Topic

Getting your first customers as a startup

A startup's hard problem is almost never building the thing. It is that nobody knows the thing exists, and every channel that would fix that needs an input you do not have yet: proof to put behind an ad, an audience to publish to, users to refer you onward. At zero customers the scalable channels are all waiting on something you cannot buy.

What does work at that stage is unglamorous and available immediately. Describe the buyer precisely enough to count them. Write to a small number of them for a reason you could say out loud. Answer what comes back the same day. These pieces cover that stretch: the first ten customers, the founder-led sales conversations nobody trained you for, writing outbound while the product is still moving under you, and how to tell when it is time to hire.

Written for startups, including the cases where the honest answer is that outbound is the wrong tool for your shape of business and something else has to come first.