How to get your first users for an app you built with Lovable or Bolt

When an app takes a weekend instead of a quarter, the bottleneck moves from building to distribution. Most builders who ship with Lovable or Bolt have no audience yet, no email list, and a product that looks like many others on launch boards. The fix is not ads. It is getting a small number of real people through your signup and listening to what they say.

• Test signup end to end on a phone and a laptop. Use a fresh email. Apps built on Supabase auth (Lovable’s default backend) often have email confirmation on; make sure the email arrives and the link works on your published URL.
• Offer a free signup without a credit card. Early users will not pay to try something new, and most builder communities, FirstUsers.club included, require a free way in.
• Make the first screen explain itself. After signup, a new user should know what to do next without asking you.
• Decide on a domain. A free subdomain like yourapp.lovable.app is fine for testing and for FirstUsers.club, but some launch boards (BetaList, for example) do not accept free hosting subdomains, and a custom domain looks more trustworthy.
• Add analytics so you can see where people drop off between visiting and finishing signup.

1. FirstUsers.club. Join a 5-week cohort of 30 builders and sign up for 5 members’ products a week. In your launch week, at least 25 members sign up for your app and answer the question you choose. It works with any URL, including lovable.app subdomains, and for iPhone and Android apps and Chrome extensions too. Basic is $10, or earn a free entry.
2. Builder communities on Reddit and Discord. r/SideProject and the communities around Lovable and Bolt are full of people who just shipped too. Share what you built and ask one specific question; give feedback on other people’s posts as well.
3. Niche communities. If your app is for teachers, runners or landlords, the subreddit, Slack or Facebook group where they gather is worth more than any launch board.
4. Launch boards. Uneed and Peerlist Launchpad give you a launch day with less competition than Product Hunt. Our Product Hunt alternatives page compares them.
5. Your own network. Message ten people who fit the audience and ask them to sign up and tell you what confused them.

On FirstUsers.club each signup comes through a tracked link and is matched to the email or phone used. You can check them by hand, but if you built with an AI tool there is a faster way: in your website settings (Account → Websites → Edit, or My week), copy the setup prompt and paste it into Lovable, Bolt, Cursor or Replit. It tells your app to remember the FirstUsers link a visitor arrived from and, when they finish signing up, report it from the server with your secret key. Each signup is then verified the moment it happens and marked “auto-verified” on your public launch page.

The secret is stored as an environment variable or secret in your builder, never in the browser, and the call never blocks or slows down your signup if it fails.

• “What almost stopped you from signing up?”
• “What did you expect to happen after you signed up?”
• “Would you use this again next week? Why or why not?”

Ask one question at a time and read every answer. Twenty-five answers to one good question will tell you what to fix next. Our guide to honest feedback goes deeper.