Getting customers · 9 min read
How to get your first SaaS customers
Your first ten customers are found manually, one at a time, by turning up where the problem is being discussed and being useful. Treat it as research with a payment link attached, not as marketing.
Ten is an awkward number. Too few to be a business, too many to get by accident. Almost everything written about SaaS growth assumes you already have them.
Getting to ten is a different job from getting to a hundred, and using the hundred-playbook is why most people never reach ten.
You’re not doing marketing yet
Marketing is what you do once you know who the customer is, what they respond to, and roughly what one is worth. You know none of that. What you’re doing is closer to research with a payment link attached — and the payment link matters, because money is the only honest signal you’ll get.
Your first ten customers aren’t revenue. They’re the answer to what you should build and say next.
1. Write down the trigger
Not the persona. The moment. “We broke prod with another migration.” “The spreadsheet stopped coping.” “The person who did this has left.”
Each one is a moment when somebody starts looking. Three of those is enough to work with. If you can’t write three, that’s the week’s finding, and the next step is conversations rather than promotion.
2. Go where the complaint already exists
Not where your audience “is” in the abstract. Where the specific complaint gets posted: subreddits, Discord servers, niche forums, the comments under a competitor’s launch, replies to someone venting about the problem.
Search the words people use when they’re annoyed, not the words you use when you’re selling. “How do you all handle…”, “anyone found something better than…”, “still doing this in a spreadsheet…”
3. Email twenty people individually
Not a sequence. Not a tool. Twenty emails you wrote by hand to people you have a specific reason to contact — they posted about the problem, they run the kind of operation you built this for, they left a review complaining about the incumbent.
Each should reference that reason in the first line. If you can’t write that line, they’re not on the list. Twenty good emails beat two hundred templated ones and won’t get your domain flagged.
Charge them
The temptation at ten is to hand out free accounts to get the logos. Resist it. A free user tells you the product is interesting; a paying one tells you it’s worth money, and those are completely different facts. You need the second one.
4. Ask the ones who say no
People who look and don’t buy are the most valuable people you’ll meet this month, and almost nobody asks them anything.
One question: “What were you hoping this would do that it didn’t?” Don’t defend, don’t explain, don’t demo. Collect the answer.
Three of those answers will usually rewrite your homepage for you, in their words — which is the only version that reliably works.
5. Do it again with what you learned
The loop is small and unglamorous: find people with the trigger, be useful where they are, watch what happens, adjust the words. Ten customers turn up somewhere in the middle of doing that for a few weeks.
What to skip until you’ve got ten
- A content calendar
- A launch
- Paid acquisition
- A referral programme
- Anything described as a strategy
- Another feature
Every one of those multiplies something you don’t have yet.
Then what?
At ten, you’ve got positioning in your customers’ own words and some idea which trigger converts. That’s the point at which picking a single channel becomes a sensible thing to do — marketing for SaaS founders covers what comes next.