---
title: "Do You Know Where to Find More Customers?"
section: "Customers"
sectionId: "customers"
date: "2026-05"
---

## 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](https://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.