Customers

Do You Know Where to Find More Customers?

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Never Stop Acquiring

Once you have your first 5 customers, you should immediately be looking for 10, then 50. Too often founders find their first group and stop — they get lost building new features or assume customers will keep coming.

Winning founders are obsessed with acquiring new customers. If you found a way to acquire customers that works, keep doing it. If you find oil, keep digging.

Early Customer Acquisition Strategies

Hang out where your users are

Go to where your target customers already spend their time.

  • Selling developer tools? Post on Hacker News and relevant subreddits
  • Attend live events and meetups to talk directly to potential users

Build in public

Create a sense of community around your product.

  • Being open and transparent on Twitter/X is increasingly effective for word-of-mouth growth
  • Building publicly on Indie Hackers lets you engage an existing community of founders and early adopters

Leverage your network

  • Are you solving a problem your network suffers from?
  • Do you have ideal customers you can easily reach out to directly?
  • Ask early customers if they know others who might want to use your product

Create viral side projects

Alex Tew, co-founder of Calm, built donothingfor2minutes.com — a simple site that asked whether you could sit still for 2 minutes. If you moved the mouse or touched the keyboard it would say "Fail." People shared their scores widely, and he collected ~100k emails of engaged users in just a few days — before ever launching Calm. The virality of the non-product drove traffic back to the real product.

Build a waitlist

A waitlist can generate hype and help you control onboarding — but only if you have genuine demand first.

You should create a waitlist if you want to:

  • Gauge the level of interest before full launch
  • Limit the number of customers you are onboarding at once
  • Build up hype and demand for your product

Once you have a few hundred people on the waitlist, you can use growth mechanics such as inviting users to move up the list by referring others — creating a virtuous acquisition cycle. Superhuman used this approach effectively.