How to Get Customers for a New Business

Getting customers for a new business means finding the specific people who already have the problem you solve, reaching them directly, and turning a handful into paying, satisfied customers before you try to scale. Early on, that usually means personal outreach by the founder. Ads, search and launches tend to work later.

This milestone is where the route shifts from “does anyone want this?” to “how do I reach the people who do, again and again?” In the interviews I do, the story of the first customers is rarely the one the founder planned. The plan was a launch, a viral post or an ad campaign. What actually worked was usually slower, more personal and a little uncomfortable.

What this decision really is

On the surface the question is which channel to use. Underneath, it is a decision about where to spend the scarcest thing you have, your own time, at each stage of the business. A channel that is right for your first ten customers is often wrong for your first thousand, and the reverse is just as true.

It helps to split the problem into three stages:

Stage	Goal	Methods that usually fit	What you learn
First 10 customers	Prove that strangers will pay	Personal outreach, your network, communities, manual service	Who buys, in their own words
First 100 customers	Find a pattern	Direct sales at volume, referrals, one or two content or community channels, launches	Which message and channel convert
Repeatable channel	Grow without the founder in every sale	Content and search, partnerships, paid acquisition, sales hires	What a customer costs and what one is worth

Founders get into trouble when they skip a stage. A paid ad campaign before the first ten customers is an expensive way to find out you do not yet know who you are selling to. Manual outreach at the thousand-customer stage is a sign the business has not found its repeatable channel.

Why the first customers come from you

Paul Graham’s 2013 essay “Do Things that Don’t Scale” is probably the most cited piece of advice on this stage, and its central point is simple: you cannot wait for users to come to you. He describes Stripe’s founders setting up interested users on the spot instead of sending a link later, asking for the person’s laptop right then. He describes Airbnb’s founders going door to door in New York to recruit hosts and help improve their listings, and Pinterest’s founder recruiting at a design bloggers’ conference after noticing that many early users were interested in design.

Graham also names the reasons founders avoid this work: it is easier to stay home and build than to talk to strangers who will mostly say no, and the numbers look too small to matter. Both reasons are familiar. In my conversations with founders, the ones who struggled longest to get customers were rarely short of product. They were short of conversations.

The same essay makes a point about attention that suits small businesses especially well. Early customers can get an unusually good experience from an incomplete product if the founder makes up the difference by paying close attention to them. Graham cites Wufoo sending each new user a handwritten thank you note. A large company cannot do that. A founder with twenty customers can.

What the right channel depends on

There is no best channel in general. There is a best channel for a particular buyer, price and product. These are the factors that decide it.

Who buys. Business buyers can be reached one by one, through outreach, referrals and introductions, and a single sale can justify hours of work. Consumers usually need to be reached in groups: communities, content, marketplaces, launches.

What they pay. A product that costs a few dollars a month cannot support a sales call per customer. A product that costs thousands a year often needs one. The price you charge, covered in the next milestone, quietly decides which channels can pay for themselves.

How long they take to decide. An impulse purchase can come from a single post. A purchase that needs a budget, a manager or a contract needs follow-up, and follow-up is where most founders drop the ball.

Where buyers already spend their attention. The best early channel is usually wherever your customers already gather to talk about the problem: a forum, a trade group, a Slack community, an industry event, a marketplace. Going to them beats asking them to come to you.

What you already have. A professional network, an audience, a skill at writing or a list of past clients are all head starts. Founders who start without any of these are not at a disadvantage forever, but their first channel will usually be direct outreach.

The common options

Channel	Best for	Strength	Main trade-off
Your own network	First few customers of almost any business	Fast, warm, honest feedback	Small, and friends may buy out of kindness
Direct outreach (email, calls, messages)	Business buyers, higher prices	You choose exactly who to reach	Slow, many rejections, needs follow-up
Communities and forums	Niche products with a clear group of users	Buyers are already discussing the problem	Self-promotion is often unwelcome; you have to contribute
Launch platforms	Products for early adopters and tech audiences	A burst of attention and feedback	The spike fades; visitors are not all buyers
Content and search	Problems people actively search for	Compounds over time	Takes months before it brings customers
Partnerships and referrals	Products that complement something people already use	Borrowed trust	Depends on someone else’s priorities
Paid ads	Products with a proven message and known economics	Scales quickly and measurably	Expensive while you are still learning
Marketplaces and app stores	Products that fit an existing store	Buyers already arrive ready to purchase	Fees, rules and the platform owns the relationship

Two patterns come up repeatedly when founders describe what worked. The first is that their best early channel was usually the least glamorous one available. The second is that the channels that finally scaled were often different from the ones that brought the first customers. Neither is a failure. The early channels taught them what to say, and the later ones let them say it to more people.

The role of a launch

Many founders put a launch at the center of their plan. A launch on a platform like Product Hunt can be useful, but it is a single day, and it is worth being clear about what it is for. Product Hunt describes itself as a global community of makers, early adopters, investors and people who like new products. Its own launch guide encourages makers to submit their own products, says there is no discernible advantage to using a third-party “hunter,” and asks makers not to request upvotes directly. The guide presents launch day mainly as a source of visibility, feedback and connections, not as a promise of customers.

Paul Graham’s view of launches is blunter: big launches usually do not work, and all a launch really needs to produce is an initial core of users. That matches what I hear from founders. The launches that mattered were the ones that brought in a few dozen of the right people, who then stayed and talked about it.

Where founders usually get it wrong

• Waiting to be discovered. Publishing a website and waiting is a common plan and one of the least effective. Early on, customers need to be found.
• Selling to everyone. “Small businesses” or “creators” is not a customer. A narrow group is easier to find, easier to talk to and easier to impress. Graham points out that Facebook began only for Harvard students.
• Too many channels at once. Five half-tried channels produce five inconclusive results. Pick one or two, give them a fixed period, and judge them against a target you set in advance.
• Paying for attention before the message works. Ads amplify what you already have. If the message does not convert in direct conversations, paying to show it to more people rarely fixes it.
• Treating a spike as a channel. A launch, a viral post or a press mention can bring a burst of visitors. A channel is something you can repeat next month.
• Not following up. Many first sales come on the second or third contact. A single message with no reply is not a no.
• Scaling before customers stay. If new customers leave quickly, acquiring more of them only speeds up the leak. Watch whether early customers come back, renew or refer others.

The two deeper guides for this milestone

Founder-Led Sales covers why the first sales usually have to be made by the founder personally, what that work looks like day to day, and when it makes sense to hand selling to someone else. It is the natural next step after a successful pre-sale, as described in How to Pre-Sell Before You Build.

Launching on Product Hunt looks at what a launch on the platform can and cannot do for a new product, how founders prepare for it, and how to turn a day of attention into customers who stay.

Other topics planned for this milestone include where founders found their first ten customers, cold email for first customers, and building an audience before you launch.

How this changes when you run more than one business

Founders running several businesses at once face this milestone with less time per business but often more assets: an existing audience, a list, a network built through earlier projects. The temptation is to reuse those assets for everything. Sometimes that works well. Often the new business serves a different buyer, and the old audience is the wrong one. The questions in this pillar still apply to each business separately: who buys, where they gather, and what you can reach them through. The practical side of splitting attention is covered in How to Manage Multiple Businesses.

How to know you are ready for the next milestone

You are ready to focus on pricing when most of these are true:

• You have paying customers who did not know you before you contacted them.
• You can say in one sentence who they are and why they bought.
• At least one channel has produced customers more than once, and you understand roughly why.
• Some early customers have come back, renewed or referred someone.
• You have a rough sense of what each customer costs you in time or money.

If you have customers but no idea where the next ones will come from, stay at this milestone a little longer. Pricing decisions are much easier when you know which channel you are pricing for.

Where this sits on the route

Getting customers is milestone 5, in the middle of the Launch phase. Before it comes How to Validate a Business Idea, where you collect evidence that people want what you offer. After it comes How to Price Your Product, where you decide what to charge, a decision that also shapes which channels you can afford to use.