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How did you grow from 0 to 50 customers?

by Johan Cutych

Long time no post IHackers! I was recently wondering about how the growth strategy changed from 2016 to 2022.

I remember back in the day it is the "build it and they will come" mindset. Not as much as in 2012, but still. Building a good product and launching on PH and then being active and responding on your profile on Twitter was kind enough.

But now it feels it has changed a lot to the hard grind of doing tons of landing pages, TikTok, connecting people on LI, and doing great content there.

The competition is fierce.

So I am wondering, what were the exact steps and things you did to get to your first 50 paying customers?

Johan Cutych's avatarJohan Cutych
on July 15, 2022
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  1. 3

    This classic Paul Graham essay might be useful: Do Things That Don't Scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html).

    Here's an extract:

    The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.

    Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was Stripe. But in fact they're famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition.

    davidwu's avatar davidwu
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    4 years ago
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    1. 1

      This gold aged well! So true

      Johan Cutych's avatar Johan Cutych
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      4 years ago
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