How to get your first 10 SaaS customers

Ten is a strange number. It’s too few to be a business and too many to get by accident. Almost everything written about SaaS growth assumes you already have them — that you have a funnel to optimise, a cohort to retain, a channel to scale. You don’t. You have a URL and a nagging suspicion that you’ve wasted four months.

Getting to ten is a different job from getting to a hundred, and using the hundred-playbook is why most people never reach ten.

The mindset shift: you are not doing marketing yet

Marketing is what you do when you know who the customer is, what they respond to, and roughly what a customer is worth. You know none of that. What you’re doing for the first ten is closer to research with a payment link attached.

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

Personas are useless here. “Backend engineers at Series A companies” tells you nothing about when to show up. Triggers do.

• “We broke prod with a migration again.”
• “I’ve just taken over organising the society.”
• “Our spreadsheet stopped coping at 80 members.”
• “The person who did this has left.”

Each of those is a moment when someone goes looking. Write down three for your product. If you can’t, that’s your first real finding — and it means the next step is conversations, not promotion.

2. Go where the complaint already exists

Not where your audience “is” in the abstract. Where the specific complaint gets posted. Forums, subreddits, Discord servers, Slack communities, the comments under a competitor’s launch, the replies to someone tweeting about the problem.

Search for 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…”, “alternative to…”, “still doing this in a spreadsheet…”.

3. Be useful before you’re relevant

The single fastest way to burn this channel is to reply with a pitch. People can smell it instantly, moderators ban for it, and you get one shot per community.

The reply that works answers the question properly — genuinely, in detail, as if you had no product at all — and then, at the end, mentions that you built something for this, in one sentence, without a link if the rules say no links. That’s it. It converts better anyway.

4. 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 organisation you built this for, they left a review complaining about the incumbent.

Each one should reference the specific reason you’re writing in the first line. If you can’t write that line, they’re not on the list. Twenty good emails will beat two hundred templated ones, and won’t get your domain flagged.

5. Ask the ones who say no

The people who look and don’t buy are the most valuable people you will 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. Just collect the answer.

Three of those answers will usually rewrite your homepage for you, in their words, which is the only version that works.

6. 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 arrive 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

All of those are ways of multiplying something. You don’t have the something yet. Go and get ten.