4:0050 Founders Share How They Got Their First Customers
From Y Combinator · Published Jul 20, 2024 · Watch on YouTube
TL;DR
Fifty founders describe varied paths to first customers: cold outreach (email, voicemail, door-to-door), platform-based acquisition (LinkedIn, Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter, GitHub), leveraging personal networks (friends, family, former coworkers), and inbound from waitlists or unsolicited hiring messages. Several had not yet acquired a paying customer.
Key insights
- Cold outreach methods include crafted emails, voicemails, and literal door-to-door persistence (e.g., waiting for a food truck owner to take a break).
- Reddit was used for both customer discovery (posts with waitlist signups) and direct sales conversations; one founder got ~1,000 waitlist signups in 24 hours from a Reddit post.
- Twitter and GitHub can create explosive organic inbound (e.g., 50 to 10k Twitter followers, 20k GitHub stars, 150k daily unique visitors).
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