Business: How to Get Your First 10 Customers
You think you know who your target customer is. The harder question is: how do you actually find them and start a conversation?
Strategy advice already exists — do things that don’t scale, founder-led sales, charge for the product. This article is about the tactics of getting customers 1 through 10.
Source note: This article synthesises ideas from a Y Combinator Startup School talk by Max (visiting partner), based on dozens of YC founder stories about how they landed their first customers. It is a practitioner summary, not a transcript. Support the original talk if the topic matters to you.
Start here: where does your buyer spend time?
Before you touch a tool or pick a channel, answer one question:
Where does your target customer actually spend their time?
Most founders default to cold email and LinkedIn. It is easy, it happens from a laptop, and it feels like work. For some buyers it works — for example, selling sales software to a sales leader who lives on email and LinkedIn.
For many others it fails. School district administrators, property managers, insurance agents, truck dispatchers — people who are not on a laptop all day and whose inbox is not the centre of their work life. Blast them with cold email and you will conclude “outbound doesn’t work,” when the real problem is wrong surface.
One YC founder spent months on email and LinkedIn into a legacy industry with terrible open and reply rates. When he finally walked an industry trade show, he closed more in three days than in three months of cold email. His customers were on job sites, at conferences, and on the phone. Refining subject lines had been a waste of time.
Buyer-day questions (one hour)
Sit down and answer concretely:
- What does their average day look like?
- How often do they check email?
- Do they go to conferences — and which ones?
- Are they on Reddit? LinkedIn?
- Do they pick up the phone?
- Do they mostly ask friends for software recommendations?
- Which industry newsletters do they read?
If you cannot answer most of these, you have not spent enough time with real customers. Fix that before anything else.
Customers 1–3: work your warm network first
Before email automation or prospecting tools, start with people you already have a connection to. Across founder stories, the first two or three customers almost always came from:
- Friends in the industry
- Former colleagues
- Classmates
- People one introduction away
Early buyers are not only buying product quality. They are taking a bet on you. First- and second-degree connections are the easiest people to take that bet.
Work these sources in order
- Personal network — former colleagues, classmates, industry friends. Highest trust. Talk to them first.
- Second-degree LinkedIn — who your connections know; ask for warm intros. One founder closed about half her YC-batch customers via LinkedIn intros.
- AI network search tools — e.g. Happenstance-style natural-language search across your extended network (“find people who work on notification systems at big companies”).
When you ask for an intro, be specific: who you want to meet, why they would care, and what to paste into the forwarded email. Lower friction → more intros.
Pattern: Prospecting tools only start to matter once you have ~10–20 quality customers. Weeks spent setting up outreach stacks while second-degree connections sit unmessaged is skipping the lowest-hanging fruit.
Show up in person
A surprising theme in founder stories: many closed their first customers by being in the same room — not settling for Zoom.
It is slower, awkward, sometimes expensive, and you can get rejected face-to-face. It also tends to beat almost everything else for the first ten.
Fly out to close
- One founder flew to a single executive buyer four weeks in a row. Reschedules kept happening; he kept showing up; he closed them.
- Another showed up at offices uninvited (often asked to leave). One flight to Hawaii ended in an eight-minute kick-out — that same account later became one of his biggest.
Small conferences beat spray-and-pray
One real conversation at a small, industry-specific conference often converts better than cold-emailing the same person.
Conference mini-playbook used by multiple founders:
- Put Calendly (or similar) 15-minute slots back-to-back for every conference day
- Before the event, email the attendee list a couple of times and fill slots
- Email again during the event for people who missed the first send
- Stack meetings all day so the conference is not “networking vibes” — it is a filled calendar
Micro-events
Founder dinners or happy hours for your ICP: 6–10 people, roughly $50–$100 a head. Consistently converts better than large events. Once someone has dinner with you, they rarely ghost your follow-up — and sometimes they help you.
For the first ten customers, no tool replaces being in the same room as the buyer.
Find where the pain is public
For consumer or SMB products, there is often an online place where future customers already complain about the problem you solve. Your job: find it and show up as a real person.
Reddit (and cousins)
Common patterns:
- Post a product video → comments rip you apart → hundreds of lurkers quietly sign up
- Mine old threads where people complain about your exact problem → DM commenters one by one (one founder’s first 10 came this way)
- Healthcare founder: responding to Reddit and Facebook complaints was basically the job for months — 2–5 posts a day; some shadowbans; also real customers
Broader than Reddit: Facebook groups, Discord, YouTube comments; for B2B niches, industry forums or trade-association boards.
Reddit bonus: threads land in Google and persist for years. Work today can keep paying off.
Outbound: when you finally go cold
After warm network, in-person, and communities, you will need people you do not know. Job: match ICP companies → right person → contact info → reach out.
Tools founders actually started with
| Tool | Role at this stage |
|---|---|
| Apollo | Most common start — lead DB, email finding, basic sequencer. Free tier often enough for the first list. |
| Clay | Research/enrichment workflows with AI — useful when you qualify on specifics (tech stack, hiring, recent LinkedIn posts). |
| LinkedIn Premium | Freshest professional data. Pattern: connection request without a note → short DM after accept. One founder’s biggest customer and highest-converting cold channel. |
Apollo alone is enough for most founders this early.
Frame outreach as something other than a pitch
Often the most effective early outreach was not framed as a sales pitch — advice, mentorship, product review, whiteboard session.
Do not mislead. If you are not actually open to learning, do not disguise a sales call. If you genuinely want to learn and build a relationship, the framing can be a real foot in the door.
Examples from founders
- Reach out to CEOs in your space asking for mentorship — short, real messages; flattery helps; some mentors become customers
- Talk to ~200 salespeople before the product exists; weekly LinkedIn hypothesis testing (~50% accept, ~20% of those to calls) → pipeline of people who already told you what they need
- DevTools: free whiteboarding on agent architecture + shared Slack to help implement — architecture that happens to need your product
- Selling to lawyers: pay $100–$200/hour for product feedback (~30% accept). Expensive-sounding math; conversion high enough that CAC stayed reasonable — especially in high ACV markets
Outreach copy that works (without obsessing)
Exact wording matters less than people think. A few things matter a lot:
- Under ~75 words. Long emails get ignored and smell like LLM paste.
- One clear CTA. Reply? Call? 15-minute demo? Ambiguity reads as “this will eat my time.”
- Read it out loud to a friend. If you would not say it to a real person, rewrite. One-minute filter for AI-sounding lines.
Give before you ask
Highest-converting outreach often delivered value first:
- API security: quick vulnerability scan of the public site
- Mobile onboarding: walk through their app with specific suggestions
- Compliance: short audit note specific to their product, then ask for a deeper meeting
Not sustainable at scale — that is the point. You are chasing the first 10, not a factory. Twenty minutes of research before asking for thirty minutes of their time is a fair trade.
Follow up: three or four times over a couple of weeks.
The frame: 1–3, 4–10, then 10–50
| Customers | Where they usually come from |
|---|---|
| 1–3 | Personal network — friends, former colleagues, one intro away. In the founder survey, almost no counterexamples. |
| 4–10 | Things that don’t scale — fly out, Reddit DMs, dinner for six, personalised LinkedIn DMs, free consulting. Tedious, manual, and how you learn before you automate. |
| 10–50 | Playbook shifts — refined pitch, case studies, clearer value prop. Then Apollo, Clay, sequences, and volume tools start to make sense. |
The messy middle (4–10) works because the founder is doing it. Showing up at an office, DMing on Reddit, or sending research only someone who studied the problem would send signals something automation cannot fake: you care enough to put your own time in.
That is your advantage vs established competitors. Lean into it.
Closing standard
The first 10 customers will likely not come from a tool. They come from you manually tapping your network and showing up.
You do not need to be an amazing salesperson. You need to be willing to do the unscalable things most salespeople and founders will not do.
- Map where the buyer lives before you pick a channel
- Exhaust warm intros before outbound tooling
- Get in the room — flights, small conferences, micro-dinners
- Show up where pain is public — Reddit, forums, groups
- Cold outbound last — and frame it as learning when it is real
- Short copy, clear CTA, give before ask, follow up
- Scale tools after ~10, once the message is worth scaling
Good luck — and go get the first ten.
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