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.

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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?"

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.