Recruit them one at a time, personally, from people who already have the problem, and charge them. Ask about what they did the last time the problem happened rather than what they would do with a feature, because the past produces facts and the future produces encouragement. Ten is a meaningful milestone rather than a warm-up: across 3,728 tracked startups the median product with any revenue at all has 8 active subscriptions.
What ten customers actually means
The framing everywhere is that your first ten customers are the easy part, the friends-and-family round before real growth. The data says otherwise.
This should change how you treat them. Ten customers is not a sample you burn through on the way to a thousand. At median ARPU of $13.40 a month, ten customers is a real, if small, business, and they are the only source of information you have that is not speculation.
How to recruit them
Write down twenty names. Actual people, not segments. Former colleagues, clients, people from communities you are in, people who complained about this problem in public. If you cannot get to twenty, you have picked an audience you cannot reach, which is a bigger problem than the product.
Ask each one individually. Personal asks convert; broadcasts do not. A post to your whole network is a single ask with a low ceiling, twenty messages is twenty chances.
Ask for something specific and small. Not "check out my product" but "would you try this for two weeks and tell me where it annoys you?" A vague ask is easy to agree to and easy to never act on.
Give founding members something real. A price locked permanently, their name in the product, and a direct line to you. These cost nothing now and are worth a great deal to someone deciding whether to bet on an unknown tool.
Charge them. Free during a defined trial window, then a founding price. The payment is the experiment.
Stop at ten and go deep. Ten people you talk to every week beat a hundred silent signups, and the hundred will teach you nothing you can act on.
Where to find them
The instinct is to launch somewhere. The pattern that actually works is smaller and less satisfying: go where the problem is already being described, and be useful there.
Reddit comments still outperform launch posts. The post "How do you handle chasing clients for late payments" generated 84 comments and real product insights. A launch post generates views and silence.
via r/indiehackers
That is the whole mechanism. A launch post asks people for attention. A useful answer in a thread about the problem gives them something, and the subset who have the problem badly enough will follow you back. One founder we quote below got their first organic customer this way after four to five months of it.
There wasn’t some huge launch that suddenly brought hundreds of users. No viral tweet. No Product Hunt #1. No crazy growth hack. It was basically one person who had a real problem, me talking to him, and then actually building what he needed.
via r/SaaS
If you want to find those threads systematically rather than by scrolling, that is what our complaints database is for: it indexes people describing problems across Reddit, review sites and app stores, so you can search the pain rather than the product.
What to ask them
There is one rule and it does most of the work: ask about the past, not the future.
Ask this
Not this
When did this last happen?
Does this happen often?
What did you do about it?
Would you use a tool that fixed it?
What did that cost you, in time or money?
What would you pay for this?
What did you try before that?
Do you like this idea?
Who else deals with this?
Do you know anyone who would want this?
The left column produces facts that already happened. The right column produces predictions, and people are bad at predicting their own behaviour and worse at telling a hopeful founder that their idea is unremarkable.
When you watch someone use the product, the same discipline applies: give them a real task, then stay quiet. Every place they hesitate is a redesign item, in priority order. If you talk them through it you have destroyed the only measurement you were there to take.
What to do with the answers
Sort by frequency, not volume. One thing three users tripped over outranks one thing a single user demanded loudly. Loudness correlates with personality, not priority.
Separate what they did from what they said. If someone praised the product and has not opened it in nine days, the nine days is the finding.
Fix the top item and tell the people who hit it, by name. Same day if you can. The loop of "I mentioned a thing and it changed" is what turns a tester into someone who recommends you.
Write down the objections verbatim. They are your landing page copy later, in better words than you would have chosen.
The failure mode to watch for is retreating into the editor, because building is comfortable and asking people for money is not:
At some point I realized I was probably just hiding behind development because it’s easier to sit down and code than to actually find people and ask them to use something you’ve built.
One at a time, by hand, from people who already have the problem. Make a list of twenty named individuals you can reach directly, ask each of them personally rather than broadcasting, and give the ones who say yes something a later customer cannot have: a permanent price, a direct line to you, and real influence over what gets built.
Is 10 customers a lot for a new SaaS?
It is more than most products ever reach. Across 3,728 tracked startups reporting at least one active subscription, the median is 8 and the 25th percentile is 2. Getting to ten paying customers puts you above the middle of every product that has published a revenue number.
Should my first customers pay or use it free?
Free during a defined testing window, then a founding price. Perpetual free users give you feedback about a product they are not really relying on, and the difference between interest and commitment only becomes visible when money moves. The first payment is the first real data point.
What should I ask my first users?
Ask about the past, not the future. When did this last happen, what did you do about it, what did it cost you, what did you try before. Questions about whether someone would use a hypothetical feature produce encouragement rather than information, because people are trying to be kind.
Where do I find my first customers?
Wherever the problem is already being discussed rather than wherever founders gather. Communities, forums and comment threads about the workaround are full of people describing the problem in their own words. Replying usefully in those threads outperforms launch posts consistently.
How many customer conversations do I need before building?
Keep going until the stories start repeating, which usually takes somewhere between ten and twenty conversations. The signal is not a number, it is the moment you can predict what the next person will say before they say it. Then build the thing every story had in common.
Where these numbers come from
Subscriber counts were computed on 22 September 2026 across the TrustMRR corpus of 8,651 tracked startups, restricted to the 3,728 reporting at least one active subscription. Figures are self-reported by founders who chose to publish revenue publicly, which over-represents products willing to show a number. Treat the distribution as a map of products that made it far enough to report, not of all products ever started; the true median across everything launched is certainly lower.
Cite this page
Last verified: September 22, 2026
BigIdeasDB Research. (2026). How to get your first 10 customers. BigIdeasDB. Retrieved from https://bigideasdb.com/guides/how-to-get-your-first-10-customers