How to Get Your First 10 Customers

Chapter 1 · Narration: WOW Mentor

How to Get Your First 10 Customers

What WOW Mentor's teardown reveals is a single stubborn fact: your first ten customers come from you, the founder, not from any tool. Before picking a channel, answer where your buyer spends their day; pull your first two or three from the warm network that already trusts you; physically get into the same room; and show up as a real person where the pain is aired in public. Outbound tools and automation only join once your message is proven, and outreach framed as advice or a genuine gift opens doors that a pitch cannot. In the end, the first ten belong not to a great salesperson but to the founder willing to do the unscalable work everyone else avoids.

Today, WOW Mentor breaks down the very first wall a founder hits: how do you actually get your first ten customers. The speaker is Max, a visiting partner at Y Combinator, and he says he constantly hears the same question from YC founders: I think I know who my target customer is, so how do I go find them and start a conversation. What WOW Mentor notices first is the line he draws between strategy and tactics: the strategic advice, doing things that don't scale, founder-led sales, charging for your product, has already been covered by YC Startup School, so today he talks only about the tactics of moving your hands and feet. A few weeks ago he posted on Bookface, YC's internal social network, asking dozens of founders how they really landed those first ten customers, and this video is a compilation of their answers, a map compressed from many founders' field experience where only the repeating patterns survive. The first question WOW Mentor reads as the spine of the talk is this: before you choose a channel, where does your target customer actually spend their time. Max says most founders default to cold email and LinkedIn, because you can do it from your laptop, it feels like work, and there is a ton of automation for it. For some buyers it works: a sales leader lives on a computer and on LinkedIn, so email and LinkedIn make perfect sense. But if your buyer is a school district administrator, a property manager, an insurance agent, or a truck dispatcher, they may not sit at a laptop all day, and their inbox is not the most important surface in their work life. You can blast them with cold email all you want, and all you will conclude is the false lesson that outbound simply doesn't work for you. He grounds this in one recent YC founder who spent months on email and LinkedIn into a legacy industry, with terrible open and reply rates. When he finally went to an industry trade show and walked the floor, he closed more in three days than in three months of cold emails; those customers were on job sites and picked up the phone. The lesson WOW Mentor pulls out is sharp: in hindsight, every hour that founder spent refining his subject line was wasted. So Max asks you to sit down for a single hour, before touching any tool, and answer basic questions about your buyer. What does their day look like, how often do they check email, do they go to conferences, are they on Reddit or LinkedIn, do they pick up the phone, do they ask friends for recommendations or read industry newsletters. If you can't answer most of these concretely, that is a sign you haven't spent enough time with real customers, and you should fix that first. Channel choice, he adds, is observation, not taste. Now it is time to actually start talking to customers, and Max says that before you touch any automation or prospecting tool, you start with people you already have a connection to. Across the founder stories he collected, the first two or three customers came, almost without exception, from the same sources: friends in the industry, former colleagues, classmates, or people one introduction away. The point WOW Mentor underlines is that intros are not a magic sales trick: people who buy early buy because they trust you as a founder, not only because of the product. If someone is going to bet on a new product from a new company, they at least need to trust the person building it, and your first and second-degree network are the easiest people to take that bet. So work through a few sources in order: first your personal network, former colleagues, classmates, friends in the industry, because they trust you most; next your second-degree LinkedIn connections, where you ask for warm intros. One recent YC founder got intros to about half the customers she closed during her batch this way, which tells WOW Mentor that warm intros can carry half your early pipeline.

The third source is AI-powered network search tools. Happenstance, a recent YC company, lets you search your whole extended network in natural language, surfacing relevant people from a far wider net than you could scroll through by hand. When you ask for an intro, be specific, he says: tell them who you want to meet, why that person would care, and what to write in the forwarded email, because the easier you make it, the more likely it happens. The pattern WOW Mentor especially flags is that prospecting tools only start to matter once you have ten to twenty quality customers. Tons of founders spend weeks setting up outreach tooling when they still have plenty of second-degree connections they haven't worked, which is skipping the lowest-hanging fruit. The tactic WOW Mentor finds most human is physically showing up. In the founder stories, a surprising number got into the same room to close their first customers rather than settle for a Zoom. Max admits many don't want to: it is slower, awkward, can cost money to travel, and you might be rejected to your face. But precisely because of that, it works better than almost anything else. One recent YC founder flew to a single executive buyer four weeks in a row, and though the buyer kept rescheduling, he kept showing up and eventually closed them. Another showed up at customer offices uninvited, was asked to leave most of the time, and once flew all the way to Hawaii only to be kicked out after eight minutes, yet through sheer persistence that customer became one of his biggest accounts. The signal WOW Mentor reads is clear: it is not the volume of rejection but the act of putting your body in the same space that conveys a sincerity automation cannot fake. In the same spirit, Max says small conferences work remarkably well: the conversion from one real conversation at a small, industry-specific conference can be far higher than cold-emailing that person. He shares a mini playbook several founders used: set up a Calendly with fifteen-minute slots back-to-back across the conference, email the attendee list beforehand to fill them, email again during the event to catch anyone who missed the first, and stack meetings all day. Another tactic is micro events: a few founders ran founder dinners or happy hours for their ideal customer profile, six to ten people at roughly fifty to a hundred dollars a head, and what WOW Mentor highlights here is density, not scale. Founders said these small gatherings convert far better than large events, because once someone has had dinner with you they are very unlikely to ignore your email. For the first ten customers there is really no tool that replaces being in the same room as your buyer. The next channel WOW Mentor breaks down is public pain online. If you are building a consumer product or something for small businesses, there is often a place where your future customers already complain about the problem you solve, and your job is to find it and show up as a real person. For many founders that place has been Reddit. In one common story a founder posts a product video, the comments rip them apart and they think the launch is a disaster, but then a couple hundred silent lurkers quietly sign up. Another founder said Reddit was the source of his first ten customers, found by DMing every commenter on old threads where people complained about the exact problem he solved. A healthcare founder said responding to Reddit and Facebook complaints was basically her whole job for a couple of months, two to five posts a day; she got shadowbanned from a few subreddits, but she also got a bunch of customers. The principle is broader than Reddit: find where pain is expressed in public, whether Facebook groups, Discord, and YouTube comments, or industry-specific forums for B2B niches. And because Reddit threads get pulled into Google and persist for years, the work you do today keeps paying off. WOW Mentor notes that the shadowban was simply the price of a density that only pays when you show up as a real person.

… The rest of this chapter continues in the full edition, available with a subscription.

Listen to this chapter