Four months ago, I offered to help find your first customers for free. I’m doing it again.
About four months ago, I posted here offering to help people find their first customers.
The outcome was awesome. I got to meet dozens of indie hackers, learn about what they were building, and work alongside them to figure out who was closest to the problems they were trying to solve.
Sometimes we found promising people to talk to. Other times, we learned that the original audience, messaging, or even the problem needed to be reconsidered. Either way, having real conversations was much more useful than sitting around guessing.
I want to do another round.
If you’re building something and struggling to find your first customers, reply below or email me at rkotcher@gmail.com with:
- What you’re building
- What problem it solves
- Who you think experiences that problem
- What you’ve tried so far
I’ll pick a handful of projects and help research the market, identify people who are close to the problem, and think through a non-spammy way to start conversations with them.
This is free. I’m doing it because I want to keep getting better at customer discovery and learn alongside other builders.
I’m not promising overnight customers or fake growth hacks. The goal is to get closer to real people with real problems and learn what they actually care about.
If that sounds useful, tell me what you’re building!
Robert
Thanks for doing this Robert.
What I'm building: Jobseeker Go Gold a safe community, not just a job board where real people get seen by real companies no fake jobs.
Problem: I'm tired of fake job posts, people using AI to mass apply blocking the bridge from job seeker to recruiter, and scammers going after remote workers.
Who it's for: Job seekers tired of applying into a black hole — especially remote workers and folks with Open to Work who've been burned.
What i've tried: Solo builder here. Built a Slack where the community can come together to fight the evil job market and actually get seen instead of ghosted profiles are live, board is no spam. App link is on my profile.
For distribution — LinkedIn posts (crickets), Indie Hackers page (not indexed yet), and Reddit is blocking all of my posts also.
Bottleneck is what you described: getting in front of the right people who are tired of being burned, not shipping more features. Site is live, profiles work, but trust is hard when big boards burned everyone.
If you're hunting, try it and tell me what sucks I'll fix it.
Thanks for doing this. I’m building ScribaEcho — source-backed comparison and decision tools for solo founders and small teams choosing email marketing software.
The problem I’m trying to solve is that the real price is often not the sticker price: contact counting, send caps, automation limits, duplicate lists, and upgrade triggers can change the cost quite a bit. The audience I think is closest is someone actively choosing or switching Kit, GetResponse, MailerLite, or Brevo, especially after list growth makes their current setup expensive.
What we’ve tried so far: search content + decision tools, 20 Pinterest pins, one canonical Medium story, and a handful of non-promotional community contributions. Search is getting impressions but still 0 clicks. Our clean first-party measurement is at 96 email-marketing pageviews, 45 commercial-intent pageviews, and 5 attributable affiliate navigations, but still 0 confirmed external-entry signals and 0 provider signups. So the bottleneck really is what you described: getting in front of the right people, not shipping more pages.
One concrete free asset is this account-free cost worksheet:
https://scribaecho.com/email-marketing/cost-decision-worksheet/?utm_source=indie_hackers&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=cost_worksheet_phase1&utm_content=first_customers_robert_20260823
ScribaEcho is affiliate-funded and that’s disclosed; the worksheet itself is free and stores/submits no answers.
I’d really value your take on who is closest to this problem and what non-spammy conversation you’d start first.