"Getting your first 10 paying users is harder than building the product." That is the title of a post on r/SaaS from February 2026. The founder wrote that "Building felt productive." Then: "But getting the first 10 people to actually pay? Way harder." What came back was "Just silence."
Another founder, in a thread from August 2026, put it in two lines: "I think I made the classic developer mistake. I spent months building instead of selling."
This guide is for founders who have a working product and few or no paying customers. You get:
- why the first 10 customers come from conversations, and what that means for your week
- how to write down who the 10 are, before you message anyone
- where to find them, what to write, and how to sell the first ones by hand
- when to stop doing it by hand and hand over to ads
My own first paying customers came from direct messages and e-mail. Most of the founders quoted below say the same about theirs, so that is where this guide starts.
Start with conversations, not channels
Your first 10 customers will most likely come from people you talk to one at a time: messages, e-mails, introductions and replies in communities. Ads, SEO and launch days come later, once you know who buys and why.
A commenter in an r/SaaS thread on the first 10 clients put it in one line: "Your first 10 probably come from conversations, not channels." Another wrote in the same thread: "The first 10 users usually don't come from 'marketing'. They come from proximity."
Paul Graham made the same point in 2013, in his essay Do Things That Don't Scale: "The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them."
The silence after a launch is easy to misread. One reply in the February thread named it: "The silence isn't the market telling you no. It's telling you that nobody knows you exist yet. Two very different problems." Ten conversations a week will tell you more than a month of waiting for sign-ups.
Conversations also give you the thing every later channel needs: the words your buyers use for their problem. You will put those words in your ads, your page and your sign-up flow. You can't get them from a dashboard.
Write down who the 10 are
Pick one kind of buyer with one problem, and write it as one sentence before you message anyone. A vague buyer gets a vague message, and a vague message gets no reply.
One buyer, one problem, one sentence
One commenter in r/SaaS gave a form for it: "I help [specific person] avoid [specific expensive pain]". Fill it in with a real person and a problem that costs them money or time.
The difference shows in a reply to a founder who had built a CRM for freelancers:
"A CRM for freelancers" is broad and sounds generic. "A tool that stops freelancers losing warm leads because they forgot to follow up" is much clearer. The pain isn't CRM. The pain is lost revenue.
The sentence also decides where you look. One reply in the August thread said: "the reason 'how do i sell it' feels impossible is you're looking for a channel before you know who the buyer is. don't pick a channel yet."
A list of 20 real names
Next, turn the sentence into names. A founder who now helps others with this step described it on r/SaaS: "make a list of 10-20 people who fit. Check your own network, ask your friends for introduction, check communities, niche subreddits, etc".
Keep the list in one sheet, with one row per person:
| Column | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Name and where you found them | "Ana, r/freelance thread on late invoices" |
| The problem, in their words | copied from their post, or from your call notes |
| First message sent | the date |
| Reply | yes, no, or the reason they gave |
| Next step | a call, a setup, a trial |
| Paid | the date and the plan |
The names above are an example we made up. The "Reply" column matters more than it looks. A reply in the r/SaaS cold e-mail thread suggested you "Track replies by objection, not just response rate: no pain, wrong person, bad timing, unclear value, too expensive, already solved." After 20 rows you will see a pattern in that column.
If you can't fill 20 rows, that is information too. A reply in an October 2026 thread said: "If you can't find five people in the niche willing to complain about the problem, that's already useful feedback."
Your first customers fit in one sheet.
Find them where they already are
Look in this order: people you know and the people they can introduce you to, then communities where your buyers already complain, then cold messages to strangers who fit your sentence. Each step down is colder, so each one needs a sharper message.
People you know, and the people they know
This is the fastest place to start, and the one founders skip. From the February thread: "Your warm network is the fastest path to 10 paying customers. Tell everyone you know what you built and who it's for. Most founders skip this because it feels awkward but it damn well works."
The useful ask is not "try my product". It is "who do you know who has this problem?" A reply in the October thread said "warm intros beat cold DMs by a wide margin". Another gave the reason with an example from the trades: "One intro from that bookkeeper is worth more than 50 cold messages."
Friends who are not buyers can still help with an introduction. They can't tell you if a buyer will pay. Keep them out of the "Paid" column unless they really are the buyer.
Communities where buyers already complain
Your buyers already describe their problem somewhere: a subreddit, a Slack or Discord group, a trade forum, a Facebook group. Go there to read before you write anything.
One reply in the October thread gave a sequence that works without a network:
Public trade forums work better than cold email when you have no network. Find threads where plumbers or bookkeepers already argue about invoicing or scheduling, answer helpfully, then DM only the people who engaged.
Another commenter, who works in accounting software, added the reading step: "Read 20 of them, write down the exact wording people use". That wording goes into your sentence, your first message and, later, your ads.
Every community has rules about promotion, and moderators enforce them. The founder of the "getting users feels impossible" thread wrote: "When I try to talk about it in some subreddits mods always deletes it". Read the rules first. Answer the question that was asked. Mention your product only when someone asks what you use, and send a direct message only to people who replied to you.
Cold messages to strangers
When your network and the communities run out, write to strangers who fit your sentence. Expect most of them to ignore you, and plan for it.
A founder in a June 2026 thread wrote: "So far I've sent around 50 emails and got almost no responses." The top reply read the result like this: "50 cold emails is enough to learn that this version of the message/list is not working, but probably not enough to conclude the channel is dead."
It can work when the list is narrow and the offer is personal. From the February thread: "My first 8 paying users came from manually DMing 40 people in one niche and offering to onboard them myself. It wasn't scalable, but it worked." Asked where, the founder answered: "From LinkedIn".
Two rules for this stage:
- Write each message by hand. At 10 to 20 people a week you don't need software. A reply in the June thread: "Setting up an automation that sends 300 emails a day won't do you any good at this stage."
- Follow the law where you send. In the US, the CAN-SPAM Act covers business e-mail too. The FTC says "The law makes no exception for business-to-business email." Use your real name, an honest subject line, your postal address and a way to opt out (FTC compliance guide). Rules in the EU differ by country, so check yours.
Ask about the problem, not the product
Your first message should ask about their problem in one or two short lines. "Can I show you my SaaS?" asks for a favor. A question about their week asks for nothing.
The best advice we found on this was in the June thread:
The first users usually come when the ask gets smaller and the pain gets sharper. "Can I show you my SaaS?" is easy to ignore. "Are you still doing X manually every week? I noticed Y and had one idea" is much harder to dismiss if the targeting is right.
The same reply said: "Stop asking for feedback on the product at first. Ask about the painful workflow the product is supposed to replace." In the October thread, another commenter made the ask even smaller: "Can I watch how you do your invoices for 15 minutes" usually lands better than "can I pick your brain about your pain points".
Here is a first message we wrote as an example. Change every bracket:
Hi [name], I saw your post about [the problem, in their words]. I'm building something for [the buyer] who [the problem]. How do you handle it today?
If they answer, ask about the last time it happened, what they tried and what it cost them. Don't ask "would you buy this". A commenter in the October thread put the same advice this way: "ask about their last time they had the problem, not whether they'd buy your idea." Several founders in these threads also point to Rob Fitzpatrick's book The Mom Test for how to ask these questions.
The smaller the ask, the more people answer.
- "Can I show you my SaaS?"
- "Can I pick your brain?"
- "Can I watch you do it for 15 minutes?"
- "Are you still doing X manually every week?"
Sell the first ones by hand
When someone says the problem is real, set the product up for them, watch them use it, and ask them to pay. The first customers buy because you solved their problem with them, more than because the product is finished.
Do the setup for them
Paul Graham's essay describes how the Stripe founders did it. When someone agreed to try Stripe, they would say "Right then, give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot. The essay also covers doing work by hand that you plan to automate later: "When you only have a small number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later."
Founders in the threads call this concierge onboarding. One wrote: "Find 5-10 people experiencing the exact problem you solve in a specific community or professional group. Manually reach out and offer to set it up for them, essentially a "concierge" onboarding." Another gave a plan for the first week: "manually solve the first 3 cases even if the product is not the full answer yet".
Doing the setup yourself also shows you where people get stuck. Those steps become your onboarding later.
Ask for money early
Ask the first users to pay, or tell them on day one when the free period ends. Free users show you that someone likes the product. Paying customers show you that someone needs it. That is our view, and the threads lean the same way. A founder who described this stage wrote that "every new feature feels like progress but its mostly hiding from the uncomfortable part, which is asking people to pay". The founder who now helps others with this step put the rule as: "people should commit either with their time or money".
Watch who comes back
A customer who stops using the product in week two is not one of your 10. One reply in the "getting users feels impossible" thread asked the founder: "Like if you have 10 users, do 6 of them come back? Because that's the real signal. If they're not sticking around, it's a product thing, not a marketing thing."
So add one more column to your sheet: still using it after a month, yes or no.
Launch days help, but they are not the plan
A launch on Product Hunt, Hacker News or a niche community can bring a first group of users to learn from. It rarely brings a steady flow of paying customers by itself.
Paul Graham named the limit: "All you need from a launch is some initial core of users." He also described what to do with that group: "get some initial set of users by doing a comparatively untargeted launch, and then to observe which kind seem most enthusiastic, and seek out more like them."
If you launch, read the rules first. Hacker News, for example, says "Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with", lists "sign-up pages" as off topic, and asks: "Please don't ask friends to upvote or comment."
A founder on r/SaaS who now sells a lead tool wrote that "What did not work at all was mass blasting messages or posting in big places like Product Hunt way too early." For many B2B products, a niche community where your buyers already are is a better first place than a launch site full of other founders.
When to hand over to ads
Start paid ads when your first customers have shown you who buys, why, and in which words. Before that, ads mostly buy clicks from people you can't describe. After it, ads can find more people like the ones who already paid.
One founder described the order their company followed:
our first 10 users were referrals. entrepreneur communities, colleagues.
once we had 10 clients we started running ads and doing content on instagram. this part depends a lot on where your ideal customer is.
The reply ends with: "the first 10 almost never come from ads."
Paul Graham's essay describes the same switch: "if the market exists you can usually start by recruiting users manually and then gradually switch to less manual methods."
Signs you are ready for ads
- You can write the buyer sentence, and it matches the people who paid.
- More than one customer of the same kind said yes, for the same reason.
- You have their words for the problem, copied from messages and calls.
- You know the first paid step: a trial, a plan or a call.
- You can follow one sign-up from the first click to the payment.
If two or more of these are missing, keep going by hand a little longer.
What carries over from the messages
The conversations hand you most of what an ad needs. The sentence that got replies becomes the first line of the ad. The problem in the buyer's words becomes the headline. A media buyer on r/SaaS gave the same advice for Meta ads: "take the exact sentence that made them pay and make that the ad headline". The objections in your "Reply" column tell you what the landing page has to answer.
Then pick the first paid channel from where those buyers already spend time. Put your stage, budget and team into the Channel Finder. It ranks 150 channels for your answers. Channels that need something you don't have yet, such as paying customers, an e-mail list or an ad budget, move to an "Unlock later" list that says what each one needs.
For Meta ads in particular, our guide Facebook ads for SaaS: when they work and when they don't covers the price points and the math to do first.
This step is what our early launch tactics page covers: the launch offer, the page, the waitlist, the first small paid tests and the tracking that shows which move brought each sign-up. The one-by-one messages that come before it stay with you, because nobody can have those first conversations for you.
Do the first customers by hand. Then let ads find more like them.
- One sentence
- Conversations by hand
- First paying customers
- Ads to more of the same buyer
Mistakes that keep founders at zero
Building one more feature.
Why it happens: building feels productive, and messages feel like rejection.
Fix: count conversations each week, not features shipped.
Pitching before listening.
Why it happens: you know the product best, so you lead with it.
Fix: ask about the last time they had the problem. Show the product only after they confirm it.
Sending a lot of messages at once.
Why it happens: volume feels like progress.
Fix: 10 to 20 messages a week, each one written for that person. Change the sentence when the replies say "wrong person" or "no pain".
Selling to other founders by accident.
Why it happens: founder communities are easy to find and friendly.
Fix: post where your buyers are. Likes from other founders are not sign-ups from buyers.
Keeping it free for too long.
Why it happens: asking for money is the hardest message to send.
Fix: say the price, or the end date of the free period, before the first setup call.
Running ads to find out who the buyer is.
Why it happens: ads look faster than conversations.
Fix: use conversations to learn who buys. Use ads to find more of them.
Where this breaks down
- Enterprise products. Paul Graham's essay notes that for products like enterprise software, in a field where you have no contacts, you have to rely on "cold calls and introductions". Ten customers can take much longer, and each one involves more people.
- Very cheap products. If your app costs a few dollars a month, ten customers won by hand prove little about the money. Use the first conversations to learn the words, then test a small paid channel sooner. That is our view.
- The sources. The founder stories here are self-reported Reddit posts. Several commenters sell outreach or lead tools, and we say so where we know it.
- The law. Rules for cold e-mail and direct messages differ by country and by platform. Nothing here is legal advice.