Six strategies to find your first 10 SaaS customers

Executive overview

Most founders start coding before validating demand. The result: a product nobody buys. The fix is to market before you build — get into real conversations with potential customers while there is still time to adapt.

Build your network, not a social media audience. Marketing is a learnable, repeatable skill; audience-building is a lottery.

Start marketing before you start coding — conversations beat content, network beats audience.

Foundation: landing page and ideal customer profile

• Set up a basic landing page and begin collecting an early access list immediately.
• Define a tight ideal customer profile (ICP) — a specific title, role, or vertical.
• "Everyone on the internet" is not an ICP; narrow focus is essential for bootstrappers.
• The list becomes a survey asset — use it to test value props and screenshots before building.

Six tactics to reach the first 10 customers

• Talk to founders who have sold into the same space — both successes and failures.
• Leverage your existing network — ask for introductions to potential users; if you have no network in the space, start building one now.
• Find an existing audience — appear on podcasts, get a network contact to share your idea; do not spend years building your own audience from zero.
• Lurk in online communities — Reddit, Facebook groups, Slack channels; identify recurring complaints about existing solutions.
• Warm and cold outreach — email, LinkedIn DMs, Twitter DMs; Tally.so's co-founder cold-outreached thousands of people to get traction.
• Run paid ads — Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google Ads with no expectation of positive ROI; the goal is finding interested prospects cheaply and fast.

How to handle feedback

• Expect feedback that both confirms and challenges your initial vision.
• Develop the skill of knowing which feedback to act on and which to ignore.
• Adjust your marketing copy and product direction in response to market pull.
• Validate any unique positioning early — confirm it matters to real buyers.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Treating Twitter/X as a marketing strategy is a lottery, not a repeatable process.
• Cargo-culting tactics (e.g., copying a free plan) without understanding what actually drove a competitor's growth.
• Locking in on a fixed product vision before having customer conversations.
• Assuming low-touch funnels need no human contact — early conversations are essential regardless of funnel type.

What to do if you can't find people online

• Reconsider offline tactics: cold calling and in-person events.
• Or restart in a space that has an identifiable online audience.
• Either way, direct conversations with potential customers are non-negotiable.