First Customers (GTM)

I have zero marketing budget. What distribution can I actually do for free?

A starting point

Free distribution is not really free, it costs your time and often your face. The honest options for a broke founder are: showing up in communities where your users already gather, writing or posting in public consistently, direct outreach to people one at a time, and partnering with someone who already has the audience you want. Pick one, do it for 90 days without switching, and treat your own time as the budget you are spending.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 2 link-checked Watch Read

Watch

▶️ Video
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it After the book and the essay, this is the tactical walkthrough: how to get your first 100 customers with no ads, no complex SEO, and no viral trick. It leans on the same do things that don't scale idea but turns it into concrete first moves you can run this week. Use it as a starting point for a plan, then adapt the specifics to where your own customers actually hang out.

Y Combinator's Brutally Simple Playbook to Get Your First 100 Customers

On YouTube by Y Combinator

Y Combinator's Brutally Simple Playbook to Get Your First 100 Customers
  • Start with people you already know or can reach directly, since warm outreach converts far better than anything cold.
  • Go where your customers already are (communities, threads, DMs) rather than waiting for them to find you.
  • The early goal is a small group who genuinely love the product, not a big vanity number.
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →

Read

📖 Book
✓ Link checked Paid Beginner

Why we picked it When you have no budget, the worst move is to pour your limited time into a channel that was never going to work for your product. Traction gives you all nineteen ways a startup can reach customers and a simple way (the Bullseye framework) to bet on two or three worth testing first. Treat it as a menu and a method, not a verdict: your free channels will come from this list, you just have to find the ones that fit you.

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

From Portfolio (Penguin Random House) by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares

  • Most startups die from no distribution, not a weak product, so give traction real time, not leftover time.
  • There are nineteen channels (content, SEO, communities, PR, sales, and more), and most founders ignore the ones that would actually work for them.
  • Bullseye: brainstorm across all channels, rank them, then run cheap tests on your top few instead of guessing.
Open penguinrandomhouse.com →
✍️ Essay
Free Beginner

Why we picked it The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few customers. The cheapest, most honest way to validate demand is to go get it one person at a time.

Do Things That Don't Scale

From paulgraham.com by Paul Graham ~15 min read

  • Recruit your first users manually, don't wait for them to come.
  • A tiny group of users who love you beats a big group who like you.
  • Manual, unscalable effort early is a feature, not a failure.
Open paulgraham.com →

People also ask

How do I figure out which distribution channel is right for my startup? Run experiments, don't guess. Use the Bullseye framework from 'Traction': brainstorm across all ~19 channels, pick 3 promising ones to cheaply test... Intermediate 2 resources → Why does everyone say 'distribution is more important than product'? Because a great product nobody can find dies quietly, while an average product with a strong channel wins the market. Most founders overspend on bu... Intermediate 2 resources → What are the actual distribution channels I can choose from? There are roughly 19 well-known ones, SEO, content, paid ads, viral/referral, email, sales, business development, PR, community, existing platforms... Beginner 1 resource → Should I focus on one channel or spread across many? Focus. Early on, pick one channel that shows real traction and pour your energy into mastering it before diversifying, spreading thin across five c... Intermediate 2 resources → How do the fastest-growing B2B companies find and scale their distribution? They start with high-trust channels, personal network and direct outreach, to land their first ten, then scale on a dominant engine, most often con... Advanced 2 resources → As an Indian founder, how do I think about distribution for a global product? The channel is still the strategy, but pick ones that don't require you to be physically in the buyer's market, content/SEO, product-led self-serve... Advanced 3 resources →