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. Gong analyzed over 67,000 recorded sales demos and found the actual, measurable habits of the ones that closed, not opinion.... Gong Labs Article Effective strategies for conducting successful sales demos Gong Labs
  2. This essay is not about demos, it is about the underlying test our short answer relies on: if you cannot explain something... Farnam Street Essay Feynman Technique: The Ultimate Guide to Learning Anything Faster Farnam Street
  3. Video · 35 min video Founder-Led Sales for Y Combinator Demo Day Sam Blond
  4. The condensed, skimmable version of Blond's YC talk, written up as a thread after he spoke to a live batch. Good for a quick... X (Twitter) Thread · short read How to succeed with founder led sales Sam Blond
  5. A practicing operator's version of our own bar: Girdley says you need a proven, repeatable process and something like 15... Michael Girdley Essay · 12 min read Playbook: When & how to hire your first salesperson Michael Girdley
  6. Jason Lemkin has watched thousands of SaaS founders make this hire, and this is his running list of what goes wrong. The number... SaaStr Article · 12 min read The Top 10 Mistakes Folks Make Hiring Their First Sales Team Jason Lemkin
  7. A free grab-bag of the actual artifacts (email templates, qualification checklists, call scripts) you need to run consistent... Close Template · 9 email templates, 3 checklists, 2 scripts, 5 books The Startup Sales Resource Bundle Close / Steli Efti
  8. A plug-and-play spreadsheet for calculating win rate, average deal size, and churn from your own numbers. Use it to actually... HubSpot Tool · spreadsheet tool Sales Metrics Calculator HubSpot
  9. Written for the stage right after your first hire works, this explains why hiring account executives before product-market fit... a16z Article · 15 min read Your product won't sell itself: How to build a world-class sales team Jason Rosenthal
  10. This one flips the seat. Karthik Chakkarapani is the buyer, a CIO at Zuora who has sat through hundreds of startup pitches, and... The Neon Show Podcast · ~65 min What Startups Can Learn From a $1.7B Company's Chief Information Officer Siddhartha Ahluwalia (host), Karthik Chakkarapani (guest, CIO of Zuora)
  11. A US buyer deciding whether to trust an unfamiliar Indian vendor reads your contract as closely as your product. YC's free,... Y Combinator Template YC Standard Sales Agreement Template Y Combinator
  12. Lemkin has watched thousands of SaaS companies go through this exact stage and is blunt about where founder led sales quietly... SaaStr Article Why Founder-Led Sales Breaks Earlier Than You Think Jason Lemkin
  13. The cheapest way to bridge a twelve hour timezone gap is to stop scheduling a live call for everything. Loom lets you record a... Loom Tool Loom for Sales Loom
  14. Spolsky's classic essay explains why willingness to pay for the identical product varies wildly by customer, using the image of... Joel on Software Essay · ~20 min read Camels and Rubber Duckies Joel Spolsky
  15. Fried's answer is deliberately unromantic: pick a number, put it in front of real people, and let the market correct you... Signal v. Noise (37signals) Essay · ~5 min read How to price something Jason Fried
  16. This lays out the mechanics of anchoring price to the value a customer gets rather than to what competitors charge, which is... Harvard Business Review Article · ~8 min read A Quick Guide to Value-Based Pricing Utpal M. Dholakia
  17. A short, free book written by a bootstrapped software founder specifically for people who have never priced anything before and... Neil Davidson / Red Gate Software Book · ~80 pages Don't Just Roll the Dice: A Usefully Short Guide to Software Pricing Neil Davidson
  18. A concise, practical guide written for founders setting SaaS pricing for the first time, with none of the consulting-firm... Stripe Atlas Guides Article · ~10 min read Pricing low-touch SaaS Patrick McKenzie
  19. Podcast · ~70 min Girish Mathrubootham: Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR Harry Stebbings (host), Girish Mathrubootham (guest)
  20. This explains the actual mechanism behind starting higher than feels comfortable: whoever names a number first shapes the... Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School Article · ~7 min read Price Anchoring 101 Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School
  21. A real thread of solo founders arguing through exactly your problem in the comments, including pushback from Indie Hackers... Indie Hackers Thread · ~10 min read How do you "charge more" as an indie hacker? Courtland Allen
  22. This piece names the exact trap founders fall into: sending the same generic "just checking in" message everyone else sends,... Predictable Revenue (Steli Efti) Article Why Your Competitors' Follow-Ups Aren't Working (and Yours Can) Collin Stewart
  23. When your short answer says follow up on the date whether or not they replied, eventually you reach the point where you need a... HubSpot Template The Power of Breakup Emails: 7 Templates To Close the Loop HubSpot
  24. This is a tight, practical breakdown of why most recap emails fail: they bury the action item under a long summary. It argues... 30MPC (30 Minutes to President's Club) Article 3 Steps for Crafting the Perfect Sales Recap Email 30MPC (30 Minutes to President's Club)

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 →