How did you get your first 10 paying customers: outbound, community, or something else?
I’ve spent five years on the sales side of B2B, so I know how outbound works when there’s a team, a brand and a budget behind it. What I don’t know is how it works when it’s just a founder with a half-finished product and no name yet.
The advice I keep running into is “do things that don’t scale” and “talk to every user.” That’s fine, but it doesn’t tell me what people actually did on a Tuesday morning.
For those of you who’ve landed your first customers:
-Where did the first 3 to 5 come from? A cold email, a DM, a community like this one, someone you already knew?
-Did you ask for money early, or let people use it free first and bring up pricing later?
-Was there anything you were sure would work that got zero replies?
My own guess is that the first customers mostly come from people who already trust you, and that cold outreach matters later. I could easily be wrong, so tell me if that doesn’t match what happened to you.
Real numbers are welcome, even small ones like “sent 40 messages, got 3 calls.” They help more than a general strategy.
Replies
Your guess matches what happened to me. My first customer was me. I only build what I use myself, and then my consulting clients' teams start using it in their real work. On pricing, if free signups aren't turning into paid, the first thing I'd do is put the price clearly on the site. The timing of moving people from free to paid is the key part. And the best thing I ever heard was about 15 years ago, when I overheard a table of women at a cafe in Tokyo recommending my service to each other.
You asked for real numbers, so here is a small consumer one, not B2B. My app had no network to sell to, so the first payers came from paid ads. One Christmas themed ad campaign gave 347 accounts, 115 of them reached the app, 73 made a song, 12 started a trial, 2 paid. The thing I was sure about that did not work: search keywords. They brought mostly teenagers making a song for themselves, 8 of 20 said under 18 in the intake quiz, while every one of the first four payers was 35 or older. So my lesson matches the spirit of your guess from the other side: the channel matters less than whether it reaches the people who already have the reason to pay.
Your guess matches ours. I run Victra Careers, a job search platform in Armenia, no ad budget.
Job seekers: the first real wave came from one LinkedIn post with plain market data (open roles in Yerevan, top professions) ending with "write your profession in one word, I'll reply with a link". It got 340 comments, and I answered every one by hand.
Employers: every company that applies gets a personal call from me before approval. Pricing comes up on that call, not later, and there's a 2-week trial.
What I was sure would work and didn't: posts about product features. They got roughly 4x less reach than real stories and data from the market. People engage with their own problem, not with your product.
Shabir, tuesday morning with no brand for me means opening linkedin, picking 2 or 3 products people compare mine to, and messaging people who've just commented on their posts about the thing they mentioned, not a pitch. I do around 20 of those a day. nearly everyone who pays came from that or from events, barely anyone from the website.
Not quite the first 10, but here is a real number from Victra Careers, a job search platform in Armenia. TikTok carousels that simply say how many jobs are open in a city got 16K to 18K views and around 100 comments each. We answer every comment by hand with the count for that person's city and the steps to start searching on the site. It beat every other format we tried. For us the lesson was: give people one specific useful number first, and the conversation starts by itself.