Your First 100 Customers Are Probably Already Somewhere
One of the most common SaaS questions is:
"How do I get my first 100 customers?"
The usual answers are predictable.
"Do SEO."
"Post on X."
"Launch on Product Hunt."
"Make TikToks."
"Run ads."
"Do cold outreach."
None of these are necessarily bad ideas.
But there's a problem.
You don't know which one makes sense for your product.
Your customers are already doing something
If people have a problem bad enough to pay for, they're probably already trying to solve it.
Maybe they're:
- Paying for a competitor.
- Searching for alternatives.
- Asking questions on Reddit.
- Complaining about existing tools.
- Using spreadsheets.
- Posting in niche communities.
- Watching YouTube tutorials.
- Looking for integrations.
- Comparing different products.
That's where I'd start looking for the first 100 customers.
Not with:
"How can I get more traffic?"
But with:
"Where are people already showing intent?"
Let's say you're building a $50/month SaaS
You need 60 customers to reach $3,000 MRR.
You could spend six months trying to rank for competitive keywords.
Or you could discover that your target customers are already discussing the exact problem in three niche communities.
Those are very different starting points.
The second option doesn't guarantee customers.
But it gives you something much more valuable:
a hypothesis you can test.
This is where competitor research becomes interesting
Your competitors have already spent time figuring out how to reach the market.
So I'd want to know:
Where are they getting attention?
What kind of content are they creating?
What keywords are they targeting?
Which communities mention them?
What are customers saying about them?
What alternatives are people searching for?
You don't have to copy their strategy.
You're looking for clues.
And sometimes those clues point somewhere completely different.
We built Fountrail around this process
This is one of the things we're trying to make easier with Fountrail.
Instead of starting with:
"Which marketing channel should I use?"
You start with the market.
Research competitors.
Understand their positioning.
Look at their acquisition strategies.
Study customer feedback.
Identify potential audiences.
Then turn those findings into marketing hypotheses.
For example:
Hypothesis: Our target customers are already looking for alternatives to X.
Test: Create a comparison page and post it where those users are already looking.
Or:
Hypothesis: Competitor X gets traction through educational content.
Test: Create 10 pieces of content around the same underlying problem, but target a narrower audience.
That's a much better starting point than simply saying:
"Let's do content marketing."
Don't try to reach everyone
Your first 100 customers probably won't come from 100 different places.
They may come from a handful of very specific audiences.
And that's okay.
You don't need everyone to know about your product.
You need the right people to know it exists.
That's why I think the first 100 customers are less about "growth hacks" and more about finding where intent already exists.
What would you do?
If you had a new SaaS tomorrow and needed your first 100 customers, where would you look first?
Competitor audiences?
Reddit?
SEO?
X?
Product Hunt?
Cold outreach?
Or somewhere more specific?
I'm curious what has actually worked for other indie hackers.
Honestly, the hardest part has been turning a huge amount of market data into something founders can actually act on.
It’s relatively easy to collect competitors, features, pricing, reviews, and traffic signals. The difficult part is connecting all of that into a clear decision: what to build, who to target, and how to get the first customers.
That’s also been the biggest learning for us with Fountrail - the output needs to be less “research report” and more “here’s what I’d test next and why.”
Curious what’s been the hardest part for you with Xstream4K so far?
Yeah, founders often spend their first few months trying to be everywhere when their buyers are already concentrated in a few specific places. I’d start by finding where your ideal customers repeatedly ask questions, compare tools, and look for solutions.
Pick three of those places and test them for 14 days: join the conversations, publish one useful answer to a specific problem, and offer a relevant next step. Track visits, qualified conversations, and customers. If people engage but don’t buy, revisit the offer; if nobody engages, try another place.
Your first 100 customers will probably come from one or two repeatable paths, such as community conversations leading to referrals or a search page bringing in qualified leads. Who’s your ideal customer, and what are they trying to do?
Exactly — the “three places for 14 days” approach is much more actionable than trying to be everywhere.
For Fountrail, our ideal customer is an indie hacker or small SaaS founder who has an idea or early product and needs to answer three questions: is this niche worth pursuing, how should I position it, and where can I find the first customers?
They’re trying to reduce the guesswork before spending months building or scaling something that may not have a viable market.
That’s also why we’re focusing Fountrail on connecting market signals directly to positioning and acquisition experiments, rather than just giving founders a list of competitors.
Thanks for sharing the numbers, that makes it much easier to follow.
The part that is easy to agree with and hard to do is that the places with real intent are usually hostile to whoever sells the solution. Competitor support forums, niche subreddits and complaint threads are exactly where the intent sits, and exactly where a vendor gets removed fastest. So the real question is not which channel, it is how to be present somewhere that does not want you there. The only thing I have seen work is answering plenty of questions where your product is not the answer, so that the times it is do not read as the reason you turned up. That is slow in a way the list of tactics does not suggest.
Exactly. I think that’s the part most “first 100 customers” playbooks gloss over.
Being present where intent is highest doesn’t mean dropping your product into every relevant thread. You have to earn enough context and trust that your answer is useful even when your product isn’t mentioned.
That’s also something we’re trying to reflect in Fountrail: not just identifying where conversations happen, but understanding the nature of those conversations and whether there’s a realistic way to participate.
It’s slower, but probably much more sustainable than trying to force a conversion out of every interaction.