How do I find my first customers?

Will started small on purpose: 30 to 100 dollar small business customers gave a fast feedback loop and reps of people testing the product and finding problems, "actually the most valuable thing at the time." When about 30% of calls "were just not working," the early cohort stuck with them because it "was all built on relationships" — weekly and sometimes daily meetings, and a promise: "we're not gonna make you pay for stuff that's not working." One of those customers now pays "like $78,000 a month."

Discovery conversations are also the customer pipeline. Each conversation produced a relationship that converted later. Talk to people, build for one, ship overnight, repeat.

For a consumer-facing brand, Nathan says "friends and family are usually your best first customers" because you have the direct line. Out of the first 100, "probably half of them were friends or friends of friends." They also tried Meta ads, but "at the very beginning it was extremely expensive, it wasn't worth it, we lost so much money." When it got quiet — "you only have so many friends" — he and Rex "decided to print like thousands of postcards and we just walked down the streets of Melbourne," delivering door to door in Brighton as neighbours with a discount code. It worked: because they were "literally down the street" they'd "deliver within 10 minutes," and customers still mention they "got the founder's postcard in the beginning." His rule: for the first 100 "just try everything," because "it's not about scalability at this stage, it's about getting meaningful feedback from strangers."

Celeste says she "would make silly TikToks that wouldn't even do that well," getting "like 3,000 views in SF," but they would still "get 800 people signed up." That sign-up response was "the first signal to me that what we're building people really want."

On the matching itself, early on "we would have AI do it but it didn't do a good enough job," so the team "would go in and rearrange the matches to make them better or veto matches that we didn't think were good enough." She says they "don't have to do that anymore."

Nam says they got plenty of warm intros from their research network, which helped build pipeline. But the first real customer started with a LinkedIn comment: "our first real customer actually came from a cold comment on LinkedIn." A law-firm director had posted that she was frustrated about the lack of guard rails and trust in AI; Nam engaged with the content "just kind of engaging with her content" rather than pitching, which scored a conversation. It became "a six-month sprint where every day we met with their team," and by the end of the year they were invited to the firm's annual dinner — the moment they crossed "the trust line."

Jevon's pattern was bottom-up then top-down: get user-level feedback first, then use it to open the management conversation. He explicitly told management the team was struggling with "reactive customer service, putting out fires," that it was time consuming and manual, and that Keeyu was a startup launching now. Three companies signed on as pilot customers that way — "a budgie smuggler," E H P Labs, and Helly Hanson. They then shipped the absolute bare minimum version 1 of the MVP, focused entirely on functionality, not "beautiful UX UI."

He says it teaches you thick skin and resilience, and to push the boundaries and get out of your comfort zone to make something work if you believe in it. He could have saved time by getting a distributor, but those early hustle moments are the ones he remembers most fondly.

They literally built it one customer at a time. Fortunately during lockdowns a lot of customers were open to chatting to suppliers on the phone where they weren't before, so they would sit in their living rooms and call the best bars and restaurants and bottle shops in the country, tell them what they were doing, and then walk up to the post office at the end of the day.

There Andy would wrap a couple of cans in newspaper, put them in a box with a handwritten postcard and a few stickers, ship it off, and then a couple of weeks later follow up again on the phone to hear what they thought of the beer. They grew their first 200 customers just doing that. Andy still remembers all of those customers and the relationships built directly with them — most are still ordering five years later, and he makes a point of dropping in to say good day to them when he's in the same city.

Alessia describes early traction as a continuous launch. "We launched the first prototype on the internal YC platform" — "then we launched with YC then we launched with Product Hunt and then we launched with Hacker News and on Reddit as well so it's a continuous process and I think this is the trick." Between launches "you need a lot of feedback and you need a feedback loop where you keep improving the platform based on the feedback that you receive." And much of it is inbound: "a lot of feedback at the end comes naturally, you don't even have to look for that. People come to you because they resonate with the solution, they resonate with the problem, and then they come to you and they ask you specific features." On Product Hunt — "where makers launch new tech products to early adopters" — they "won product of the day and hit 6,000 users in three weeks."

Satya's co-founder had a background in the fraud and risk space, and he even vibe-coded a small outreach product that wrote customized emails to larger companies. But the first customer "actually came from a completely cold message" — they noticed the company was trying to scale its fraud operations and reached out saying "what if we could help you with our AI agent." The company saw a demo and loved it; what Socratix AI was building resonated with what they needed at that point. In less than a week they showed the demo to a broader team and got buy-in. Satya credits an internal champion who "moved the wheels for us really quickly," and they were in production pretty soon after.

The first client was a nine figure brand, and they signed Nike directly after — who are now investors in the business. Hamish also made sure those early customers were massive brands on purpose: the first UK client is Opoli, a 100 million pound brand, because that makes people ask "how did you get that client so early" and is interesting to follow and engage with on social.

Because the product is about offline connection, Butter needed a certain number of users on the wait list before it could launch, so Sam built that wait list first. He didn't start marketing until maybe a week before going live, and once they did, building those 100 users honestly didn't take long — a great proof point that there was a strong need and that the way they were talking about it was right. He admits creating founder content is his "nightmare fuel" and not his favorite thing to do, but it must be done, and he's much better at it now than a year ago.

Their first-customer strategy was to reward early followers. They "primarily did it just as a thank you to the first 150 people that were following us from the start on Instagram and our EDM subscribers," and to "generate more hype for the upcoming launch party." The campaign moved their metrics: Instagram followers up "by I believe 50%," reach up "188%," and email subscribers up "by 60%." They hand-delivered the cases because "we wanted to be more personal," and the 150 cases essentially sold out — opened on the Wednesday, delivered Thursday and Friday, "sold out by the Friday night."

One of their first customers "just completely inbound it to us" off a "very garbage" website John "threw... up on webflow after like a day" that "specifically targeting that problem in niche." Another major first customer came from a conference — you "sign up as like a creator and get in for free versus as a company," and "just hanging around near the event you can actually meet a lot of very important people." When they heard the pain point, Vivek says, "we basically told them exactly what they wanted to hear, like we can basically solve all your compliance pain points." Then John did it by hand: "they would give me thousands of [documents] and I would just like skim read them to like absolute blitz breakneck speed," with the AI "barely working." After "I had done it like successfully for a month... they signed the contract," and that was "the big turning point."

The pre-launch playbook was hustle. They posted "something's coming soon" teasers to make it enticing, got influencers to share a day in their life on the Sisterwould page, and spent every night and day sending texts and DMs asking girls "what are your hair concerns." Instagram would even block them from messaging too many people. Floriye's encouragement: "even if you don't have your product ready, because it does take so long, you can just start building your community."

Brian found that after talking to many brands and retailers, even leading brands "made us work with the agencies that they work with anyway," and "the agency thought it was a really good idea and they wanted to sell it to their clients as well." His reaction: "that's great, like we just did with one. So like another ten sales. So how can we create that as like a default? You know, scenario." He also leaned on the Australian agency ecosystem, where "once you work with an agency in Australia that does really well, they usually talk with an agency in like Thailand or Singapore, Hong Kong" — global agencies with alliances across the world that helped Litecard expand.

Robert says when you think about where Vietnamese workers were actually finding jobs, "it was through their network," referrals, and Facebook groups. So rather than building demand from scratch, "we could actually go to where they were and we started to buy up Facebook groups." Buying and consolidating those groups, then becoming the admins, "is how we got our head start into this blue collar marketplace."

Ben had been a boulderer for years and was deeply connected to the indoor rock climbing community in Melbourne, which was exploding in popularity. His friends who climbed indoors wanted a small pot to keep brushes and essentials in. He saw it as "a great way to test out materials and also design for a community that I knew well and that I had connections in to kind of find our first ways into retail stores or to gyms." Designing for a community he understood, that he believed would be receptive to a first product, was how he found his first market.

Landing the first big fund manager partner is often the hardest challenge, and Nhi says for her it was definitely not about cold calling — it's important to leverage the existing relationships you have, because your network opens doors. But she stresses that relationships only get you that first meeting; demonstrating and proving that MaiMoney can bring value to the table — handling the tech stack, onboarding, servicing, marketing and sales, and bringing in revenue for fund managers — is what got the deal. Her key lesson: "relationships get you the meeting, but it's really important that you... communicate what you can bring to the table" to seal it.

That early low-cost work was great market research: she got to talk to clients, understand what they were looking for, and tailor her solution to fit more client needs, all while the stakes were low because clients knew she was genuinely putting in the effort to help them. That built a connection that kept them coming back, and over time larger brand deals came after she found more of a product-market fit having tested with smaller brands.