How do you get your first 100 website visitors?

The first hundred visitors matter out of all proportion to their number: they're how you find out whether the page communicates, whether anyone clicks the button, whether the idea survives contact with strangers. Here's where they reliably come from, and — since a hundred visitors is really a hundred data points — what each source teaches. (Disclosure: published by BidSurvivor, source four.)

Source 1: The people who already know you (~20 visitors)

Your network, posted once, honestly: "I built this, tell me what's confusing." These visitors are warm and useless for market data — they click out of loyalty — but their confusion reports are gold. Fix what they trip on before inviting strangers.

Source 2: One community post (~30–50 visitors)

The subreddit or forum where your users complain about the problem you solve. One post that leads with the problem and mentions the product second. These are the highest-intent visitors on this list; if they don't click your call-to-action, the page has a message problem, not a traffic problem.

Source 3: A small-stage launch (~50–200 visitors)

Uneed or Fazier rather than Product Hunt for a first outing — the full comparison. Curious, product-minded strangers: perfect for testing whether your one-liner stops a scroll.

Source 4: A free ad slot (~a trickle, fully measured — ours)

BidSurvivor sells two twelve-hour ad slots a day; an empty one is free to claim and every account starts with $100 of house credit, so this costs nothing. The visitors are few — young board, numbers public — but they're cold: nobody's friend, nobody's community. Cold clicks are the strictest test your pitch line gets, and here the test is free and self-reporting.

Source 5: Directory findability (a slow drip, forever)

An evening of directory submissions won't produce a spike, but it starts the permanent drip and makes your name searchable — which sources 1–4 all quietly depend on.

Read the hundred like data

Warm visitors validate clarity, community visitors validate demand, launch visitors validate the pitch, cold clicks validate the one-liner, and search drips validate findability. A hundred visitors that all came from one source answer one question; a hundred from five sources answer five. That's the whole trick — and the next milestone's playbook is in how to get traffic on launch day.