Original Summary

short version: i got the first handful of customers by doing the thing that does not scale, for much longer than i expected to, and i nearly quit twice because it felt like i was doing it wrong. the advice everyone gives is "do things that don't scale". what nobody says is how long. i assumed a few weeks. it was closer to five months of manually finding people, messaging them one at a time, and getting on calls where most of them said no. what i'd actually tell someone starting: pick 30 people, not 300. i wasted the first month on a big list and generic messages. narrowing to a small group i genuinely understood changed the reply rate more than any rewrite of the message did. ask what they do today, don't pitch. my first messages explained what i built. almost nothing came back. switching to asking how they currently handle the problem got replies from people who were not even close to buying, and two of those turned into customers months later. count conversations, not signups. signups were depressing early and made me want to go rebuild things. conversations were a number i could move every single day, and they were the thing that actually produced the signups later. the uncomfortable part is that none of this looks like progress while it's happening. no graph goes up. you just talk to people and most of them don't care, and then one day enough of them do. if you're in the manual phase right now, how long have you been at it?   submitted by   /u/namanyayg [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：技术学习与提效
  • 分类依据：内容涉及技术、AI、软件工具或工程实践
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SideProject
  • 发布时间：2026/10/11 23:40:48