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Your first customers for an AI tool are already in Slack and Discord, asking how to automate some part of their job. You do not need an audience. You need to show up in the right rooms, answer real questions, and offer your tool only when it fits.

All guidesFor founders of an AI tool

1. Latent Space Discord

This is the community around the Latent Space podcast. It is full of AI engineers and builders comparing models, evals and tooling. Read the pinned rules first, then post your work only in the channel set aside for sharing projects. Answer questions in the technical channels with real detail, for example: "We hit the same retrieval issue. Chunking by heading instead of token count cut our bad answers a lot. Happy to share the script."

2. MLOps Community Slack

Join at mlops.community. Members are ML engineers, platform engineers and data scientists shipping models to production. Search the workspace for the problem your tool solves, such as "prompt versioning" or "LLM monitoring", and reply to threads from the last few weeks. Keep self-promotion to the channels the admins allow, and lead with what you learned building it, not a pitch.

3. Hugging Face Discord

Good for open-source model users and developers fine-tuning or deploying models. Help people who are stuck in the help and model-specific channels. If your tool wraps or deploys HF models, share a working Space or notebook when you show it off. Something like "I built a Space that does X on your own CSV, link below, feedback welcome" lands better than a landing page.

4. RevGenius Slack

A large community of SDRs, AEs, RevOps and sales leaders. Go here if your AI tool writes outreach, scores leads, summarizes calls or cleans CRM data. Search for "AI", "ChatGPT" and "Clay" to find people describing manual work. DM only after a public reply: "Saw your thread on researching accounts by hand. I built a tool that does that step. Want me to run it on 10 of your accounts for free?"

5. Superpath Slack

A community for content marketers, many of whom are deciding how to use AI in their writing workflow. It fits AI tools for briefs, editing, SEO research or repurposing. Members are skeptical of generic AI writing, so show a concrete before and after from a real draft. Ask for feedback, not signups, and read the rules on promotion before posting.

6. DataTalks.Club Slack

A free community of data engineers, analysts and ML learners. It works for AI tools that touch SQL, notebooks, data cleaning or analysis. Answer course and career questions to build trust, then share your tool in the channels where projects are welcome. Offer to give a short demo or write up how you built it. Members often like build stories.

7. Online Geniuses Slack

A large workspace of growth, SEO and performance marketers. It suits AI tools for ad copy, keyword research, reporting or landing pages. Search for complaints like "takes me hours" or "anyone automate" and reply with a specific fix. Invite 3 to 5 people to a free pilot in exchange for a 15 minute call.

8. Run a 30 minute daily routine

Each morning, search two of these communities for your problem keywords, reply helpfully to three threads, and follow up with anyone who engaged yesterday. Log every conversation in a simple sheet with name, pain and next step. Hulby, an AI cofounder, can run this search and follow-up loop for you every day.

Mistakes to skip

  • Joining 20 communities at once and posting the same launch message in each.
  • DMing people cold right after they join, with no public conversation first.
  • Leading with model names and features instead of the job the tool does.
  • Ignoring pinned rules and posting promos outside the allowed channel.

Want this done for your AI tool, every day?

Hulby finds the people asking for what you built, writes every reply and email, and keeps you on it until they pay. Free to start.

Find my first customers

Questions

How many communities should I join at first?

Two or three that match your buyer. Go deep in those before adding more.

When is it okay to mention my tool?

When someone describes the exact problem it solves, or in the channel the admins set aside for sharing. Otherwise, just help.

Should I offer the tool for free?

For the first 5 to 10 users, yes, in exchange for a call and honest feedback. Then ask the happiest ones to pay.

How long until I see results?

If you show up daily with useful answers, you can expect conversations within a week or two. Paying customers usually follow from those conversations.