How to Get Your First 10 SaaS Customers (When You Have Zero Audience)

You've read the posts. Build in public. Tweet your journey. Post value. Grow an audience. Then customers will come.

Good advice. For when you already have 5,000 followers.

If you're building your first SaaS with a small — or non-existent — audience, waiting for organic traction is a strategy for watching your runway disappear. Your first 10 customers are not a marketing problem. They're a sales problem. And sales, at this stage, is a manual job.

Here's what actually works.

The thing nobody tells you about "build in public"

Build in public is a long game. If you start today, you might see real results in 8 to 12 months. By which time you've either pivoted, run out of money, or convinced yourself the market doesn't exist.

Your first 10 customers are not coming from Twitter. They're coming from conversations. Specifically, conversations you haven't had yet because they feel uncomfortable.

That discomfort is the whole game. The founders who get their first 10 customers fast are not better at marketing. They're just willing to have conversations that feel like begging — but aren't.

Stop building. Make the list.

Close your IDE. Open a notes app and write down 50 names. Not ideal customer profiles. Real people.

People you worked with before. People in communities you're part of. People who commented on your posts. People who fit the description of who you built this for.

50 names. That's the job right now. You're not going to cold-pitch all 50. You're going to start conversations with 20 and eventually ask 5 of them to try it.

Don't pitch. Ask.

The mistake most founders make: they open with the product.

"Hey, I built this tool that does X. Want to try it?"

That's a pitch. Most people say no to pitches from strangers.

Instead: "Hey, I've been thinking about [specific problem]. Is that something you deal with? I'm trying to understand how people handle it."

That's a conversation. And conversations convert.

When they engage — and if you've picked the right people, they will — you say: "I've actually been building something around this. It's early. Would you be willing to look at it and tell me if I'm solving the right problem?"

That framing turns your unfinished product into an advantage.

The reply that unlocks everything

When someone tries it, the instinct is to wait. Don't wait. Reply fast.

"Just wanted to check in — did you get a chance to try it? What was the first thing that confused you?"

Not "what do you think?" Not "did you like it?" Those get polite answers. "What was the first thing that confused you?" gets honest ones.

That one question has unlocked more product insight — and more paying customers — than any landing page.

The uncomfortable truth about cold outreach

At some point you'll exhaust your warm network. That's when most founders freeze.

Cold outreach feels like begging. It's not. Done right, it's starting a conversation with someone who doesn't know you exist yet but has exactly the problem you solve.

The key: be specific. Not "I built a SaaS tool for founders." That's noise.

"I noticed you've been building [specific thing] — I've been working on something that might be relevant to the [specific problem] that comes with that. Happy to share if it's useful."

Ten minutes of research per person. Feels slow. Works.

10 highly personalised messages will beat 100 generic ones every time.

Communities are not broadcast channels

Join the communities your customers are in. Not to post your product. To genuinely participate. Indie Hackers. Relevant subreddits. Slack groups for your vertical.

Answer questions. Ask for opinions. Be a real person.

When someone asks for tool recommendations in your category — and they will — you have credibility. You're the person who's been helpful for three weeks. That's when you mention it.

The first 10 are not a marketing problem

If you're stuck at zero customers after three months, it's almost never the product.

It's that you're waiting for something passive to work — SEO, word of mouth, organic social — before you've done the active work.

The active work is uncomfortable. Messages that might get ignored. Demos that go nowhere. Conversations where you realise you're solving the wrong problem. That's not failure. That's information.

Your first 10 customers are a manual job. Do the manual job.

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