Customer Centric
Monday, April 28, 2025
If you're building something new and asking yourself:
"Where do I even find my first customers?" - You're not alone.
Many founders, even seasoned ones, wrestle with this question.
The default advice often sounds like a checklist:
Run paid ads.
Do cold outreach.
Publish content.
While these strategies can work, they’re not where you should start, especially in the earliest stages.
Before you dive into tactics, you need to take a step back and ask a deeper question:
👉 Who exactly are you building for?
When you get crystal clear about who your early customers are, the where starts to unfold itself.
Why Founders Get Stuck at Go-to-Market
It’s a classic trap:
Founders build in silence, launch a product, and wait for the magic to happen.
But instead of things working in their favour, they get:
❌ No signups.
❌ No engagement.
❌ No paying customers.
The root problem?
Most founders treat their product like it exists in a vacuum, when in reality, their product only has value in the context of the customer’s life.
If you wait until after launch to find customers, you’ve already waited too long. Start with the customer from day one.
Where You Should Actually Start
Instead of asking, “Where do I find customers?” ask:
👉 “Who is already struggling with the problem I’m solving?”
Look for people already trying to "hack" solutions together.
You’ll know you’ve found them when you spot these signals:
Urgency: They need a solution right now.
Frustration: They are wasting time, energy, or money.
Workarounds: They’ve pieced together temporary fixes.
Emotional Pain: The problem is so severe it’s affecting their sleep, job, or finances.
Example:
When Slack launched, it wasn’t positioned as a "chat tool." They realised early that teams were frustrated with fragmented email threads and constant context-switching. By focusing on the pain of lost productivity and communication gaps, they found early adopters eager for a better solution.
Don’t Just Build a Product, Co-Create It
Most early-stage founders think their job is to sell the solution.
In reality, your first job is to co-create the solution with the right users.
When you deeply involve potential customers in the early stages:
You validate your assumptions faster.
You save months of building the wrong features.
You create emotional buy-in from early users.
Instead of guessing what the market wants, you build it with the very people who will use (and pay for) it.
Real-Life Example:
Superhuman (the email client) famously spent months doing 1-on-1 customer interviews before scaling. They only focused on people who said they would be “very disappointed” if Superhuman disappeared. By continuously shaping the product around real user feedback, they achieved a level of product-market fit that felt almost inevitable.
Why Your First Conversations Matter More Than Any Channel
Here’s the secret most early growth playbooks miss:
The first users you talk to often become:
Your first paying customers
Your loudest evangelists
Your case studies and testimonials
When you invest the time to listen, not pitch, you build relationships, not just transactions.
It’s these early relationships that will shape your entire go-to-market strategy, your product roadmap, and even your brand reputation.
Key Takeaways: Finding First Customers the Right Way
TL;DR:
Don’t start with channels; start with people.
Find those already feeling the pain you solve.
Listen more than you pitch.
Build with your early customers, not just for them.
Early conversations are worth more than early clicks.
When you focus on finding the right people, the channels and growth tactics will naturally emerge.
