Finding Your First Customers
Getting your first customers is one of the hardest things you’ll do as a founder. It’s also the most important.
And it looks completely different depending on where you are in your journey.
Here’s the map:
Stage 1 — Learning: Get 5–10 real people to use, try, pay, or commit. These are your “early adopters.” This is founder-led and manual. It’s all about validating demand; gathering evidence that proves people want what you want to build.
Stage 2 — Selling: Can you get the same type of customer to buy again and again? You’re experimenting with messaging, pricing, and channels, looking for patterns until you nail one channel, one message, one buyer over and over again.
Stage 3 — Scaling: Grow by doing more of what’s already proven. Your focus is on implementing systems and fine-tuning processes to get more efficient and effective at what you know works.
This Builders Field Guide focuses on Stage 1. We’ll cover Stages 2 and 3 in the next issue.
Getting Early Adopters: You’re an Explorer, Not a Salesperson
Deep down, all founders know they need to sell somebody something. But I can’t tell you how many entrepreneurs say the thought of actually doing that is scary and intimidating.
So, instead they keep building. They tweak the product, add features, and continually wait until they feel ready. Or they put up a social media post and hope someone finds them or joins the waitlist on their landing page.
The uncomfortable truth is that when you have an idea you believe in, the sooner you can get out and talk to people, the faster you’ll know if it’s worth building. And unlike customer discovery, the goal of getting early adopters isn’t just to learn. It’s to get a small group of people to actually do something. Use it. Try it. Pay for it. Commit to it.
That discomfort is the job. And the best way to muster up is to reframe what you’re actually doing. You’re not selling. You’re not asking for a favor. You’re inviting someone to help you solve a real problem and finding out whether that problem is real enough for them to act.
If it is, you learn something. If it isn’t, you also learn something! Either way, the learning doesn’t come from building product. It comes from you taking action, from engaging with people who have the problem and trying to acquire your first customers. The only way through it is to do it!
“The learning you need is sitting in conversations you haven’t had yet.”
Where Early Adopters Actually Come From
Good news! You don’t need a big audience, expert sales skills, a PR firm, or a massive network to find your first customers. You just need to find the right 10–20 people.
And they’re closer than you think.
The key word at this stage is reachable. You’re not trying to reach everyone. You’re looking for specific people who already feel the pain you’re solving, strongly enough to do something about it.
There are three places to find them.
The people already in your orbit. Start with who you already have access to. But filter hard. This isn’t about asking your friends and family to support you. It’s about identifying people in your existing network who actually have the problem you’re solving. Former colleagues. Past clients. People in your alumni network. Communities you’re already part of. The question isn’t “who do I know?” It’s “who do I know that has this problem?”
Places where the problem is already being discussed. Find the corners of the internet (or the room) where people are already complaining about, asking about, or trying to solve your problem. Niche newsletters. Reddit threads. LinkedIn posts. Industry events. You’re not pitching the crowd. You’re identifying specific individuals worth a direct conversation.
People for whom the problem just got urgent. The best time to reach someone is when their pain just got worse. A new job. A new regulation. A growth milestone that broke what used to work. These moments make people open to solutions they’d normally ignore. If you can find someone in that moment, you’re not interrupting. You’re showing up exactly when they need you.
Start by pulling from all three. Your goal is a list of 10–20 specific, named, reachable people. Not a target market. Not a demographic. Actual humans you can email or call.
How to Actually Get Your First 5–10 Customers
Reach out directly. Pick one person from your list and send them a message. Keep it short, make it personable. Make it specific to them, and ask for one thing — a 20 minute conversation. That’s it.
Do the work to earn the yes. Once someone agrees to talk, make it as easy as possible for them to try what you’re building. Manually set up their account. Clean or import their data. Create the first output for them. Sit with them while they use it (watch, listen, observe). This feels inefficient. It’s not. It’s how you get adoption and deep learning before trust exists.
Charge something — even a little. Charging filters out people who are just curious, creates urgency, and changes the dynamic of the relationship. Keep it simple: a small fixed fee, a time-bound test (2–4 weeks), or a “founding customer” rate that gets credited toward a future plan.
End every conversation with an intro. Every conversation should end with one of these: “Who else should I talk to?” / “Can you intro me to 1–2 people dealing with this?” / “Who owns this problem at your company or in your network?” One conversation should always lead to the next.
A Few Things You’re Allowed to Do
First-time founders often make this harder than it needs to be. A few things worth knowing:
You’re allowed to use scripts and notes. It’s not cheating. Write down what you want to say before you reach out. Having notes in front of you during a conversation makes you more focused, not less authentic.
You’re allowed to say you’re early. In fact, it helps. “I’m not selling yet, I’m learning” is disarming. People are more generous with their time and honest with their feedback when they know you’re figuring it out, not pitching them.
You’re allowed to (and should) start small. You don’t need a national launch or a thousand users to validate your idea. Start in one community, one industry, one city. Get ten people. Learn from them. Then expand.
You only need to focus on one channel at a time. Don’t blast Instagram, send cold emails, print flyers, and pitch partnerships all at once. Pick one way to reach people and work it until you’ve had 10–15 real conversations. Then assess.
Getting early adopters is unglamorous.
It’s awkward cold messages and conversations that don’t go anywhere and learning things you didn’t expect. But it’s also the most important work you’ll do as a founder because everything that comes after it is built on what you discover here.
Stay Tuned for Part 2
Once you’ve got a handful of initial customers, the question changes entirely — can you get the same kind of customer to say yes again and again? Moving from early adopters to repeatable sales requires a shift in what you do, how you do it, and how you measure success. Next week’s Builders Field Guide will walk you through how to test what’s working, spot the patterns, and turn what you’ve learned into a repeatable process for getting customers.
If you’re building something and want to see what AI-powered entrepreneurship support actually looks like, check out Builders Studio. Our latest AI agents can help you get your first customers and then turn that into a scalable sales model.
If you’re an organization supporting entrepreneurs and want to explore partnership, let’s talk.