How do I get my first 10 paying customers?

Where they are

Not in ads. Early on, ads buy you visitors who have never heard of you and don’t trust you yet. Your first customers are people who already feel the problem and are talking about it somewhere:

• Communities and forums for your audience, where people ask “how do I…?”
• People who complained about the tool you’re replacing, in reviews or threads.
• Your own network: former colleagues, people you’ve helped, people who asked you about the problem.
• Your waitlist, if you have one: they raised a hand before the product existed.

How to ask

1. Answer first. Reply to someone’s question with a useful answer, not a link. Mention what you’re building only if it truly helps.
2. Talk one to one. A short call or a direct message beats a broadcast. Ask how they deal with the problem today and what it costs them.
3. Offer to set it up with them. Doing the setup together removes the biggest reason people don’t start, and you learn what’s confusing.
4. Ask for money early. A price, even a small one, tells you whether the problem is worth paying for. “I’ll use it when it’s free” is not a customer.
5. Keep a promise per person. When they ask for something, write it down with their name, and tell them when it ships.

What to record

For every one of the ten: where you found them (the community, the thread, the referral), what they asked for, and when they started paying. Ten records are enough to see a pattern: most early customers often come from one or two places, and those are the places to go deeper.

Record the source when you first meet them. Afterwards, people rarely remember where they first heard of you.

When to add a channel

Once a channel has brought a few paying customers by hand, it’s worth testing a little spend there, and measuring what each customer cost (CAC) against what they pay.

With Nordva Launch

Every signup and visit keeps where it came from, each person’s feedback sits on their record, and with Stripe connected (every plan, read-only) the Insights page shows which sources your paying customers came from. Recording what a channel cost, to see cost per customer, needs Indie.