Original Summary

There’s a lot of advice about getting your first customers: do SEO, post on Twitter, launch on Product Hunt, run ads, build an audience. But I’ve been more interested in what founders actually did when they had zero customers. I went digging through old Reddit threads and found a few stories that I thought were worth sharing. 1. Build something useful for a community first One founder created a free tool for a subreddit and started publishing weekly ranking statistics. Instead of immediately trying to sell something, they became useful to the community. Eventually, someone in the industry reached out and asked whether the founder could provide historical data. The founder wrote the code to generate the reports, and word started spreading from there. The interesting part is that the first customer wasn’t acquired through a sales funnel. The founder demonstrated value publicly, and the customer effectively came to them. Original discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/mnuf7u/how\_did\_you\_get\_your\_first\_customer/ 2. Find 50 potential customers and literally call them Another founder took almost the opposite approach. They built a basic Squarespace site, searched online for 50 businesses that matched their assumptions about their target customer, and called every one of them. They physically visited around 15. They talked to those businesses about the problem, offered no discounts, and had customers booking through the website the next day. The company didn’t even have the technology fully automated yet. They manually handled the work behind the scenes until they eventually raised seed funding. According to the founder, they spent roughly $500 during their first two months and became profitable. Original discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/mnuf7u/how\_did\_you\_get\_your\_first\_customer/ 3. Spend time where people are already describing the problem A more recent SaaS founder said their first 20 customers came from a combination of cold outreach and Reddit. But their Reddit strategy wasn’t posting promotional links everywhere. They searched Reddit for posts where people were already describing the exact problem their SaaS solved. They would answer the person’s question genuinely and only mention their product when it was actually relevant. They estimated they made roughly one product mention for every ten helpful comments. Their takeaway was that Reddit worked because they participated in the communities rather than treating them as advertising channels. Original discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1tfplhb/how\_did\_you\_get\_your\_first\_customers\_for\_your\_sas/ What I find interesting is that none of these stories starts with “we found the perfect scalable acquisition channel.” One founder made something useful for a community. One called 50 people. One searched Reddit for people already experiencing the problem. The first customers seem to come from doing things that would be ridiculous to do

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/9/26 12:43:00