The Playbook

First 100 Customers: The Channels That Actually Convert

Forget the growth-hacking listicle. Here's what actually got real founders to 100 — and it's shorter and less glamorous than you'd hope.

← All articles · distilled from real founder research

I've read a lot of "how we got our first 100 customers" write-ups. And the honest, slightly boring truth is that almost all of them come down to the same short list of channels. Not fifty tactics. Maybe five. Let me tell you which ones actually convert, ranked roughly by how often they showed up in the research.

Cold outreach, by hand, to people who obviously have the problem. This is the single most-repeated first-customer tactic in the entire body of founder stories, and it barely gets talked about because it's unsexy. You DM or email people who clearly have the pain. Intercom's Des Traynor sent about 100 hand-written cold emails a day, learning and improving daily. Lauryn Higgins, a freelance copywriter, cold-outreached 40 targeted companies over six weeks — spending roughly 30 minutes researching each one and referencing their actual existing content — and landed her first three long-term clients at around a 7% conversion rate. Jon Perrin got both his 1st and 10th customers from Hunter.io — literally just finding the right email and reaching out. This works because you're not casting a net; you're walking up to the person with the problem and offering the solution.

Your own network, first. Before you do anything clever, mine the people who already trust you. Matthew Pierce got his first 10 for Slay.so from existing clients and friends-of-friends (his wife's network). Volkan Ozcelik's first 10 were friends, colleagues, and trusted industry people — and then his next hundred were, in his words, "friends of the first 10." That word-of-mouth compounding — delight the first ten, they bring the next ninety — shows up constantly. Victor at MakeSales.io mapped it out almost too neatly: first 3 friends, next 3 referrals, next 3 content, next 3 outbound. The network isn't a fallback. It's usually the fastest first-ten channel there is.

Reddit and niche communities. I've written a whole piece on Reddit, so I'll keep it tight: it's arguably the strongest single channel for the first 100 in these stories. One founder got 60 of 100 there, another 42 of 100. Patryk Maron's best results for Zazu's first 100 came from Reddit. The key is those communities are where your audience already gathers — you're not building an audience, you're borrowing one.

Product Hunt — as a burst, not a foundation. This one's real but specific. Marie Martens launched Tally on Product Hunt and it "doubled our user base in one day." Leo Baishun's EarlyBird did a Christmas-Day PH launch amplified across social, Hacker News, Reddit, Indie Hackers, and Slack/Discord/Telegram — and reported first 500 customers within three days. But — and this matters — PH is a spike, not a channel you can return to weekly. The founders who won it pre-warmed their network and cross-posted everywhere to drive vote velocity. Show up cold and it's a shrug.

Hacker News, if you're technical. Julius got most of his first 30 for TinyUX from a "Show HN" post that briefly hit the front page. Mateusz Buda got his first 10 for ScrapingFish from high-quality, citable blog posts that repeatedly hit the HN front page. Courtland Allen submitted Indie Hackers to HN, stayed top-3 for over 24 hours, and reported about 570 mailing-list subscribers and 156,000 pageviews in under two days. Enormous for a dev-audience product. Useless if your customer isn't on Hacker News.

Now here's the meta-point I really want you to take away, because it's more important than any single channel: the Indie Hackers channel-by-milestone summary is startlingly clean. First 10: cold outreach and your network dominate, with Reddit and PH helping. First 100: social posting pushes the needle most, then word of mouth and PH. First 1,000: SEO becomes the workhorse.

Notice what that means. The channels change as you grow. Cold email is a first-ten hero and a hundredth-customer footnote — Steven Goh's Proxycurl got its first 10 from cold email, but by 1,000 customers only about 10% still came from that original blast while roughly 70% came from SEO. If you try to cold-email your way to 10,000, you'll break. If you try to SEO your way to your first 10, you'll starve waiting for Google.

So for the first 100 specifically, here's my blunt advice. Don't spread across five channels. Pick the one or two where your exact buyer already is — cold outreach if you know who they are, Reddit/community if they gather somewhere, PH/HN if they're builders — and go deep. Do the unscalable version. Get on the phone. Marek Piechut got his first 10 "on the phone and in a car" driving to prospects. That's not a growth hack. That's just showing up. And it converts better than almost anything with a dashboard.

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