How to Find Your First 10 Customers

Published 2026-09-25

Most advice about getting your first customers says "post on social media" or "tell your friends." That gets you polite likes, not customers. There's a faster shortcut: the people you want are already paying someone else to solve the problem, and your competitors have left a trail showing exactly where those people are.

Start with who's unhappy with a competitor

Read your competitors' 2 and 3-star reviews. These are people who needed the product enough to buy it and are disappointed enough to write about it — the warmest possible prospects. Note the complaint that keeps coming up. That complaint is your opening line. (What competitor reviews tell you goes deeper on reading them properly.)

Go where the "what do you use for X?" questions get asked

Search Reddit and Facebook groups for "[competitor name]" and "what do you use for [problem]". Every thread where someone asks for a recommendation or complains about a tool is a conversation your first customer is having right now. Answer the question helpfully first. Mention what you're building only when it actually fits, and say it's yours.

Copy the channel, not the message

Check where competitors get their customers: the Meta Ad Library shows their ads, their blog shows which searches they're chasing, their website footer shows which marketplaces and directories they're listed in. You don't need to beat them on every channel. You need the one or two channels they're clearly getting results from, with a different message aimed at what their customers complain about.

Do things that don't scale, on purpose

For the first ten, manual beats clever. Email people one by one. Offer to do the first job personally, or set the product up for them. Ask each one afterwards who else has the same problem. Ten customers who came in by hand teach you more than a thousand visitors from a post that went briefly viral.

Track where each one came from

Write down the source of every signup or sale, even if it's just a note. After ten, you'll usually see that one channel produced most of them. That's the channel to put real time into next; the rest you can drop.

A shortcut for step one

ScoutBrief builds the competitor list for you from a short description of your business, with each competitor's positioning, pricing and weaknesses, plus a "how to use this report" section that points at where to find customers first. The first report is free. Once you have a few customers, the next step is turning this into a proper go-to-market plan.