no twitter, no list, and i won't do video - how do the first 100 humans find a $12/mo tool

Integration directories are underrated and almost nobody in this thread will mention them. If your tool touches a platform that has a marketplace or an app directory, get listed. The listing is a page with buying intent on a domain with authority, it costs a day of paperwork, and it does not require you to have a personality online.

Same logic for the smaller aggregators in your niche: association member lists, tool roundups maintained by a trade blog, open source awesome lists if you are near developers. Boring, unglamorous, permanent.

Yes, and it is slower and more durable than the video route.

Go where your niche already asks questions in public and answer them properly, without linking to yourself for the first several weeks. Forums, professional communities, the comments under trade publications, question sites. The bar is: your answer should be useful to someone who never clicks anything.

What this actually buys you is not clicks. It is language. After 30 or 40 answers you will have the exact phrases these people use for their problem, which is what you then put on the landing page and in the titles of pages you write. That is the part people skip and it is the part that compounds.

My first 60 users came from about nine months of that, and about half arrived through search on pages I wrote using phrases I had literally copied out of forum posts.

Worth saying plainly: you can also just be slow. Three friends and one payer is not nothing at this stage. If you write one good thing a week for a year and email twenty people a week, you will have a real business or a definitive answer, and either outcome is better than the version where you burn out making videos you hate in month two.

Small newsletters in a narrow niche will take money and it is not expensive if you look below the big names. Anything with a few thousand engaged subscribers in a trade you are serving will usually quote you something in the low hundreds, and some will do a swap or a straight mention for free if the tool genuinely helps their readers.

Measure with a dedicated landing page per placement, not a UTM you will forget to check. If a placement sends 40 visits and 3 signups, that is a repeatable channel, and repeatable beats big.

Direct outreach counts as distribution and does not require an audience. Twenty emails a week to people who obviously have the problem, written by hand, no template. You will hate the first fifty. By the hundredth you will have talked to more real users than most people with 3,000 followers.

The reason people prefer building an audience is that rejection is asynchronous and diffuse. Cold outreach is rejection in your face, one name at a time. It is also faster.

One narrow page per problem, written like a real answer, not like marketing. Not "the best tool for X", but the specific question with the specific number in it. Those pages take months to move and then they keep working while you sleep. Everything else on this list is you working.