Get your first customers

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

1. The origin story of the first Indian SaaS company to list on NASDAQ, told by the company itself. Freshdesk found its first... Freshworks (The Works) Article · 10 min read The Freshdesk Story: Where and How It All Started Freshworks (The Works)
2. A clear, short explainer on why asking friends (or anyone) what they want produces false positives, and how to interview for... NYU Entrepreneurship Article · 8 min read Stop Asking What They Want: Why Customer Discovery Is About Problems, Not Products Frank Rimalovski
3. Fishkin pushes back on the fuzzy way founders talk about fit and argues for tracking concrete behaviors like usage, retention,... SparkToro Article · 12 min read Product-Market Fit is a Broken Concept. There's a Better Way. Rand Fishkin
4. Your question is really about a denominator, and this piece gives realistic stage-by-stage conversion benchmarks. It helps you... Close.com Article · ~12 min read Understanding Your Sales Funnel Conversion Rate Steli Efti
5. Hoffman turns the Airbnb story into four transferable lessons, including the crucial one about when to stop. The manual,... Reid Hoffman (Medium) Essay · 12 min read How to Scale a Magical Experience: 4 Lessons from Airbnb's Brian Chesky Reid Hoffman
6. Written specifically for engineers who would rather ship code than sell. McKenzie, a developer who bootstrapped his own... Kalzumeus Essay · approx 20 min read Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It Patrick McKenzie
7. A short, honest founder writeup that echoes the heart of our answer: a handful of real conversations with people in your target... Indie Hackers Thread · approx 10 min read How I got my first 100 users Alexander Chen
8. Cohen bootstrapped two companies past a hundred million in revenue, and he is blunt that a typical launch converts around one... A Smart Bear (Jason Cohen) Essay · 15 min read Excuse Me, Is There a Problem? Jason Cohen
9. Early sales is not about volume, it is about finding the few customers who want your vision badly enough to bet on an unproven... Andreessen Horowitz Article When Sales Isn't Just Selling: Advice for Founders in Early Markets Martin Casado
10. This reframes early customers as something you win through effort rather than something you stumble onto, which directly... Medium Article Early Stage Sales: Why Every Startup's First Customers Are Won, Not Found DC
11. A calm, practical guide to founder-led selling from zero, built around the idea that you close early deals through warm... Stripe Atlas Article Your first 10 customers Patrick McKenzie
12. If you are unsure whether it is your price stopping the sale, start here: figure out which order of magnitude you are in (a 10... Naomi Ionita, Lenny's Newsletter Article How to price your product Naomi Ionita
13. Sometimes the stall is your pitch: you demo features instead of framing the problem and the cost of not solving it. Dunford... April Dunford, Lenny's Newsletter Article A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins April Dunford
14. Practical scripts for the exact moment interest collides with price, so you have something better than a nervous discount. It... HubSpot Article 14 responses to the objection "Your price is too high" Davidson Hang
15. A companion breakdown of how early users became paying customers, including companies that had no paid plan at launch and... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How today's fastest-growing B2B businesses turned their early users into paying customers Lenny Rachitsky
16. When you want your old network to open doors rather than just buy, this covers how to ask in a way that respects their time and... Kristina Hu (Hu Knows) Article · ~8 min read How to Ask for a Warm Intro Kristina Hu
17. A grounded walkthrough of where first customers realistically come from, starting with the people you already know. It treats... Startups.com Article · ~15 min read How to find the first 100 customers for your startup Startups.com
18. A concrete, tactical guide to working through your own network toward paying customers without awkward pitches. It walks... UniTel Voice Article · ~15 min read How to Get Your First 10 Paying Customers Using Your Personal Network UniTel Voice
19. The other half of the problem: once you have supply, how do you get the first buyers so sellers do not churn out of an empty... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 15 min read Cracking the Chicken-and-Egg Problem: Growing Initial Demand (Part 4) Lenny Rachitsky
20. Before you sweat which side to seed, Gurley helps you judge whether your marketplace is even structurally worth building. He... Above the Crowd Essay · 20 min read All Markets Are Not Created Equal: 10 Factors to Consider When Evaluating Digital Marketplaces Bill Gurley
21. Since supply is usually the side you bootstrap by hand, this is a focused list of 28 concrete ways real marketplaces did it. It... andrewchen.com Article · 15 min read 28 Ways to Grow Supply in a Marketplace Lenny Rachitsky (via Andrew Chen)
22. Balfour, who led growth at HubSpot and founded Reforge, breaks the cold start into the mechanics of how you actually reach... Brian Balfour Essay · 20 min read The Network Effect: Solving the Chicken or the Egg Brian Balfour
23. This is the famous story of Airbnb flying to New York and photographing listings door to door, the most literal example of... First Round Review Article · 12 min read How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from Failing Startup to Billion Dollar Business First Round Review
24. A practical, structured playbook for the exact fear in this question: users quietly leaking away. Lenny breaks retention into... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How to Increase Your Product's Retention Lenny Rachitsky

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