Going from 0 to 1 paying customer is hard! Here's my formula for it.

Background:

In 2013, I built a top-selling B2C app with hundreds of thousands of users.
In 2019, I built a B2B company and scaled it to 3,000 business customers

The problem:
Getting the first paying customer is often the hardest part of starting a business. Scaling from 0 to 1 is often mysterious and blurry.

Most ideas die in this phase.

Here's my story and my trick for getting my latest product's first paying customers:

1. Build an MVP
Let's focus on a few points here:

It has to be an MVP. Do not build all the bells and whistles of your dream product.
Again, it has to be an MVP. Don't over-optimize and reduce the product to something that's not useful. Just build the minimum product that would still solve the needs of your users.
I would recommend it takes no more than 5 weeks from start to finish. If you spend too long building without traction, it'll be hard to stay motivated, and you may lose interest.
The MVP includes a landing page (don't build it from scratch; use Framer, Webflow, or something similar).

2. Hunt for users

I have a rule that's never failed me for this phase. Every time I build a product, I find a list of 1,000 customers who could benefit from using my new product. Then, I contacted them with a brief message asking them if they'd like to try it out.
My rule of thumb is if I can get 5 paying customers from this list, then I'm on to something and proceed to scale.
Also post on IH, PH, HN, and wherever you can post about your product.

3. Start with only paid plans if possible
The way to know for sure if you have built something valuable is to ask people to pay for it. My latest product had no free plan (it does now, but not when I started it). I wanted to know fast if people would be willing to pay for this or not.

A little more on how we got the first user for my product
After following precisely the above steps, I got someone to sign up, and they started using our product in production. I could not believe my eyes. I thought for sure the credit card they entered was fake. But the payment went through at the end of the month. So I thought for sure they'd cancel. But they didn't. What's more, I kept getting more sign-ups (almost every week).

Eventually, I was convinced that this was a product to pursue, so I went all in and raised a ~$1M pre-seed round (that's a crazy story for another post)!

The road to 100 and 1000 paying customers
Now it's a bit of fun. My advice is to avoid playing games. Be authentic. If you want to promote your product, do it in a tasteful way. Don't lie. Don't spam
But it's a mixture of marketing, ads, outreach, and SEO, depending on various factors (the customer size, the contract size, etc.)

** A bit about the product **

The last product to benefit from this method is Rupt. We are live on ProductHunt today, and we'd appreciate your support!
I'm also hiring. If you're about the startup life, come work with me!