How to Get Your First 10 Customers

1. 0:00 – 0:54

   Why the first 10 are different

   1. MKMax Kolysh0:00

      [upbeat music] Hi, I'm Max, a Visiting Partner here at Y Combinator. Today, I want to talk to you about something I constantly hear from YC founders, which is, "I think I know who my target customer is. Now, how do I actually go find them and start a conversation?" YC Startup School already released a lot of good advice on the strategy of early-stage sales, doing things that don't scale, founder-led sales, making sure to charge for your product. That advice is all great, and you should definitely internalize it. But today, I want to talk about the tactics of getting your first 10 customers. A few weeks ago, I made a post internally on Bookface, YC's internal social network, asking founders how they actually got those first 10 customers. Dozens of founders responded and wanted to share their experience. This video is a compilation of all my learnings. So let's get

2. 0:54 – 2:45

   Where does your buyer actually spend their time?

   1. MKMax Kolysh0:54

      started. Before you even touch a tool or pick a channel, you need to answer one question: Where does your target customer actually spend their time? Most founders default to cold email and LinkedIn outreach. This is because it's easy. You can do it from your laptop, it feels like you're working, and there's a ton of automation and tools that you can set up for all this. And for some buyers, this actually works fine. If you're selling sales software to a sales leader, for example, email and LinkedIn actually make a lot of sense. The buyer, who is a sales leader, lives on a computer. They spend a ton of time on LinkedIn. It's going to work for them. But a lot of times, you might be selling to a school district administrator or a property manager, an insurance agent, or a truck dispatcher. A lot of people don't sit on a laptop all day, and a lot of people don't have their inbox as the most important surface in their work life. You can blast them with cold email all you want, and you're just gonna conclude that outbound sales doesn't work for you. One recent YC founder spent months on email and LinkedIn outreach to a legacy industry. His open rates and reply rates were terrible. When he finally decided to actually go to an industry trade show and walk the floor, he closed more in three days than he had in three months of sending cold emails. His customers were on job sites, and sometimes they went to conferences. They picked up the phone. In hindsight, any amount of time he spent refining the subject line or his email copy ended up being a waste of time. So before you do anything else, sit down for an hour and answer some basic questions about your buyer. What does their average day look like? How often do they check their email? Do they go to conferences, and which ones, if so? Are they on Reddit? Are they on LinkedIn? Do they pick up the phone? Do they mostly ask their friends for recommendations for new services and software to use? Or maybe there are industry newsletters that they read. If you can't answer most of these questions concretely yet, that's a sign you haven't spent enough time with real customers. Go fix that before anything else. All right. Now it's time to actually start talking to customers. Before you touch any email automation or prospecting tool, you have to start with people you already have some connection

3. 2:45 – 4:20

   Customers 1–3: work your warm network first

   1. MKMax Kolysh2:45

      to. The first two or three customers, almost without exception in these founder stories, came from one of these sources: friends in the industry, former colleagues, classmates from school, or more generally, people one introduction away. The reason your warm network matters isn't that intros are some magic sales trick. It's that the people buying your product early are buying because they trust you as a founder, not just because of the quality of the product. If someone's gonna take a bet on a new product from a new company, they at least need to trust the person building it. Your first-degree and second-degree network are the easiest people to take that bet on you. So before you go outbound, work through a few sources in order. First, your personal network, former colleagues, classmates, friends in the industry. These people will trust you the most, so talk to them first. Next is your second-degree LinkedIn connections. Look at who your connections know and ask for warm intros. One recent YC founder told me she got intros to about half of the customers she closed during her YC batch via LinkedIn intros. Third, there are a bunch of AI-powered network search tools. Happenstance, for example, is a recent YC company that lets you search across your whole extended network in natural language. You can ask things like, "Find people who work on notification systems at big companies," and it'll surface relevant people from a much wider net than you can scroll through manually. When you ask for an intro, be specific. Tell them who you want to meet, why they specifically would care, and what to say in the forwarded email. The easier you make it for them, the more likely the intro actually happens. One pattern I want to call out. Prospecting tools only start to matter once you have 10 to 20 quality customers. Tons of founders spend weeks setting up outreach tools when they actually have a lot of second-degree connections they

4. 4:20 – 5:14

   Get in the room: show up in person

   1. MKMax Kolysh4:20

      haven't messaged yet. If you haven't worked your network, you're skipping the lowest hanging fruit. One of the most surprising things that came up in those YC founder stories is that so many of them, to close their first few customers, actually showed up in person. They didn't just settle for getting on a Zoom. They got into a room. They made it their mission to be in the same room as the buyer. A lot of people don't want to do this tactic. It's slower, it's awkward, it might cost money if you have to travel somewhere, and you might get rejected to your face in real time. But it also happens to work better than basically anything else. First, fly out to close them. One recent YC founder flew to a single executive buyer four weeks in a row. The buyer kept rescheduling, but he kept showing up and eventually closed them. Another founder regularly showed up at customer offices uninvited and got asked to leave most of the time. One time, he actually flew to Hawaii to meet a customer who kicked him out after eight minutes of conversation. And that customer, through some persistence, became one of his biggest accounts.

5. 5:14 – 6:15

   Conferences and founder dinners

   1. MKMax Kolysh5:14

      Another learning was that small conferences tend to work really well. The conversion rate from one real conversation at a small industry-specific conference can be much higher than trying to cold email that same person. Here's a mini playbook on conferences that multiple founders used. You can set up a Calendly and put 15-minute slots back to back across every day of the conference. Before the event starts, email the attendee list a couple of times and fill as many slots as possible. Email them again during the event to catch the people who didn't open the first email. Stack meetings the whole day, and that'll make sure you get the most out of the conference. Another tactic is micro events. A few founders I spoke to ran founder dinners or happy hours for their ideal customer profile, something like six to 10 people, maybe $50 to $100 a head. A lot of founders consistently said that this converts way better than large events. Once someone's eaten dinner with you, it's very unlikely they're gonna ignore your email afterwards, and sometimes they'll even go out of their way to help you. For the first 10 customers, there really is no tool that can replace being in the same room as your buyer. If you're building a consumer product or a product for small businesses,

6. 6:15 – 7:30

   Find where your customers complain online

   1. MKMax Kolysh6:15

      there's often a place online where your future customers are already complaining about the problem you solve. Your job is to find it and then show up there as a real person. For a lot of founders, that place has actually been Reddit. A common Reddit story looks something like this. A founder posts a video of their product on Reddit. A lot of the comments start ripping them apart, and the person thinks their launch is a disaster. But then there's a couple hundred lurkers, the people who never would comment, who might quietly sign up for their product. Another founder told me Reddit was the source of his first 10 customers. He'd find old threads where people complained about the exact problem he was solving, and he would DM every commenter one by one. A healthcare founder said that responding to Reddit and Facebook complaints was basically her whole job for a couple of months. She was doing two to five posts a day. She did get shadowbanned from a few subreddits along the way, but she also got a bunch of customers. This principle is broader than just Reddit. You've gotta find the place where the pain is being expressed in public. For consumer products, that's often Facebook groups, Discord, or YouTube comments. For some B2B niches, it could be industry-specific forums or trade association message boards. The nice thing about Reddit is that threads get pulled into Google Search and persist for years, so the work you do today will keep paying off for a long time. Okay, you've worked your warm network. You've showed up in person. You're active in the communities where

7. 7:30 – 8:35

   How to go outbound: Apollo, Clay, and LinkedIn

   1. MKMax Kolysh7:30

      your customers complain. And at some point, you're gonna need to go actually outbound the people who you don't know. Your job is to find companies that match your ideal customer profile, find the right person at each one, find their contact info, and reach out. Here, I'll talk about a few tools that are most common and that you might wanna try. Apollo was the most common starting point for the founders I talked to. It's basically a lead database with email finding capabilities and a basic sequencer. Their free tier is generous enough for you to build your first list. For most founders at this stage, Apollo alone is enough. Clay is another really popular tool. It lets you build research and enrichment workflows with AI on top of your prospect list. It starts to matter when you wanna qualify leads on something very specific, like what software your prospects use, who's been hiring, or who posted about a topic recently on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Premium is the richest source of fresh professional data. Oftentimes, you'll wanna send a connection request without a message, followed by a short DM once they actually accept you. One recent YC founder mentioned that he got his biggest customer this way, and that was his highest converting cold outreach channel. Great. Now you have your outbound lead list. It's time to decide how you're actually gonna communicate with these prospects.

8. 8:35 – 10:20

   Frame outreach as advice

   1. MKMax Kolysh8:35

      One of the most interesting patterns I saw is that for a lot of founders, the most effective early outreach wasn't actually framed as a sales pitch. It was framed as something else, maybe asking for advice or for mentorship, or asking for a product review or for a whiteboard session. To be clear, you shouldn't mislead people. If you're not actually open to learning from them and you're just trying to disguise a sales call, don't do this. But if you genuinely wanna learn and invest in building a relationship with these people, this framing can often be a real foot in the door. Here's a few examples. One founder reached out to dozens of CEOs in his space asking if they'd be his mentor. His messages were short, they were real, and most people were flattered. A couple accepted, and a few of them eventually became customers. Another founder talked to 200 salespeople before her team even built out the product. Every week, she'd max out her LinkedIn connections with one specific hypothesis she was testing that week, basically user research on steroids. She said about 50% of her connection requests were accepted, and she converted 20% of those into calls. By the time she had a product, she already had a pipeline of people who'd told her exactly what they needed, and she could go reach out to them. A dev tools founder offered startups free whiteboarding sessions on their agent architecture and then offered to open up a shared Slack channel so he can help them implement it. The trick was the architecture just happened to require his exact product. And here's one really creative variation from another founder. He was selling to lawyers, and he actually offered to pay them $100 to $200 an hour, basically a portion of their hourly fee, in exchange for product feedback. About 30% of people he reached out to accepted that offer. The math sounds expensive, but the conversion rate was high enough that his customer acquisition cost ended up being quite reasonable. This kind of approach can especially work in markets with high contract values. Once you've decided on your framing, it's time to actually write some outreach copy. In my experience, the exact copy

9. 10:20 – 13:15

   Writing outreach that sounds human

   1. MKMax Kolysh10:20

      matters less than people think, but a few things really do matter. First, keep it under 75 words. Long emails tend to just get ignored, and they'll assume you used an LLM to write it. Second, the single most important line is a clear call to action. What do you actually want from this person? Do you want a reply? Do you want a call? Are you offering a 15-minute demo? Make it really clear. Otherwise, they'll assume the worst, basically that you're gonna eat up a bunch of their time. Third, there's a very easy test that a lot of people don't do to check whether the email sounds human or not. Find a friend and just read your email out loud to them. If anything sounds like something you wouldn't actually say to a real person, rewrite that part. This is basically a one-minute sanity check, and it'll help you remove most of the AI-sounding lines that end up ruining cold emails. One last tip here. Some founders said that their highest converting outreach gave the prospect something before asking for anything. For example, an API security company can do a quick vulnerability scan on the prospect's public website and show them what they found. If you're a mobile onboarding tool, you can walk through the prospect's app and send a couple of specific suggestions. One example from the YC founders I talked to was a compliance startup that prepared a short audit note specific to that prospect's product, and then they asked each one for a meeting to go into more detail. Now, this kind of work is not sustainable at scale, and that's kind of the point. You're not trying to do this at scale. You're trying to get your first 10 customers. 20 minutes of work before asking for 30 minutes of someone's time is actually quite a reasonable trade. And one last thing here, don't forget to follow up. Something like three or four times over a couple weeks is perfect. I wanna leave you with one frame that I think is a really useful way to think about this whole phase. Customers 1 through 3 almost always come from your personal network. Again, friends, former colleagues, people one intro away. In my founder survey, there were basically no counter examples to this pattern of how people found their first few customers. For customers 4 through 10, they come from doing things that don't scale, flying out to customers, sending Reddit DMs, a small dinner for six prospects, personalized LinkedIn DMs, or free consulting sessions. This part is gonna be tedious, and it's gonna be manual, and it's a really good way to learn before you automate. Then, customers 10 through 50 are where the playbook starts to shift. By this point, you'll probably have a refined pitch, case studies, and you'll have a really good grasp on what resonates about your value prop. And that's when Apollo, Clay, email sequences, all these higher volume outreach tools actually start to make sense. Now, you have a message that's worth scaling and will get you results. So as a reminder, the reason this messy middle phase from 4 to 10 customers works is that you personally, the founder, are doing it. When a founder shows up at someone's office, DMs someone on Reddit, or sends a really researched email that only somebody who studied this problem knows about, it signals something no automation tool is gonna be able to fake, that you care enough about this problem to put your own time into it. That's your advantage right now. It's the one thing you have that established

10. 13:15 – 13:45

    Recap: The first 10 come from you

    1. MKMax Kolysh13:15

       companies in your space won't, so you have to really lean into that. So in conclusion, the first 10 customers will likely not come from a tool. They're gonna come from you manually tapping into your network and showing up. You don't have to be an amazing salesperson to do this. You just have to be willing to do the unscalable things that most salespeople and founders are not willing to do. Good luck, and I can't wait to see what you build. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 13:46