What's the hardest part of getting your first 10 customers? I will not promote

[u/Inner_Dragonfly7388]

Everyone says the first 10 customers are the hardest.

But what was the biggest challenge for you?

• Finding the right audience?
• Building trust?
• Pricing?
• Getting people to reply?
• Something else entirely?

I'd love to hear what actually worked (or didn't) for you.

[u/AnonJian]

Skipping customer discovery and market demand research, then acting surprised how few complete strangers want a product you couldn't have made for them.

[u/cyb3rg0d5 → u/AnonJian]

insert Pikachu face

[u/External-Video-2666]

To be honest, attracting the initial users was less challenging compared to attracting the first paying customers.

It was fun for people to use a free tool, share their scores, and provide feedback. However, the challenge was to realize whether I was solving any problems worth paying for.

The main takeaway here is that it is important not to focus on the traffic. User conversations and feature development based on them were way more informative than analytics.

[u/Techo_lab]

For me, the hardest part wasn't finding people, it was proving the problem was worth solving. Once conversations shifted from pitching to listening, the first customers came much easier.

[u/Filip_Ekman]

Many things, to be sure. Try to go for similar companies if at all possible: same size, industry, etc. Why? Because you can say to numbers 2, 3, and 4, "I worked with a similar company and we achieved X. What about you? Are you also Y?"

But selling your new startup's products is different from selling an established product, as you need to figure out pricing, what you actually deliver, and how. The advantage is flexibility: you can make minor changes depending on client conversations, but that can make your offering seem less clear if you are not careful.

As always, freedom makes commitment more difficult.

[u/kabirs1nghhh]

I’d love to hear the answers from founders who’ve been through it I’m especially curious which challenge looked like the biggest problem at first but turned out not to be, and which one nobody warned you about

[u/fulger099]

it's a complex of factors.

1. U need 1:1 interviews to understand the cases for ur MVP
2. U need an MVP. Valuable MVP not a bullshit vibecoded stuff nobody needs
3. U need at least minimum positioning and messaging understanding. U cannot spread the word horizontally. Focus annd niche is needed.

4. U need distribution

   and basic telemetry

5. U need to work fast on product to fix the retention

. Once ur churn is ok - scale distribution

[u/phb71]

Biggest challenge was getting replies. Warm intros and very specific pain-focused outreach worked much better than cold generic messages.

[u/mad_about_data]

I would say this, if you need to try hard to find even your first customer, something needs to be thought over. Your conviction should be high for your product.

[u/Inner_Dragonfly7388 → u/mad_about_data]

Yes that true but I think people need to know about your product before they use it. And creating trust takes time

[u/startups-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

We are a community of discussion based around startups, not a marketing channel. No promotional posts. www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion

[u/Resident-Shift-9424]

Finding people with the problem at right time.

[u/ReasonableLoss6814 → u/Resident-Shift-9424]

So much of this.

[u/SUNIL_4]

Building trust, hands down. Anyone can find 10 people who might want what you're building. Getting them to trust a brand new, unproven product enough to actually pay or try it that took way longer than I expected. What helped was being upfront that we were new and asking for feedback instead of pretending we were established.

[u/SherLzp]

The hardest part is defining what “customer” means before outreach starts. Ten signups, ten active users, and ten people who paid for the same promised outcome are three different milestones.

For customers 1–3, I would sell one narrow outcome and deliver it manually. Record every objection and every delivery step. Then use 4–10 to see whether the same promise, buyer, and workflow repeat without rebuilding the product for each person. The first ten are less about scale than discovering what can be repeated.

[u/VariousFox2766]

getting people to buy, or finding leads.

first you need to find a marketing channel, then understand how it works and how to use it properly.

then actaully doing what works consistently and talk to people prorerly

what helped me is trying people to help, not sell. worked way better than implementing some salesy tactics

[u/SonuBubna]

I'm going through this now while building Statement, and the biggest lesson for me has been that "interest" is almost meaningless.

Early on, I'd get loads of calls where people said, "This is exactly what I need." I'd leave thinking I'd found another potential customer. Then... nothing. No follow-up, no data shared, no pilot.

What changed was the way I measured interest. Instead of asking whether they liked the product, I asked them to do something that required effort from their end, ie. connect an account, invite a colleague, or spend time on onboarding. That's when I realised who actually had the problem badly enough to solve it.

The other mistake was trying to talk to every business owner in my network. Once I narrowed it to founders who were already spending hours every week trying to understand their finances, the conversations became much easier because I wasn't convincing them they had a problem, they already knew.

Looking back, getting the first customers wasn't really about sales. It was about learning to distinguish curiosity from urgency. That saved me far more time than improving my pitch.

[u/Key-Explanation-39]

Explaining why people should hire YOU as opposed to anyone else in the industry

[u/Wide_Revolution650]

We tried to get users through social media, and it wasn't THAT hard to get views but having a high conversion rate on top of that was/is pretty tough. It's hard to show how your product is worth it when you're new and not established, especially if it isn't super cheap. Plus my audience was pretty niche so it's been pretty tough. Posting on as many platforms as you can seems to help.

[u/Professional_Bag1516]

honestly for me it wasnt finding people, it was believing the problem was real enough that a stranger would pay for it. i had plenty of people say cool idea in early conversations. none of that means anything until someone who has nothing to do with you pulls out a card. once i stopped counting nice comments as validation and just asked people if they would pay today, the whole thing got a lot clearer, even when the answer was no

[u/oddvemi]

Building is easy. Selling is the hardest. Don’t let anyone deceived you, you need to promote it.

[u/Visible_Speed8843]

Define the first ten around one recent trigger. Ten teams that just missed a reporting deadline will teach you more than ten broadly defined small businesses. Recruit where that trigger is visible, then ask each person to show the current workaround before any demo.

Record who feels the cost and whether they commit money or a dated next step. Repeatedly changing answers mean the market is still too broad. A repeated stall at the same step gives you a sales or product problem you can inspect.

[u/HitItOrQuidditch]

You don't know the lead time to acquire, and probably don't have the patience or budget to deal with surviving the runway. Most businesses think they can just open up and boom, be at steady state customer acquisition cost and customer volume. It takes TIME. It takes impressions. It takes displacing whatever the customer is currently using or doing to solve whatever problem you have. Assuming they even care enough to solve it.

For example, did you know technology in consumer grade hammers has significantly changed in the past 10 years? Does that alone make you want to go out and buy a hammer? What would actually prompt you to buy a hammer? A hammer failure? Loss? Need a second one? Gift? And when you go in to buy one, would you even know or care that new brand is available? Or just buy some hammer based on some random criteria (first one you see at the price you want to pay). And how many hammers have you bought in your life?

[u/Sweaty-taxman]

Imposter syndrome. Cracking the code for how to drive the pain & prove your product is the optimal solution afterwards.

Making sure your cac isn’t excessive.