get your first users by hand
sign up your first hundred to five hundred users yourself, and interview them before you scale any channel.
what to do
Get your first 100 to 500 users one at a time, by hand. Message them, onboard them, and watch them use the thing. Run Mom Test interviews before you spend a rupee on a channel: ask about their life and what they do today, never whether they like your idea.
for example
Founders I talk to want to flip on ads or a big partner tweet before they have spoken to anyone. I tell them to go get the first users personally and sit in the interviews. The teams that do it learn who actually pays and why. The teams that skip it scale a channel that pushes the wrong people at a product that is not ready.
the failure it prevents
A channel that pours strangers into a leaky product. You burn money, learn nothing, and still cannot say why anyone came back.
when this doesn’t apply
Once you have a repeatable loop where hand-signed users stick and refer others, that is the signal to turn a channel on. Scaling before then just scales the leak.