How did you acquire your first ten customers?

Before building, there is usually a phase of talking to potential customers, and asking them if this solves a problem. I usually talk to 20 people who say they would like a solution for the problem I am trying to solve.

In your case, before building, you should get on a call with different authors and publishers and ask if they have this problem, and will they pay for it.

After that, you build it and send them a follow up mail. Most of them will sign up to try if they said they had this problem. That's how I've gotten initial customers.

It helps if you have existing customers already and are building (manually) the solution they want. After that, you extrapolate what’s common amongst their wants and build the product around that. Then you sell it to the same people.

The thing is they already trust you because they’ve sealth with you before.

I wrote an advertisement post that I threw up on /r/forhire. It was fairly long-form and explained that I understood the emotional dilemma that the service I was offering solved, why I'm qualified to do this, and introduced a bit of scarcity in my availability along with my pricing.

I also wrote a guide on how to excel at their goal with my tools in my Evernote, and linked to it in my ad to further solidify the impression that I'm a subject matter expert, and offer a bit of a takeaway for those not interested in paying - as reddit appreciates.

Response was overwhelmingly validating.

@wowsig Can you throw a link up, so we can see it?

Would help to get some more context.