How to Find Your First 10 Customers

Drew Houston didn't find Dropbox's first customers through ads. He didn't hire salespeople. He made a video.

In 2007, Houston posted a simple screencast to Hacker News showing how Dropbox would work. No product existed yet. Just a demo video that took a weekend to create.

Within 24 hours, 75,000 people signed up for the waitlist.

That's the first lesson of early customer acquisition: your first customers come from going directly to where they already are, not from building marketing funnels.

But most founders don't have a viral video. They have a product, a landing page, and zero customers. Here's how to change that.

Start With Your Network (But Do It Right)

The most common advice is "start with your network." The problem is most founders do this badly.

Bad approach: Post on LinkedIn saying "I built a thing! Check it out!" and wait.

Good approach: Make a list of 50 people who might experience the problem you're solving. Then reach out individually with a specific ask.

Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad, got his first customers by emailing creators he personally knew. He didn't blast his network. He identified specific people who were already selling digital products through clunky workarounds and showed them a better way.

How to work your network effectively:

1. List everyone you know from past jobs, school, conferences, and online communities
2. Filter for people who match your target customer profile (or know someone who does)
3. Send personalized outreach: "Hey [Name], I'm building [one sentence]. You came to mind because [specific reason]. Would you be open to a 15-minute call to get your feedback?"

The "feedback" frame works better than "buy my product." People want to help with feedback. Once they understand the problem you're solving, buying becomes natural.

Second-degree connections matter more than you think. Your friend might not need accounting software, but their friend who just started freelancing does. Always ask: "Do you know anyone who might be dealing with this problem?"

One founder I know got 6 of his first 10 customers through second-degree introductions. His direct network had zero matches. But each person he talked to knew someone who did.

Online Communities: Where Specificity Wins

The internet is full of communities where your target customers congregate. The trick is being helpful, not promotional.

Reddit works when you've been a genuine community member first. Dropping links gets you banned. Providing value and mentioning your product when directly relevant builds trust.

Look at how this plays out:

Bad: "I built [product]! Check it out at [link]!"

Good: "I've been dealing with this exact problem for years. I actually started building a tool to solve it after the third time I lost a client proposal in my email. Happy to share what I've learned about managing this workflow."

The second approach starts conversations. People ask follow-up questions. You build relationships. Some of those relationships become customers.

Specific tactics for Reddit:

• Find 3-5 subreddits where your target customers discuss their problems
• Spend 2 weeks answering questions and providing value before ever mentioning your product
• Use Reddit search to find old threads about your problem space and identify common pain points
• When someone posts about the exact problem you solve, offer genuine help first, product mention second

Hacker News is similar but skewed toward technical audiences. Show HN posts can drive significant traffic if your product resonates. But the community is skeptical of marketing speak. Lead with what's technically interesting about your approach.

Industry-specific communities often convert better than general ones. A Slack community for SaaS founders, a Discord for indie hackers, a Facebook group for local restaurant owners. These are smaller but more targeted. Find where your specific customers hang out.

Twitter/X works through consistent presence. Pick a topic related to your product, share insights daily, engage with others in your space. Over months, you build an audience that knows and trusts you. When you launch, you have warm leads.

How Pieter Levels built Nomad List:

Pieter Levels was already active in the digital nomad community on Twitter and various forums. When he built Nomad List, his first customers came from the community he'd been part of for years. They trusted him because he was one of them.

Cold Outreach That Actually Gets Responses

Most cold outreach fails because it's obviously templated and self-serving. The emails that work are specific, short, and focused on the recipient's problem.

The formula that works:

1. One sentence showing you did research on them specifically
2. One sentence describing the problem you solve
3. One clear ask (usually a short call)

Example:

"Hi Sarah - I saw your talk at SaaStr about scaling customer success teams. I'm building a tool that helps CS teams identify at-risk accounts before they churn. Would you be open to a 15-minute call next week to get your feedback on our approach?"

Notice what's not in there: paragraphs about your product, feature lists, or generic benefits.

Where to find prospects for cold outreach:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator lets you filter by role, company size, and industry
• Company websites often list team members by department
• Twitter bios reveal job roles and interests
• Conference speaker lists are goldmines of engaged people in specific industries
• Job postings tell you which companies are actively investing in the problem you solve

The volume game:

Expect a 5-15% response rate on well-crafted cold emails. That means sending 100 emails to get 10-15 conversations, which might yield 3-5 customers.

The math matters. If you need 10 customers, plan to have 30+ conversations, which means 200+ emails sent. This isn't spray and pray; it's systematic outreach with personalization.

Follow-up is where deals happen:

80% of sales require 5+ touches. Most founders give up after 2. If someone doesn't respond to your first email, send a polite follow-up a week later. Then another. The people who eventually convert often respond to the third or fourth message.

Content Marketing Quick Wins

Full-blown content marketing takes months to pay off. But there are quick wins that can generate leads in weeks.

Guest posting on established blogs:

Find blogs your target customers already read. Pitch an article that provides genuine value. Include a subtle mention of your product or a link in your bio. One well-placed guest post can drive 50-100 signups.

Answering questions on Quora:

Search for questions related to your problem space. Write thorough, helpful answers. Mention your product only if it's directly relevant to answering the question. Old questions with ongoing traffic can drive leads for years.

Creating a useful free tool:

Build something small that solves a related problem. Make it free. Collect emails. HubSpot's Website Grader tool generated millions of leads this way. These users become pre-qualified leads for your main product.

Launch Platforms: Product Hunt and Beyond

Launch platforms give you a concentrated burst of attention. Used well, they can kickstart your customer base.

Product Hunt:

The platform gets 5+ million monthly visitors looking for new products. A successful launch can generate hundreds or thousands of signups in a day.

What makes a Product Hunt launch work:

• Launch on Tuesday or Wednesday (highest traffic)
• Prepare your community in advance to upvote at launch
• Have a launch-day discount or special offer
• Respond to every comment
• Get featured by a well-known hunter if possible

What Product Hunt won't do:

It won't save a bad product. The traffic is real but brief. If visitors arrive and your product doesn't immediately communicate value, they leave and don't come back.

Beta List and similar platforms:

Beta List curates startups for early adopters who specifically want to try new products. These users expect rough edges and provide better feedback than mainstream users.

Other platforms to consider: Indie Hackers (especially for bootstrapped products), Hacker News (Show HN posts), relevant subreddits (many allow launch announcements on specific days).

Local Meetups and Events

In an age of digital everything, physical presence stands out.

Meetups:

Meetup.com lists thousands of events organized around specific interests. Find meetups where your target customers gather. Don't go to pitch. Go to learn and connect. Business happens naturally when people know and like you.

Industry conferences:

Conferences concentrate your target customers in one place. Even as an attendee (not exhibitor), you can have dozens of conversations over two days. The hallway track often yields more leads than the official sessions.

Running your own events:

You don't need a conference. A small dinner with 10 potential customers costs a few hundred dollars and creates relationships that mass marketing never could. One founder I know got 4 of his first 10 customers from a single dinner he organized.

What NOT to Do

Watching founders struggle, the same mistakes appear over and over:

Mistake 1: Waiting for inbound

"I'll put up a landing page and run some ads." This rarely works for finding your first customers. You don't know your messaging yet. You don't know which channels work. You'll burn money optimizing the wrong things.

First customers require direct outreach. Once you understand what resonates (by talking to actual humans), then you can scale with paid acquisition.

Mistake 2: Targeting everyone

"My product is for anyone who uses email." When you target everyone, you connect with no one. Your messaging stays generic. Your outreach lacks specificity.

Pick a narrow initial audience. "I help freelance designers manage client feedback" is better than "I help teams collaborate." You can expand later. Start specific.

Mistake 3: Selling before listening

Your first customer conversations should be 70% listening, 30% talking. Founders who show up pitching miss crucial feedback. They don't learn why people buy (or don't). They miss objections they could address. They talk past the actual problem.

Ask questions. Understand their situation. Then, and only then, explain how you can help.

Mistake 4: Giving up too early

Finding 10 customers might take 100 conversations. Those conversations might take 500 outreach attempts. Most founders quit after 20 attempts and conclude "nobody wants this."

The data isn't meaningful until you've talked to 30+ potential customers. Persist.

Mistake 5: Hiding behind the product

"I need to add more features before I can sell." No, you need to talk to customers. The features you think you need are probably wrong. Build based on real customer feedback, not assumptions.

Your first customers don't need a perfect product. They need a solution to their problem. Even a manual, ugly, partial solution beats nothing.

Converting Early Users to Paying Customers

Getting people to try your product isn't the same as getting them to pay. Here's how to make the transition:

Set expectations from day one:

Be clear that this is a paid product with a trial period, not a free product. "You'll get full access for 14 days, then it's $X/month if you want to continue." No surprises, no hard feelings.

Define success criteria:

Ask early users: "What would need to happen in the next 2 weeks for this to be worth paying for?" Then focus your energy on making that happen. When the success criteria is met, asking for payment is natural.

Make payment easy:

Every friction point in the payment process loses customers. Accept cards. Don't require phone calls. Have a clear pricing page. Let people upgrade with one click.

Create urgency without being sleazy:

"Early adopter pricing is available until [date]" gives people a reason to decide now without feeling manipulated. Offering annual plans with a discount (2 months free) gives you cash upfront and reduces churn.

Finding Customers Before You Build

The best time to find customers is before you write code. Pre-selling validates demand and provides funding for development.

How to pre-sell:

1. Create a landing page explaining what you're building
2. Set a launch date 2-3 months out
3. Offer significant early-bird pricing (40-50% off)
4. Collect payment upfront or at launch

Buffer's founder Joel Gascoigne famously validated the product with a landing page showing pricing. When people clicked to sign up, they saw "We're not quite ready yet. Leave your email." Those emails became his first customers.

Why pre-sales matter:

Someone paying in advance tells you more than 100 survey responses. If you can get 10 people to prepay, you have validated demand with the strongest possible signal.

Using Bedrock Reports to accelerate discovery:

Finding the right customer for your product requires understanding who experiences the problem most acutely. Bedrock Reports's Founder-Market Fit mode helps you identify opportunities that match your background and network. Pain Point Mining surfaces communities where potential customers are already complaining about the problem you solve.

This intelligence helps you target your outreach. Instead of spraying messages at everyone, you focus on the specific people most likely to convert.

The First 10 Are the Hardest

Here's the truth nobody tells you: finding your first 10 customers is the hardest part of building a startup.

You have no social proof. No testimonials. No case studies. You're asking people to trust an unknown product from an unknown company. Every customer requires manual effort, personal relationships, and direct sales.

But those first 10 are also the most valuable. They shape your product through their feedback. They become your case studies. They refer others. They prove the concept works.

After 10, things get easier. You have momentum. You have evidence. You have stories to tell.

The founders who succeed at this stage share a common trait: they're willing to do things that don't scale. Manual outreach, personal demos, one-on-one calls. They do the work that algorithms can't replicate.

Your first 10 customers won't come from viral marketing or paid acquisition. They'll come from you, directly, solving their problem and asking for the sale.

Start today. Make a list of 50 people. Send 10 emails. Have 3 conversations. Learn. Iterate. Repeat.

Your first 10 customers are out there. Go find them.

Keep Reading

• How to Validate a Business Idea - Make sure you're building something people want before you start selling
• Founder-Market Fit Guide - Why your background determines your best opportunities
• Pain Point Mining Tutorial - Find customers by understanding where they're already frustrated
• The Startup Validation Checklist - 15 questions to assess your idea before going to market

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Ready to find your ideal customers? Try Bedrock Reports's discovery modes to identify the communities, pain points, and opportunities that match your background and product.