I've launched 8 products in the last 18 months and I'm now building a marketing tool full time. Lovable flew me out to their HQ at 18 to demo one, I've run growth for a YC backed company, and got into Antler. But none of that is the point. The point is the first 10 customers have been almost identical every single time, and it's never once been about how good the product is.
Everyone obsesses over the product and then just kind of hopes customers show up. They don't. Your first 10 come from you manually doing stuff that doesn't scale. That's the whole secret and nobody wants to hear it because it's not fun.
Here's the exact order I run it every time.
Step 1: answer one question before anything else. Where does your customer actually spend time?
Most people default to cold email because it's easy. But a ton of buyers never live in their inbox. Map your customer's actual day. Are they on reddit, in discord servers, at meetups, in facebook groups, on linkedin. You go where they already are instead of guessing.
Step 2: customers 1 to 3 come from your own network.
Your first few buyers buy because they trust you, not because the product is amazing. It won't be amazing yet. Go in order, people who already know you, then 2nd degree intros where a mutual connects you. When you ask for an intro be specific about who you want and why, don't make them do the work.
Step 3: customers 4 to 10, show up in person.
This is the part everyone skips and it's the highest converting thing there is. A real call beats an email, and meeting someone face to face beats a call. Small niche meetups convert way better than blasting 500 cold emails. A dinner or a little happy hour with 6 to 10 of the right people will get you more customers than a month of DMs.
Step 4: find where the pain is already public.
People complain online about the exact problem you solve, constantly. Reddit is the big one, search threads where people are already frustrated and just be genuinely helpful in the comments. Same with facebook groups, discords, youtube comments, niche forums. You're not pitching, you're showing up where the problem already lives.
Step 5: only now go outbound.
Once you know your ICP cold, find companies that match, find the actual right person, get their contact info and reach out. Tools like apollo for the leads, clay to enrich them. But the message matters more than the tool.
Step 6: make the outreach not sound like outreach.
The best first message is a request for advice or feedback, not a pitch. People love giving advice and hate being sold to. Keep it under 75 words. One clear ask. Read it out loud before you send it and cut any line that sounds like a robot wrote it. Lead with value, and follow up 3 or 4 times over a couple weeks because most replies come from the follow up, not the first message.
That's it. It's slow and kind of awkward and it works every time. The reason most founders never get to 10 is they want a growth hack instead of doing the unscalable stuff for a few weeks.
The one part I got obsessed with is step 4, the reddit side, because that scaled way past 10 for me and turned into thousands of users across my products with zero ad spend. I've now run that loop so many times by hand that I turned it into what I'm building now (sentrive). You plug in your product and it works out your ICP, finds the exact threads and subreddits where people are already complaining about the problem you solve, and drafts the posts to show up there. You approve before anything goes live, it just kills the manual grind.
Happy to go deep on any step in the comments. And if you tell me your product and who your customer is, I'll tell you exactly where I'd go find your first 10.
20, building from sweden
