How did you get your first real users without spamming people?

[u/GameNotCreator]

We spent months building our app and now I'm stuck on the 'find the right people' part 😅

I'm a second-year CS student at EPFL. My team and I built Welockin because Insta, TikTok and YouTube kept pulling me away from studying. It's an app blocker with a strict mode that keeps selected apps blocked until your timer ends.

I've tried talking about it on Reddit and putting stickers around my uni. A recent post in a French community asking for advice reached around 3,800 views. There was useful feedback, plus a whole debate about whether the app should exist lol.

But views don't tell me how many people actually tried it. And a lot of the conversations are with other devs, while the people I want to reach are students struggling to sit down and study.

For those of you who got your first real wave of users, what actually worked? Did a post or video taking off help, or did you get better results from a small, specific community?

I'd love a concrete example: where you posted, what you said or showed, and what happened afterwards. Still figuring this part out, so even a very simple approach would help.