How did you find your first customer?

I've messaged companies I know someone at and asked If they need an analytics & A/B tool and quickly found the first lead. We scheduled a call and after my 10 minute demo they were blown away and wanted to move forward with me. They used my free plan for a month until everything was setup. I got great feedback and feature requests that I could implement immediately. After one month of trial, they decided to subscribe because I nearly added everything they were missing.

splitbee.io

Subscribed!

We got our first customer from a reddit thread and the following ones from content that we created and posted.
zipBoard.co

Hi @hessel

I personally got my first users by cold emailing founders and asking if they wanted to get interviewed on Piiba.

Here is a YC founder who answered the same question, on how he got his first users.

https://piiba.com/profile/1589738881988x987410626168425700

He is open to questions from anyone if yiu are interested

I was still working on launching BuildFaster officially when a web developer on IH asked for early access to one of my themes called Lightning Blue.

Interestingly I found my customer even before I built my product. I talked to a group of people about a potential problem I am trying to solve and pitched my idea. Fortunately, couple of them wanted this right away and was ready to start as soon as I have the first version of the product. I spent most of time hanging out with them while building my product keeping them in loop of what's happening and as soon as I had something (still buggy), I showed it to them and one of them decided to buy.

I wrote about it here: https://tiiny.host/blog/first-paying-users/

My first customers found me through the GitHub marketplace. The advantage of being part of a marketplace is discoverability. The downside is lack of control - I'm not able to offer my own payment option.

Let's put it quick: there are so many potential channels where you can get customers from, but I get my first customer from a place I'd not count on.

This is product hunt. But not the launch page or advertising.

Every week they publish a topic for sharing feedback regarding new upcoming products. And this is where I got a lot of helpful feedback. Eventually I talked to a guy who provided enormous hints related to Pinger, and then he decided to support me and bought a subscription.

I was so excited that I event wrote a post about it: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/pinger/received-lots-of-feedback-with-one-post--M92ZmeKGpuXLdWdR0Fn

Keep trying all channels and communicating with people, understand their pains and ask questions. Our first customer was from FB groups, here's our project - https://leadflare.app

At https://nocode.mba, I built up my audience by sharing free no code tutorials. Then to get my first paying customers, I launched to my email list a limited time lifetime price for access to all tutorials.

I've yet to build a product that people pay for. But I've gotten users through a few methods:

• First app was through BetaBound, a beta listing site. Got quite a few eyeballs on the app, but not close to what I hoped for.
• For my video app, I spent 2 months hassling with making it work with Shopify. I thought a marketplace would be good, but barely got anyone to install it, and even after making it free, very few users (this is why validating ideas is important!)
• I've done a lot (to me) of cold outreach (forums, twitter, email, fb groups), and that got some more users. I say a lot, but it's probably around 15-20 people, spending a lot of time helping them with semi-related issues first, so it was very time-consuming.

It's no joke when marketers tell you to build an audience and engage with them before building a product. It's better to know that they'll want what you're doing. Just because a product is relevant to them, doesn't mean it's important to them :)

If you don't want to hear about unicorns finding their first users, this is way more relevant to IndieHackers:

https://www.indiehackers.com/article/how-to-find-your-earliest-users-5df383c1ad
Interesting stories of how 16 businesses got their first customers.