How does a young entrepreneur gain users and traction for his first startup without any prior experience into the field?

find the pain, give a solution. you will find people along the way.

I can tell you the following: 1. Ideas (by themselves with no action) are worthless. Idea by itself has absolutely no value. People come up with millions of ideas day and night all the time. And then then they wake up and go to work for some who tells them what do all day. What has value is the potential execution and what you could do with it. Idea by itself is just as useless as spitting into the wind. Believe me, I did it, I made the same mistakes and I've grown only after accepting it. 2. Are you addressing a market need? Your idea is the key (as much as it contradicts the first statement) , but is there is a key difference: Does your potential service / product solve a problem that is real in the market? Is there a need or some kind of wish in the market which your product could potentially provide a solution for? If there isn't, you are just experimenting. If there is, there is probably competition which is already satisfying that need.  If there is a need but no competition the potential valuation of the business you can create may be many times higher than your expectations. The second and most likely possibility (of having some potential competition)  is better for you. If there is competition, then you can be sure there is business. If there is competition, you can be sure you'll be addressing some market needs. 3. Does your potential service / product solve a problem that is real? If yes, focus your creative energy and efforts on developing solutions NOT for what you think would be great service, but what the MARKET actually requires. Talk to your customers. Your customers will tell what they need. Edit: By the way, if you want to know what the "market actually requires" you need to narrow down to a specific market and then gain the experience  and the in-depth knowledge of that market.

First, your in competition with millions of other ventures. If your average user has time for 5 apps/web sites/products, yours needs to be more alluring than all but 4 of those rival products. Second, thousands of those rivals are burning through investment at a shocking rate to buy attention and establish a foothold. You have to spend more or spend smarter to get people's attention, if you want to be more popular than them. Third, if there was a silver bullet, everyone would use it and you'd still have to find an edge. So, what to do? Well, looking at success stories, there are some established tactics which work. Do something better than all the similar products. Content and algorithms are key generally. Facebook has all your friends providing content everyday. Google makes the web accessible. Wikipedia knows everything. Twitter has millions of people exchanging views. Do something in a way that is so appealing people enjoy using it more than other products, and want to tell their friends. Instagram is a good example. And focus on a niche market that you can really establish yourself in first. Facebook is an excellent example. It gained traction on one university campus, then expanded to similar universities, before going nationwide, using it's existing userbase to pull in more and more users. If you can offer a highly focus product to a niche you have much more chance of getting wide acceptance in that smaller market than if you compete with the big budget ventures. But even if you do everything right and invest millions, it's still going to be hard to make that money back. Alternativily, you could keep cost low and be prepared to try many things until one catches on. At the very least you'll learn by experience, which is good because your competitors won't tell you how to beat them, and experience will make your big idea much more investible which will help you compete.