I bootstrapped my company over 2012, and we now employ three full-time people and adding more. What we did to get out first few users was simple: we wanted to

I bootstrapped my company over 2012, and we now employ three full-time people and adding more. What we did to get out first few users was simple: we wanted to build cool software, and we had a few ideas. We took our favorite, built a cool landing page that spelled out the features with a demo, and then set it free on Twitter. We had 1500 early beta signups before we went into private beta. We now have over 100,000 users and we never spend money advertising. In terms of getting our first paying customers: we just charged for it. People will pay for things that they think are valuable. However, pricing and the pricing "model" have been the #1 source of missed opportunities and optimization points for us (though we have fixed a lot of that), so they are really important to think about.