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. IndiaMART is India's largest B2B marketplace, and its founder talks candidly about aggregating supply first (opening 52 offices... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · ~45 min Bundling & Unbundling, Blitzscaling & B2B Opportunities with Dinesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO IndiaMART Prime Venture Partners
  2. A clear, jargon free explainer of the problem plus practical seeding strategies (single side focus, faking supply,... Sharetribe Marketplace Glossary Tool · 10 min read What Is the Chicken and Egg Problem in Marketplaces? Sharetribe
  3. 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
  4. Video · 48 min How to Build Products Users Love Kevin Hale
  5. A grounded, tactical read on the leaky bucket problem for founders who just closed their first handful of customers. It covers... Vitally Article · ~10 min read Turning Your First Customers Into Recurring Revenue Ian Russell
  6. Balfour (Reforge) makes the case that retention and engagement, not raw acquisition, decide which company wins. It explains the... Brian Balfour Essay · ~15 min read Why Product Market Fit Isn't Enough Brian Balfour
  7. Intercom's team, led by Des Traynor's thinking, argues onboarding is the new conversion: keeping customers matters more than... Intercom Blog Article · ~12 min read Onboarding Strategies to Drive Long-Term Customer Retention Intercom
  8. From India's largest community of SaaS founders, this is peer advice on landing and holding early customers without spray and... SaaSBoomi Article · ~10 min read How to Get Your First 10 B2B Customers SaaSBoomi (Raviteja Dodda, Mohit Garg, Sahil Aggarwal)
  9. 37signals built durable products on treating customers with genuine respect, and this episode captures their philosophy of... REWORK by 37signals Podcast · ~30 min Let Your Customers Outgrow You Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
  10. Sean Ellis coined growth hacking and built the 40 percent product market fit test, and here he explains why retention, not... Lenny's Podcast Podcast · ~70 min The Original Growth Hacker Reveals His Secrets (Sean Ellis) Sean Ellis, Lenny Rachitsky
  11. Airtable is the friendly database that sits under most no-code stacks, and it is where many founders quietly run the first... Airtable (airtable.com) Tool Airtable Airtable (airtable.com)
  12. A fast way to check whether a screen reads clearly in the first impression, which is often where clunky starts. Show people a... Five Second Test (Lyssna) Tool Five Second Test Five Second Test (Lyssna)
  13. If launching is a repeated habit rather than one event, you need a low-stakes place to keep launching, and Product Hunt is the... Product Hunt Tool · Web platform Product Hunt Product Hunt
  14. A crisp, opinionated set of principles for building software: work in cycles, say no to busy work, keep momentum, and let the... Linear Tool · Reference site Linear Method: Practices for building Linear
  15. Chopra bootstrapped Wingify to a large exit from India after first failing by building an everything tool nobody asked for. He... The Neon Show Podcast · 60 min How To Build A Successful Startup In India ft Paras Chopra Siddhartha Ahluwalia and Paras Chopra
  16. Two Indian founders turned investors on what they actually weigh when funding early founders, including resilience and... The Neon Show Podcast · ~44 min VC Wisdom: Nansi & Siddhartha on Investing, Fundraising, and Growth The Neon Show (Nansi Mishra & Siddhartha Ahluwalia)
  17. The clearest explainer of how VCs actually decide, from term sheets to how partnerships evaluate founders. Understanding the... Andreessen Horowitz Book · 336 pages Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It Scott Kupor
  18. Levels documents committing to ship a new startup every month for a year, in public, mostly to unglamorous silence, until two... levels.io Essay I'm Launching 12 Startups in 12 Months Pieter Levels
  19. A crowdsourced list of over a hundred directories and communities where you can list or relaunch a product, useful as a... Indie Hackers Template Relaunch like a pro: 100+ places to launch, relaunch, and list your product Indie Hackers community
  20. This explains why buying upvotes is a waste of money, not just against the rules. Votes are weighted by account quality and... Product Hunt Help Center Article How does Product Hunt ensure fair voting and prevent spam or vote manipulation? Product Hunt Help Center
  21. The nuts-and-bolts mechanics of the submission flow itself: what fields you'll fill in, what's required, and how the process... Product Hunt Help Center Article How to post a product Product Hunt Help Center
  22. A short, practical rundown from someone who's actually gotten featured twice, with the small unglamorous stuff that gets... Indie Hackers Article I launched 2 apps on Product Hunt and both were featured, here's what I learned Indie Hackers
  23. An honest account of a launch that stalled at 200 upvotes and ranked below a blender, and what the founder changed to do better... Indie Hackers Article Notes from a failed Product Hunt launch Indie Hackers
  24. Product Hunt's own founder, talking to YC about what separates launches that land from ones that don't. He's blunt that a clear... Y Combinator Article Ryan Hoover on Product Hunt's Acquisition and Lessons Learned About Startup Launches with Dalton Caldwell Y Combinator

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 →