How to Get Your First 10 SaaS Customers
The first 10 customers are the hardest because nothing compounds yet — no word of mouth, no SEO, no reviews. What you have is time and the fact that, somewhere, people are already asking for what you built. The whole playbook is finding those people before the conversation goes cold.
1. Stop announcing, start answering
Launch posts mostly reach other founders. Buyers don't read announcements — they post questions: "what do you use for X?", "is there a tool that does Y?", "alternative to Z that doesn't cost a fortune?". Every one of those is a warm lead with a timestamp. Ten genuinely helpful answers in threads like that will outperform any launch tweet, because you're talking to someone who already has the problem, today.
2. Go where your buyers already ask
- Hacker News — "Ask HN" threads and comment sections. Search the problem on HN Search, sorted by date.
- GitHub issues — if you sell to developers, issues are people describing the exact pain your tool removes, in public, with their username attached.
- Reddit — niche subreddits where your buyers live (not r/SaaS — that's founders talking to founders). Read each sub's self-promo rules first; some ban vendor mentions outright.
- Communities you're genuinely part of — Slack/Discord groups, forums. One honest "I built a thing for this exact problem" where you're a known member beats fifty cold posts.
3. The reply that converts (and the one that gets you banned)
The pattern that works everywhere: answer the actual question first, fully, as if your product didn't exist. Then one sentence — "I build [tool], which automates this, if you'd rather not do it by hand" — with your affiliation stated plainly. The pattern that fails: leading with the pitch, posting the same text twice, or auto-posting from a tool. Communities have gotten very good at detecting all three, and a banned account is a channel you never get back.
4. Do things that don't scale — on purpose
At this stage, onboard every trial personally. Email each signup yourself and ask what they were trying to solve. Your first 10 customers are not revenue — they're the market research that makes customers 11–100 cheaper. Ask every one: "where did you look for a solution before you found us?" Their answers are your channel strategy.
5. The grind is the moat (and the part worth automating)
None of this is complicated — it's just daily. Catching threads within hours, reading fifty posts to find the three worth answering, drafting a reply that doesn't sound canned. Most founders quit this loop after a week, which is exactly why it still works for the ones who don't.
A realistic timeline
Done consistently, this loop finds a founder 1–3 customers a week in most B2B niches. That sounds slow until you notice it's also the timeline where each customer teaches you something that compounds. Ads can come later — after these 10 conversations have told you what the ad should say.