Who should you target when your app has no users?
Choose a group whose recurring task you can describe and investigate. A useful starting description combines a person, a situation, and something they are trying to finish. Small business owners is a category; independent designers preparing a project brief after a client call gives you a situation to discuss and a workflow to observe.
You do not need certainty about the eventual market before talking to anyone. You need a defensible first choice and an explanation of what could change your mind. Write the choice as a hypothesis: we think this group has this difficulty, currently handles it this way, and could test this part of the app. Leave unverified parts visibly marked as assumptions.
This is the first lesson in our Marketing 101 path for builders seeking their first users. If you have already shipped with Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, or another tool, begin with the deployed workflow people can actually use. The marketing overview for vibe coders connects this audience decision to the rest of the path.
Describe the situation before inventing a customer persona
List the event that makes someone consider doing the task. A new client inquiry, a missed appointment, or an upcoming report can be more useful than an invented age, personality, and list of hobbies. Ask what happens immediately before the task, what the person needs to produce, and what happens if they postpone it. Those details give your research a concrete starting point.
Next, write the current workaround. It might be a spreadsheet, an established app, a colleague, or a decision to leave the task undone. A workable alternative can explain why a person understands your app and still feels little reason to try it. Record what you know about that alternative separately from what you imagine is inconvenient. Your product needs a useful role in their actual circumstances.
- Person: who carries out the task, and who experiences the problem?
- Trigger: what happens shortly before they need a solution?
- Current approach: how do they finish the work today?
- Consequence: what is difficult, delayed, or left incomplete?
- Trial: what small result could they evaluate with the app as it exists?
Compare a few plausible audiences using one fictional app
Suppose a fictional app turns a maker’s notes into an editable project brief. The same feature could be relevant to a solo designer, an agency account manager, or a student working on a group assignment. Their desired output may look similar, while access, responsibility, and reasons to change are different. The table is an invented planning exercise; it contains no customer research or market-size findings.
Choose the next investigation from the uncertainty in the final column. A founder who already knows freelance designers may be able to arrange a relevant conversation quickly. That access makes the hypothesis easier to test. It does not establish that designers have the strongest demand or that the app can safely handle their real client information.
| Possible audience | Situation to investigate | Possible current approach | Uncertainty to resolve |
|---|---|---|---|
| Independent designer | Preparing scope after a discovery call | Personal notes and a document template | Does producing the brief create enough difficulty to change tools? |
| Agency account manager | Passing a client request to a delivery team | A shared template and internal review | Can this person introduce a tool or approve its use? |
| Student project group | Agreeing responsibilities before an assignment | Chat messages and a shared document | Is the problem repeated often enough to support continued use? |
Keep the user, buyer, and approver separate
The person using an app may not control the budget or have permission to upload work into it. For early research, identify who can describe the task and who can agree to a realistic trial. Otherwise, a positive conversation can turn into an unusable invitation: the person likes the idea but cannot connect an account, provide the input, or authorize the purchase.
For the fictional agency example, you could demonstrate with synthetic notes before asking about a real client workflow. Learn how tools are evaluated and which requirements affect a trial. Avoid promising that you meet an organization’s requirements before checking them. A first audience is useful when you can learn about both the task and the practical path to trying your solution.
How can you find evidence when you have no audience?
Begin with places where people already discuss or perform the work: a professional group you can join appropriately, public questions about a workflow, existing relationships, or an introduction from someone who knows the role. Save the context of a relevant observation. A complaint about a product may concern a feature you do not provide, so check what the person was actually trying to achieve.
The GOV.UK research-planning guidance recommends choosing explicit questions before selecting a method. For this exercise, choose one uncertainty you can investigate next. You might need an interview about the current process, or an observation of someone attempting a task. Our worksheet and audience comparison are editorial tools for making that choice, not a validated demand-scoring model.
Use the customer-interview guide to plan a conversation. When you are ready to invite someone to a working trial, the first-user guide covers the different purpose of that invitation. Research participation and product adoption should be recorded separately.
Should other vibe coders be your target audience?
They are a relevant audience when your product solves a task they face. Builders may be suitable users for a deployment utility, screenshot tool, or development workflow. For a tool serving a different profession, maker feedback can still reveal an unclear screen or broken button, while leaving the customer-demand question open. Record which question each conversation can answer.
Using AI to build the app can be an interesting part of your story. Give prospective users an explanation of the useful task, the result, and the current limits. Once you have an audience hypothesis, the one-sentence positioning exercise helps translate it into language a new visitor can assess.
When should you narrow, change, or keep the audience?
Keep an evidence log with observations that support the hypothesis and observations that challenge it. Repeated examples of a task, an existing effort to solve it, and willingness to attempt a relevant workflow are useful things to investigate further. Praise, a social like, or a survey response can provide context without establishing any of those conditions.
If several people describe different problems, separate the situations before combining their responses. If nobody you contact performs the task, revisit recruitment rather than treating the lack of interest as a market verdict. If the group performs it but your current workflow does not help, examine the product’s fit. A small research round informs a next step; it does not estimate the size of the whole market.
What should you do after choosing a first audience?
Write a short research brief naming the group, the situation, the main uncertainty, and the smallest useful task your product can support. Add where you might find participants and why those people fit the question. Keep the brief small enough to revise when you learn something unexpected. The downloadable worksheet includes blank rows so you can compare your own hypotheses without filling in invented evidence.
Continue to customer interviews before making strong claims about demand. Later, use the channel-selection guide to choose a route that reaches the same audience. Consistency between the person, the promise, and the destination makes your next marketing experiment easier to interpret.