Get your first customers

The scrappy, unscalable work of going from zero to your first users.

What founders use for get your first customers, ranked by how many answers lean on it.

  1. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham In 47 answers
  2. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick In 43 answers
  3. A tactical follow-on covering the channels and motions top B2B startups scale after the first ten. Grounds distribution... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How to win your first 10 B2B customers Lenny Rachitsky In 36 answers
  4. An Indian founder story where the early demand test was manual, cold emails and direct outreach to find the first customers... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · ~50 min How Khadim Batti Built Whatfix Into a Global SaaS Leader Prime Venture Partners In 31 answers
  5. The authoritative handbook on founder-led sales, written for technical/first-time sellers building B2B SaaS. Readable free... foundingsales.com Book · book (~400 pages) Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook Peter Kazanjy In 26 answers
  6. Jen Abel has coached over 300 early-stage founders through their first sales, so this is grounded in what actually happens when... Lenny's Podcast Podcast · About 1 hour 16 minutes The ultimate guide to founder-led sales | Jen Abel (JJELLYFISH) Lenny Rachitsky with Jen Abel In 23 answers
  7. Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky In 21 answers
  8. When your first ten will come from cold outreach, this guide gives you the full mechanics: building a target list, qualifying,... Close Article · Multi-chapter guide The Ultimate Startup Guide to Outbound Sales Steli Efti In 21 answers
  9. The definitive talk that reframes launching from a one-shot event into a repeatable tactic, exactly this category's thesis. YC... YC Startup Library Video · ~25 min How to Launch (Again and Again) Kat Manalac (Y Combinator) In 16 answers
  10. When you have no budget, the worst move is to pour your limited time into a channel that was never going to work for your... Portfolio (Penguin Random House) Book Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares In 16 answers
  11. A data-backed teardown of how companies like Figma, Gusto, and Vanta actually sourced their earliest customers. Replaces... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How today's fastest-growing B2B startups found their first ten customers Lenny Rachitsky In 13 answers
  12. Video · About 25 minutes How to Get Your First Customers (Startup School) Gustaf Alstromer In 13 answers
  13. Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit Rahul Vohra In 13 answers
  14. This is the best method for the exact job of learning an industry's language when you cannot yet get face time with people in... Stacking the Bricks (Amy Hoy) Article · video walkthrough Sales Safari in Action Amy Hoy In 12 answers
  15. The consumer counterpart to finding B2B customers, focused on manually recruiting your first users for a consumer product. It... Lenny's Newsletter Article How to Find Your Early Adopters by Doing Things That Don't Scale Lenny Rachitsky In 12 answers
  16. The best book on positioning against competitors by understanding the alternatives customers actually consider. Directly turns... aprildunford.com Book · ~200 pages Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It April Dunford In 11 answers
  17. Long-form, candid interviews with Indian founders and investors on how they actually grew, distributed and built brand, one of... The Neon Show / Neon Fund Podcast · 200+ episodes The Neon Show (100x Entrepreneur Podcast) Siddhartha Ahluwalia In 11 answers
  18. Pete Koomen took Optimizely from zero to $100M+ ARR, and here he breaks the enterprise funnel down for exactly the person who... Y Combinator Startup School Video · ~35 min Enterprise Sales for Founders Pete Koomen In 11 answers
  19. This is the canonical argument that you do not need a mass market to build something real, you need a small number of people... The Technium (kk.org) Essay · ~15 min read 1,000 True Fans Kevin Kelly In 11 answers
  20. A YC partner and ex-Airbnb growth lead gives a tactical, no-fluff talk on landing early customers for both B2B and B2C. It's... YC Startup Library Video · ~30 min video How to Get Your First Customers Gustaf Alstromer (Y Combinator) In 10 answers
  21. This is the canonical source of the ship-ugly-first idea, the LinkedIn co-founder's own essay behind the line about being... LinkedIn Essay · About a 6 minute read If There Aren't Any Typos In This Essay, We Launched Too Late Reid Hoffman In 10 answers
  22. The cleanest distillation of the one framework that turns a customer chat into a relationship instead of a survey. The three... Sachin Rekhi's Blog Article · 10 min read A Primer on Talking to Customers From Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test Sachin Rekhi In 10 answers
  23. The canonical fake-door test, told by the founder who ran it. Buffer started as a two-page site: one page pitched the tool, a... Buffer Article · ~10 min read Idea to Paying Customers in 7 Weeks: How We Did It Joel Gascoigne In 10 answers
  24. An Indian SaaS founder on how he found and won real customers by identifying a large underserved market and solving its biggest... The Neon Show Podcast · 60 min How To Sell Global Tech Products From India (with Sharath Narayana) Sharath Keshava Narayana In 10 answers

Show the next 24

The questions

Getting your first 10 customers 18

Do things that don't scale to get to ten.

How do I actually get my first 10 customers when nobody has heard of me? 19 → Isn't doing things that don't scale a waste of time, shouldn't I automate from day one? 17 → Where do I find the very first people to even talk to about my product? 18 → Should I charge my very first customers or give it away free to get traction? 18 → How did real successful startups actually land their first customers? 20 → All 18 questions in Getting your first 10 customers →
Launching (again and again) 18

A launch is a tactic you repeat, not an event.

When is my product 'ready' to launch? 19 → My launch flopped and nobody cared, did I mess it up? 20 → How do I actually launch on Product Hunt and not embarrass myself? 15 → What's the best channel to launch on, Product Hunt, Reddit, Hacker News, or LinkedIn? 17 → How do I build up an audience before I launch so it's not just crickets? 18 → All 18 questions in Launching (again and again) →
Founder-led sales 18

Nobody sells your product better than you, yet.

I'm a technical founder and I hate selling, do I really have to do sales myself? 18 → How do I run a sales call without sounding like a pushy salesperson? 15 → How do I handle objections and prospects who go silent on me? 17 → When do I know it's time to hire a salesperson instead of doing it myself? 19 → What sales process should I follow if I've never sold anything before? 17 → All 18 questions in Founder-led sales →
Cold outreach & email 18

Start conversations with strangers who need you.

How do I write a cold email that people actually reply to? 19 → How many times should I follow up before giving up on a cold prospect? 18 → Cold email or cold LinkedIn/DM, what works better for reaching first customers? 19 → Is cold outreach even worth it, or is it just spam that hurts my brand? 19 → How do I build a targeted list of the right people to cold email? 18 → All 18 questions in Cold outreach & email →
Distribution & channel strategy 18

The channel is the strategy.

How do I figure out which distribution channel is right for my startup? 2 → Why does everyone say 'distribution is more important than product'? 2 → What are the actual distribution channels I can choose from? 1 → Should I focus on one channel or spread across many? 2 → How do the fastest-growing B2B companies find and scale their distribution? 2 → All 18 questions in Distribution & channel strategy →
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →