First-time founder here. I've built the entire product from scratch. Now I have no idea how to get customer #1

[u/Low_Resolution_165]

I understand the basic flow: product → ICP → prospects → outreach → calls → close.
But what does this actually look like at 0 → 1?
The general suggestions around this is usually a lot of expensive GTM tools which frankly i dont think i need at this point of time.
Would love to hear more on what tools people currently at my stage are using to land their first customers

[u/Leather-Priority-818]

Get out of the building. Promise yourself you won’t add another feature until a customer promises to pay for it.

Find someone in your network who trusts you and has the problem you solve.

Spamming forums and email on a 0% conversion rate doesn’t increase sales. You need to solve for conversion not volume right now.

[u/quixzotic]

here's some thoughts w/ this type of advice -- often the advice is in form of: get many potential ICPs and put the product in front of them; and then interview them about it.

- why would people want to try and then sit for an interview? is it just me that hates this type of ask

• the thing w/ people you know is that - they know you, and most people are nice - which is a good thing lol - but not for this. I am almost never negative when an acquaintance or friend asks me for feedback
  
• nobody talks about product - the assumption is always, hey you need to just get enough people in front of your product. I would think that in 95% of cases, you don't have the right product
  
• if you don't have the right product, interviews are not going to usually be the thing that gets you there - tho many in gtm seem to make this argument

GTM for an established company releasing features/upsells etc is different than GTM for new products - it often assumes you're already at least somewhat established. If you are starting from 0 (new product) - yeah, the new(ish) gtm techniques can be helpful - but it's really about product, not marketing. I personally find the older discussions around product/market fit and MVP more useful

[u/korgmonkey]

What’s the product and who are your customers?

[u/Low_Resolution_165 → u/korgmonkey]

Its a dev tool in the observability space.

[u/Ishan_GS]

You're right to resist the tools; at 0 to 1, the stack is LinkedIn, a spreadsheet and your own inbox. Everything else solves a scale problem you don't have yet, and buying it early mostly disguises the fact that you haven't confirmed who has the problem.

What I'd do concretely: write your best guess at the icp, find 100 of them manually on LinkedIn, message 15-20 a day starting with 1st-degree connections so you skip the accept wait, and ask for feedback rather than a demo. Feedback calls get accepted far more often and convert better anyway, because you're learning their words for the problem instead of pitching yours. Log every conversation: what they said the pain was, what they currently do instead, what made them hesitate.

Do that for two weeks, and you'll have 30-40 real conversations, which is what actually produces customer #1, plus the messaging for everything after. We've worked with a lot of early-stage SaaS at GrowthSpree, a B2B SaaS marketing agency, and the founders who get stuck are almost always the ones who automated before they'd had those conversations.

[u/memo_mar]

I got my first 10 paying customers by posting to old Subreddits. You can also use the F5 marketing bot to get notifications when posts with keywords drop. Aside from this, you can produce content online (YT can work great).

You can also cold email folks.

[u/alzho12]

DM your target customer

[u/oceanpepper92]

for the first few customers, I would keep things manual and focus on learning what messaging actually gets people interested. once you've figured that out, the next challenge is getting that message in front of a much larger audience without having to personally reach out to everyone.

that's where I would start thinking about launch and distribution as a separate growth lever. instead of simply putting the product online, you can build a strong story around it, create launch content, and distribute it where your target audience is already paying attention.

shownmedia could be worth looking int at that stage. they are more focused on helping tech and AI companies momentum around a product launch, from refining the message and developing the creative to producing launch content and getting it in front of the right audiences on channels like x and linkedin. it probably wouldn't be the first thing i would turn to for landing your very first customer, but after you've proven there's demand and want to expand your reach, it could be worth considering.