How to Get Your First 10 Customers
Max from Y Combinator provides tactical guidance on acquiring a startup's first 10 customers, emphasizing that success comes from understanding where target customers spend time, leveraging warm networks, showing up in person, and doing unscalable manual work rather than relying on automation tools.
Summary
Max opens by addressing a common challenge YC founders face: moving from identifying a target customer to actually finding and engaging them. He notes that while existing YC advice covers early-stage sales strategy well, this talk focuses specifically on the tactics for landing the first 10 customers.
The foundation of the approach requires founders to first understand where their target customers actually spend time, rather than defaulting to cold email and LinkedIn outreach. Max illustrates this with an example of a founder who wasted months on email to legacy industry prospects but closed more deals in 3 days at a trade show. The key is researching the customer's daily life: email habits, conference attendance, social media presence, and communication preferences.
For the actual customer acquisition process, Max outlines a clear progression. Customers 1-3 almost universally come from warm networks: personal connections, former colleagues, classmates, and people one introduction away. The rationale is that early customers buy based on trust in the founder, not just product quality. After exhausting personal networks, founders should leverage second-degree LinkedIn connections and AI-powered network tools like Happenstance.
A surprising finding from surveyed YC founders is that showing up in person significantly outperforms remote engagement. Examples include a founder who flew to meet an executive four weeks in a row despite reschedules, another who appeared uninvited at offices (and was sometimes asked to leave), and a third who flew to Hawaii for an 8-minute meeting that eventually became a major account. Small, niche-specific conferences also proved highly effective, with a mini-playbook involving pre-event emails, back-to-back calendar slots, and follow-ups during the event.
For online communities where customers congregate, Reddit emerged as a particularly effective channel. Founders have found success posting products for feedback, DMing commenters who complained about the problem being solved, and responding to complaints across Reddit and Facebook. One healthcare founder made customer interaction her primary job for months, posting 2-5 times daily.
Once warm networks are exhausted and in-person opportunities pursued, founders move to outbound prospecting using tools like Apollo, Clay, and LinkedIn Premium to build targeted lists. However, the framing of outreach matters significantly. Rather than direct sales pitches, effective early outreach often positions the conversation as asking for advice, mentorship, product reviews, or whiteboarding sessions. Max emphasizes this should be genuine, not deceptive.
Outreach copy itself should stay under 75 words, include a clear call to action, sound human (a simple test is reading aloud to a friend), and ideally provide value first—such as a vulnerability scan, app walkthrough feedback, or a customized audit. Follow-ups of 3-4 times over a couple weeks are recommended.
Max concludes by framing customer acquisition in three phases: customers 1-3 from personal network, 4-10 from unscalable manual work (the "tedious and manual" phase), and 10+ from higher-volume tools once a refined pitch and case studies exist. The advantage founders have is their personal willingness to invest time in a way established companies cannot fake.
Key Insights
- Most founders default to cold email and LinkedIn because it's easy and feels productive, but this fails for customers who don't live on their laptops—like school administrators, property managers, insurance agents, and truck dispatchers—making it critical to first map where the actual target customer spends time
- A YC founder who spent months on email and LinkedIn outreach to a legacy industry closed more deals in 3 days at an industry trade show than in 3 months of cold email, revealing that months of subject line refinement and copy optimization were wasted because the channel itself was wrong
- Early customers buy based on trust in the founder rather than product quality alone, which is why the first 2-3 customers almost universally come from warm networks—people who already have some relationship with the founder
- Founders achieved surprisingly high success by showing up in person despite the cost and awkwardness: one flew to meet a buyer four weeks in a row despite rescheduling, another flew to Hawaii for an 8-minute meeting that became a major account, and this tactic outperforms 'basically anything else'
- For early outreach, framing the message as asking for advice, mentorship, or product feedback rather than a direct sales pitch significantly improves conversion rates, and founders should genuinely be open to learning—one founder maxed out LinkedIn connections testing one hypothesis per week and converted 20% of accepted requests into calls
Topics
Transcript
[0:09] Hi, I'm Max, a visiting partner here at Y Combinator. Today I want to talk to you about something I constantly hear from YC founders, which is, "I think I know who my target customer is. Now, how do I actually go find them and start a conversation?" YC Startup School already released a lot of good advice on the strategy of early stage sales, doing things that don't scale, founder sales, making sure to charge for your product. That advice is all great and you should definitely internalize it, but today I want to talk about the tactics of getting your first 10 customers. A few [0:40] weeks ago, I made a post internally on Bookface, YC's internal…
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