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. YC partners who have watched thousands of founders unpack what the essay looks like in practice, with real examples from... Y Combinator Video · 26 min YC's Group Partners Discuss Doing Things That Don't Scale Y Combinator Group Partners
  2. The full Airbnb origin story, including the moment the founders flew to New York to photograph listings themselves because bad... Product Habits Article · 20 min read How Two Designers Created Airbnb and Turned It Into a Billion-Dollar Company Hiten Shah
  3. A short explainer of the Stripe tactic Paul Graham named after the Collison brothers: instead of emailing a signup link, they... This is KP Article · 8 min read The Collison Installation KP
  4. A method for finding exactly where your customers already gather online, the forums, subreddits, and groups where they post... Stacking the Bricks Article · ~12 min read How to Find Your Audience's Online Watering Holes Alex Hillman
  5. A compact guide to interviewing around jobs, pains, and gains without leading the witness. It keeps you from talking about your... Strategyzer Article · ~6 min read A Quick Guide to Asking Good Customer Questions Strategyzer
  6. A blunt, founder-written case for charging early customers instead of giving the product away. Shah walks through exactly what... OnStartups (Dharmesh Shah) Article Giving Your Software Away For Free (Startup Reality Distortion Effect #1) Dharmesh Shah
  7. A curated set of pricing deep dives from operators who have set prices at real companies. This is the right next step once you... First Round Review Article Our 6 Must Reads on Pricing a Product First Round Review
  8. Campbell has pricing data on thousands of companies, and his core message is that willingness to pay is something you can... Intercom (Inside Intercom) Podcast Patrick Campbell on the Art and Science of Pricing Patrick Campbell
  9. A ready made four question survey for finding the price range your customers see as fair, including the point where "too cheap"... Contentsquare Template Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Survey Template Contentsquare
  10. A short, balanced look at whether to charge alpha and early customers, with founders on both sides. The useful conclusion is a... Fast Company Article To Charge or Not to Charge: That's the Question for These Startups Fast Company
  11. A founder's story of clinging to free, then flipping to paid and reaching real revenue. It is concrete and relatable if you are... Indie Hackers Article From Refusing to Charge for His Products to Making $500k+ ARR Indie Hackers
  12. A clear breakdown of incentive choices (free trial, discount, pilot fee) for getting first traction without simply giving the... Mercury Article Free Trials vs. Discounts: Choosing the Right Startup Incentive Mercury
  13. A two time unicorn founder's answer to the exact fear behind giving it away: the belief that a low or zero price wins you... A Smart Bear Article Should I Price My Product Low? Jason Cohen
  14. An entire newsletter dedicated to reverse engineering how companies like Uber, DoorDash, and Spotify got their first thousand... Ali Abouelatta (First 1000 newsletter) Article · Newsletter archive, 10 min per issue First 1000 Ali Abouelatta
  15. This is the Figma half of your short answer, told with the CEO's own account. Field cold emailed designers he admired and... Fortune Article · 5 min read How Dylan Field cold-emailed his heroes to build Figma Fortune
  16. 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)
  17. Talking to prospects only pays off if you capture what you hear in a way you can act on. This free Google Doc gives you a... Kromatic Template · Google Doc template Customer Discovery Note-Taking Template Kromatic
  18. 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
  19. 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
  20. A practical conversation on validating demand through structured customer research rather than gut feel or friendly signups.... First Round Review Podcast Podcast · 50 min How to find product-market fit before you start building (with UserLeap's Ryan Glasgow) Ryan Glasgow
  21. 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
  22. 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
  23. A ready made structure for running and logging customer interviews the Mom Test way, so your manual research is captured... Notion Marketplace (GrowthHacking.World) Template · Notion template Problem-Solution Navigator: A Mom Test Based Interview Template GrowthHacking.World
  24. 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

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 →