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. A founder walks through the actual iteration: a first version of the email that flopped, the specific objections they heard... Starter Story Article · 10 min read How We Got Hundreds of Customers Through Creative Cold Emailing Starter Story
  2. A practical piece written for the Indian startup context, with the FreeCharge origin story as its centerpiece: an early cold... YourStory Article · 8 min read The Art of Cold Emailing: Every Startup's Gateway to Marketing YourStory
  3. Barry documents personally emailing bloggers he had researched individually, offering to migrate their email lists by hand for... Nathan Barry Essay · 15 min read Growing ConvertKit to $5,020 in Monthly Recurring Revenue Nathan Barry
  4. Fred Wilson has read tens of thousands of cold and warm pitches as an investor, and this short post is his honest account of... AVC (Fred Wilson's blog) Essay · ~3 min read How to Get Your Emails Read Fred Wilson
  5. Steli Efti has coached hundreds of early-stage founders through outbound sales, and this free guide states plainly that no one... Close Book · 31 lessons, roughly an hour SaaS Sales for Startup Founders Steli Efti
  6. Sajith Pai, a VC at Blume Ventures, wrote publicly about being put off when a founder outsources their own pitch email to a... LinkedIn Thread · 2 min read Always puzzled when I get pitch emails cold from a non-founder Sajith Pai
  7. If you decide to send from a separate domain for deliverability reasons, this is the official, no nonsense setup guide for the... Google Workspace Help Article · 10 min setup Set up SPF Google Workspace
  8. Video Cold Email is Changing Alex Berman
  9. This is the closest thing to a canonical answer to your exact fear: writing to someone who seems too important to reply to you.... Harvard Business Review Article Tips for Cold-Emailing Intimidatingly Powerful People Peter Sims
  10. Josh Braun's 4T framework (Trigger, Think, Third-party credibility, Talk) is a repeatable structure for writing an email that... Josh Braun Article Let's Write a Good 4-T Cold Email Josh Braun
  11. Jen Abel has coached hundreds of early-stage founders through their first enterprise deals, and this episode is unusually... Lenny's Podcast, with Jen Abel Podcast "Sell the alpha, not the feature": The enterprise sales playbook for $1M to $10M ARR Jen Abel
  12. A direct answer to a founder asking almost exactly your question. Lemkin's fix is blunt: fewer, better-targeted emails to the... SaaStr Article Dear SaaStr: Cold Emails Are Not Working for My B2B SaaS Startup. What Am I Doing Wrong? Jason Lemkin
  13. Video I Sent 10 Million Cold Emails - These 5 Scripts Made the Most Alex Berman
  14. Written from the receiving end by someone who gets a lot of cold email, this lays out exactly what makes an ask easy to say yes... Kalzumeus Software Essay · 10 min read Standing Invitation Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
  15. Direct and specific about the ask problem: it points out that asking to 'jump on a call' in the very first email is one of the... Hunter.io Blog Article · 8 min read 8 Cold Email Tips to Improve Your Next Campaign Hunter.io Blog
  16. A first-person account of what actually happened across thousands of sends, rather than a generic best-practices list. Useful... Hunter.io Blog Article · 9 min read 5 Lessons I Learned After Sending 12K Cold Emails Irina Maltseva
  17. Video · ~12 min How to Write Emails That Get Opened Ramit Sethi
  18. An investor walks through, line by line, the actual cold email that got him to say yes to what became a unicorn investment.... The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) Podcast · ~45 min The Contentful Memo: Point Nine's Christoph Janz on the Cold Email That Led to a Unicorn Investment Harry Stebbings
  19. The most complete single book on cold email as a repeatable system, from a writer who built his own business almost entirely on... Amazon Book · ~200 pages Cold Email Manifesto: How to Contact Anyone, Make More Sales, and Take Your Company to the Next Level Alex Berman, Robert Indries
  20. This is a tactical playbook for turning a handful of happy customers into a channel of their own: reference calls, case... First Round Review Article The Startup's Guide to Customer Advocacy: How to Get Closer to Your Champions Kalina Bryant
  21. This is the real time data point behind the ceiling described in the short answer, straight from a community of SaaS founders... SaaStr Article Does Outbound Still Work? 49% Of You Say No Jason Lemkin
  22. Written in 1999, this book named the exact tension you are living through: interruption based outreach gets harder every year... Amazon Book Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers Seth Godin
  23. Barry built ConvertKit's growth almost entirely on flywheels, content, community, and audience, rather than outbound, and this... nathanbarry.com Essay Creator Flywheels: The Operating System for Your Business Nathan Barry
  24. Sheridan's pool company went from near bankruptcy to a category leader by answering every question a buyer might have in public... marcussheridan.com Book They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer Marcus Sheridan

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 →