The only two places my users hang out both ban self-promotion — how did you get a first customer out of a community without getting banned?

Ask the moderators. Genuinely, just ask. I emailed the admin of a community in my sector, explained what I had built, said I did not want to break the rules, and asked what was allowed. She gave me a monthly vendor thread I did not know existed and later mentioned the tool in a newsletter. Two of my first ten came from that. The worst case of asking is a no, and the best case is that the person enforcing the rule tells you the sanctioned route through it.

I got banned doing the impatient version and it cost more than the time. Posted a genuinely relevant reply with a link in month one, got removed, argued about it, got banned permanently. The community was small enough that two people I later approached directly had already seen the argument and one of them mentioned it. Losing access is recoverable; being the person who argued with the moderators is not.

Write the thing the community keeps asking for and give it away with no signup. A comparison, a template, a checklist of how practices handle a specific scheduling mess. Post it as a resource with no link to your product at all. Half the moderators who ban promotion will pin something like that, and the people who need it will find you anyway.

The rule is against promotion, not against you being there, and that distinction is the whole game. I spent about ten weeks answering scheduling questions in a similar community with nothing in my signature and no link anywhere, and by week six people were tagging me in threads. My first three customers all came from private messages that they started. It is slow, it does not feel like sales, and it is the only version of this that works in a moderated room. What does not work is being useful for two weeks and then posting a launch announcement, because everyone can see the shape of that.

Disagreeing with the community-first strategy, at least as the main plan with three months of runway. Twenty practices in your own city, phoned or walked into, will teach you more in two weeks than a quarter of forum participation, and one of them may pay you. Communities are a good long slow channel and a terrible urgent one. With ninety days I would do the direct approach for customers and participate in the forums because it is useful, not because it is the plan.

Your first ten customers are not going to come from a channel that scales, and that is fine. Mine came from four conversations, two introductions, and a conference badge. Stop looking for the repeatable one until you have proof anybody pays at all.