarating beginning of your first 100 users. This is the real story is how we got our first 2,000 users in a single week, with nothing but an idea and a bit of hope.

This is the first of many stories I'll share about the wins, the failures, and the unexpected lessons learned whilst building Engage AI and a few other businesses from scratch - as a bootstrapped solo technical founder and first-generation immigrant in Australia.

It is a story about being resourceful and turning constraints into advantages.

Our journey with Engage AI began in the familiar quiet of a founder's ordinary world: just few of us and a blinking cursor, facing the challenge of launching a new product into a noisy world. The call to adventure was clear. We had to find our first users, our tribe, the people who would believe in our vision. But we were armed with little more than the product itself.

We were not backed by VCs and there was no safety net.

The conventional path of big ad spends, SEO, TikTok videos, and massive marketing campaigns was a world we could not afford to enter. For a moment, it felt impossible. How could we, with empty pockets, ever hope to be heard?

But we had a hidden ally, a piece of our past I had almost forgotten. Years before Engage AI, we had built a simple Chrome extension called Hashtag Analytics. It was a passion project, a free tool to help people on LinkedIn find the right hashtags to amplify their voice. Over time, it had quietly grown into a community of over 7,000 active users.

This was our secret weapon, Engineering as Marketing.

The idea struck me not like a lightning bolt, but like a whisper. What if we could speak directly to this community we had already built? This was the threshold. We decided to place a simple banner announcing Engage AI directly onto the LinkedIn page, which would only be visible to our 7,000 Hashtag Analytics users.

It was our message in a bottle, thrown into a private sea.

The moment we pushed it live was our ordeal. The test was not just technical, it was emotional. We had no idea if it would work, anyone would notice, or if they would care. The silence of the first few hours was deafening.

Then, the reward. A trickle of users became a stream, and the stream became a flood. People were installing Engage AI so fast that a new kind of magic began to happen. A few users, convinced it was an official update from LinkedIn, started posting about their access to "new LinkedIn feature".

They became our unintentional evangelists. The buzz was real.

But the true prize, the moment that validated every late night and every doubt, came on the second day. A notification appeared. Our first-ever subscriber. A man named David had not only signed up, but he had paid for an entire year. A stranger, from somewhere out in the world, believed in us enough to invest in our future. That single act was the signal we needed. It was proof.

That first paying customer gave us the conviction to go all in. But we quickly learned the strategies that get you your first 2,000 users are often the exact opposite of what you need for the next 10,000.

Next time, I’ll share the biggest mistake we made, and how it almost killed our momentum.

---