What is the best marketing strategy for a pre-launch startup to get initial users to validate the idea?

Personal network or leverage an innovation hub.

Here are some ways to collect pre-launch users @Buse B.: • Use your network of friends, colleagues, and family • Create a landing page that will allow people to subscribe • Get strong on social media • Be active in different industry and entrepreneurial communities like Facebook groups, Slack channels, IndieHackers, subreddits, etc • Post teasers and sneak peeks • Contact industry influencers for collaboration • Develop a content marketing strategy that will educate users & collect leads • Prepare a press kit & pitch to prominent journalists

I don't know the best way, but the way I'm about to do it is 1 - DM people who I hypothesize might be interested in my product. Get them to schedule a 15-minute call with me so I can 2 - ask them questions about their root pain, what they've tried to solve that pain, if they've paid for any solutions. I'm not going to ask them what they want, only what they've struggled with. 3 - And then I'll go from there. Either people will pay me money and I'll have some confidence that I'm on the path to establishing product-market fit, or I won't be able to get people on zoom calls for any reason, or I will be able to get them on calls but they won't have any urgent pains to speak of, in which case I'll learn, pivot and move on to a more educated hypothesis.

Apart from the great responses above, reading ‘The Mom Test’ should be a good starting point as well.

@Buse B. great advice above. Build your audience of potential customers by reaching out and asking for their advice first...convert them into community members...add value to them...give away free stuff and keep them updated on your product/service... Tech adoption curve says 10-20% will become early adopters/betas that you can pilot your V1 with. Convert a percentage of those into paid when you're ready launch.

Depends on a startup and the types of users. Here're some examples by types of how my team does go-to-market. 👇 1 - B2B SaaS: (i) - build a landing page with clear product description, fair advantages, price and don't forget to set conversion points there; (ii) - build an ICP dividing TA on segments; (iii) - Find communities (slack, discord, others) where groups of decision makers are; (iiii) reach out them with indirect advertising - ask how they already solve the problem/do they want to try to solve it differently?/do they want a trial? (iiiii) consider the referral program for early adopters to convert them into advocates 2 - B2C SaaS (i) - the same as above; (ii) - the same as above, but consider if you need to have both sides at the platform (demand and supply); For example, we promoted an immigration platform Visxa that helped immigrants to solve their cases and, at the same time, needed lawyers who worked with requests. (iii) - For customers (immigrants) we launched campaigns. They were based on pains and were launched in Facebook as the TA was well presented there. To attract lawyers we analyzed communities and reached them manually through LI (LI is for business and job opportunities initially, so lawyers willingly answered messages) 3 - B2C app (i) - LP (ii) - AppStore and PlayMarket optimization (iii) - Multichannel direct advertising basing on ICP (iiiI) - Partnering with companies/products that work with the same TA and provide complementary offers