Founders with no audience: how did you get your first 10 paying customers?

I don't agree with the "doing that without an audience is even harder". I've analyzed how 450+ founders got paying customers (see Zero to Users for more details) and the majority got them WITHOUT having an existing audience.

Here are the top channels they mentioned for getting the first X users:

1. Marketplaces & app stores (worked for 78 founders). Recently wrote a post on Indie Hackers on this.

2. Product Hunt (worked for 78 founders)

3. Reddit communities (worked for 45 founders)

4. Cold email outreach (worked for 42 founders)

5. "Powered by" marketing (worked for 42 founders, see this Indie Hackers post for explanation)

6. Hacker news (worked for 39 founders)

7. Having an existing audience (worked for 39 founders)

Yup, having an existing "media brand" came up on the 7th place. Most channels tapped into an existing audience someone ELSE owned. For eg, reaching out to people who follow an influencer in your niche. Finding a "directory" and cold-emailing people there, etc.

Don't let "I need to have an existing audience before getting started" limit you. You can get paying users without that.

Cold emails, but all personalized and tailored. It's tempting to send 1,000 batch emails and pray for one or two responses. We found this to be inefficient and not a strong start to a long-term relationship. Instead, we tried to understand why someone would find value in talking to a stranger (us) and prove in a sentence or two that we did the research before reaching out.

For Zlappo, my first 10 paying customers came from -- of all places -- DM on Twitter.

I even covered this in my blog article, with screenshots of my DMs that worked: https://zlappo.com/blog/4-powerful-ways-grow-and-market-your-saas-business-using-twitter-examples-given/.

We've recently broken the 1,000 paying customers mark.

At the end of the day, if you have an interesting enough idea, it won't matter if you have an audience or not. However, I would recommend starting locally. Posting on communities like ProductHunt or Hackernews will get you a spike in the start, but probably not many long-lasting users.

Instead, go to your local business in your town or area that you think might find your product useful, talk to them in person, build relations. This is hard, but it most likely will help you build a small group of really dedicated users that will even help you improve your product.

I've been trying to launch a marketing automation tool for D2C brands and I'm still struggling to find the audience for it.

haven't reached the 10 paying customers yet, still bootstrapping my side projects

I've reached $186 after 2 months, didn't have time to promote the products, but I did 3 things that worked:

• have a free version of my product (with less info)
• upsell to paid version via email
• post on really niched communities - like Corey's Swipefiles

What didn't work for me at all:

• FB groups - full of haters, I did get in touch with a couple of founders, but the ppl willing to pay was almost zero // spend too much time replying to comments and handling all sort of dumbass community admins

here are my numbers

In my case I joined a facebook group where I put posts regarding the subject of my tool (https://pagemtr.com). I've to say this works pretty well and in my opinion is a good way when you start a business because you are able to get really valuable feedback.

You don't get that feedback serving ads across the web, simply - if something won't work on a website/app people aren't supposed to tell you about that. Getting feedback almost face to face is really helping.

I recently wrote an article on how I got 66 paying users for my MVP. Check here: https://ritikamehta.substack.com/p/66-paying-users-on-beta-product-mvp

Sharing to friends , family and all connections of social networks

Started doing unscalable things for my audience to get some traction.
Checked what's funny and what's not by iteration.
Found what I was good at and what I was not.
Realized what I do not want to do.
Then:
Grab the first 200+ peeps on my newsletter (still by doing unscalable things like consultations, helping others on FB groups etc)
Pre-sale a course to 10 of them.
That's it 🏆

I started hyping my product on a subreddit two months before it launched. This resulted in roughly 150 newsletter subscribers. The day after I launched Legendsverse, I had my first customer.

And all I did was keep revealing new features and marketing them. In December of 2020, Legendsverse made its debut. I currently have 228 one-payment customers.

Now I'm focusing on creating up distribution channels because I'm afraid that the sub I use to market my product will eventually label them as spam.

-Friends, family, network
-cold calling

SEO & Blogging
Incredible results if you put in the time and work. Also the cheapest option in the long run.

Building in public on Twitter was very helpful to me in that aspect. I could directly interact with indie makers & ask for feedback.

-cold outreach
-worked my network (let them know what I'm doing)
-posted on twitter (reply guy here)
-posted on reddit

In my experience, unless you're a marketing or some other category thought leader that is going to sell an ebook or course, an audience is a nice to have. It takes a really time to build a highly engaged audience and you'll eventually tap it out.

If you can't get 10 paying customers, you're probably not solving a real problem and/or trying hard enough.

For MyCheckins, the ideal customers I started with were founders and managers of teams with less than 10 members.

The first 10 customers came from these channels:

• Cold Outreach: I ran an extensive cold email campaign (check my post history for details + process). 50% of the results came out of this.
• Content: I do not have an audience or a following. But consistent, sincere posting across IH, Reddit, and LinkedIn was enough to get a few early customers.

It sounds simple, but I experimented with 5+ channels and it took me ~6 weeks to hit the mark.

To make your marketing work and bring results, make sure you develop your product messaging first. You need to clearly understand the bleeding neck problem your product solves, identify the bad alternatives, articulate your value props, and tie them together in a document. You can use this as the foundation for all marketing work.

Pick your channels, experiment fast, and you're good to go.

• Sent a bunch of emails to potential customers (chrome extension developers that were about to be impacted by Google shutting down Chrome Store payments).

• Posted here in IH extension developers group and in a few reddit comment threads (that I monitored with f5bot).

• Now organic search (from content articles I wrote targeting specific keywords) seems to be the most common way that users come in.

These are the ones that worked for me. I tried others but they weren't effective.

Personally I hate building an audience so these methods suit me more.

Through a Twitter reply.

I shared the specifics here: https://chromeextensionideas.medium.com/how-i-got-99-subscribers-in-a-day-and-how-can-you-do-it-too-1204565b6845