Article

How to Find Your Early Adopters by Doing Things That Don't Scale

Lenny Rachitsky · Lenny's Newsletter Freemium Intermediate

The consumer counterpart to finding B2B customers, focused on manually recruiting your first users for a consumer product. It is full of tactics for going into communities, WhatsApp and Facebook groups, and forums where your users already spend time. Practical fuel for reaching a market that the metros are ignoring.

  • Go to the online places your users already gather
  • Recruit early adopters by hand before you automate anything
  • Small niche communities can seed your first real users
Open on lennysnewsletter.com ↗

It answers 14 questions

  1. How do I actually get my first 10 customers when nobody has heard of me?
  2. Isn't doing things that don't scale a waste of time, shouldn't I automate from day one?
  3. My launch flopped and nobody cared, did I mess it up?
  4. Where do I find the very first people to even talk to about my product?
  5. How do I get my first users for the MVP?
  6. How do I build up an audience before I launch so it's not just crickets?
  7. Everyone says do things that don't scale, but where's the line between that and just wasting weeks doing manual work?
  8. How do I launch in India where there's no single 'Product Hunt moment' that reaches Indian founders and buyers?
  9. I'm building for Indian SMBs who use WhatsApp for everything. How do I get my first 10 without a fancy sales process?
  10. How do I get customers who don't already know me when I have no brand, no audience, and no case studies yet?
  11. Should I try to close my first 10 customers one by one, or run a small launch to get them all at once?
  12. What are the biggest mistakes founders make trying to land their first customers that I should avoid?

And 2 more across the hub.

Read with it

  1. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  2. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  3. A tactical follow-on covering the channels and motions top B2B startups scale after the first ten. Grounds distribution... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How to win your first 10 B2B customers Lenny Rachitsky
  4. Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit Rahul Vohra
  5. This is the canonical argument that you do not need a mass market to build something real, you need a small number of people... The Technium (kk.org) Essay · ~15 min read 1,000 True Fans Kevin Kelly
  6. A YC partner and ex-Airbnb growth lead gives a tactical, no-fluff talk on landing early customers for both B2B and B2C. It's... YC Startup Library Video · ~30 min video How to Get Your First Customers Gustaf Alstromer (Y Combinator)
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