How to find your first paying user
In between high school and before starting university I spent a few months in Canada (I’m European) working at a little camping site next to a beautiful lake. Another guy working there full-time was ~55 years old, married to a diplomat, extremely intelligent but did only basic maintenance work, e.g., fixing a broken pipe, cutting the grass, laying new flooring. Still to this date I don’t know exactly why he worked there and what had happened to him but I enjoyed every single one of our conversations. I learnt something every single time. One day he told me about the concept of the “infinite increase”. This is the step of going from 0 to 1. Before the step you have nothing. Afterwards you have something. After the step you basically have infinitely more than before. I thought about this conversation recently and realized how perfectly this applies to startups. Before you have a paying customer you have nothing. You sit in a 100% blacked out room. After you have a paying customer you suddenly have a window in the room, the room itself gets bright, and you can see that outside the sun is shining and the birds are singing.
Unfortunately, this step is extremely hard. It’s hard to convince someone to buy from you when you have no proof, no reputation, no evidence. So it’s vital at this point to focus on people who are early adopters, either because they desperately need your product (early adopter type 1) or because they are so interested in their space that they would want to try everything that’s new in their space (early adopter type 2). It’s your job as a founder who wants to realize the infinite increase to find such an early adopter. The question is: Where do you find them?
Most founders default to their immediate network. Friends, ex-colleagues, LinkedIn connections they haven't spoken to in 3 years. That rarely works. Your network is a fixed pool and early adopters are rare to be found inside of it.
The next thing people try is cold outreach. And cold outreach works, but only if you're reaching the right people. Blasting 500 generic messages to anyone with a vaguely relevant job title is not outreach. Your reply rate will be 1% and your first customer is unlikely to come from it.
What actually works is finding people who are already thinking about the problem you solve. Not people who might think about it someday. People who are actively engaged with it right now. They're reading about it, talking about it, following people in the space. These people exist. There are more of them than you think. And a cold message to someone who is already halfway there converts completely differently than the same message to someone who isn't.
Practically, you can find those early adopters through going on LinkedIn and looking for people and companies in your niche. Then you go to their posts and identify the people who liked and commented on those posts. Those people have shown engagement; they have left a signal. They are either already looking for a solution (early adopter type 1) or very engaged in their niche and hence much more likely to try out new stuff (early adopter type 2).
None of this requires any tools. You can start manually today.
The ROI on an hour spent building a signal-based lead list beats an hour spent rewriting your opener every single time.
And if you want to automate this, give IbexAI a shot (www.getibex.com). We're a Harvard-backed startup dedicated to finding high-intent leads on LinkedIn on autopilot.
The personalisation point matters but the follow-up is where most people lose it. Sending the first email consistently is easy. Keeping the cadence going when you are also building and selling is where it breaks down.
Getting that part automated was what changed it for me. Replies started coming in on days I wasn't even thinking about outreach. The pipeline just ran without depending on whether I had bandwidth that week. Wrote up how I built it here if useful: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-sent-5-700-cold-emails-automatically-71-open-rate-here-is-what-i-actually-built-4dd90108f6
The "infinite increase" framing is good — 0 to 1 really does feel like a different universe than 0 to 2.
Your early adopter split (desperate need vs. curious tinkerer) matches what I'm seeing validating ThreadScout.
On where the signal actually lives:
LinkedIn commenters on niche posts = solid signal, agree. But for solo founders targeting people actively describing a pain in public, Reddit threads have been stronger for me — someone literally writing "how do I get first customers without ads" or "reddit keeps banning me" is early adopter type 1 in text form.
The mistake I made early: treating Reddit like LinkedIn (broadcast + link). That gets bans. The shift was the same as your point — find people already halfway there, reply with value first, product last.
Also +1 that your immediate network rarely converts. My one meaningful validation conversation so far came from a warm LinkedIn DM to an indie dev — not from blasting connections, but from someone who'd already done Reddit + LLM for need validation and immediately got the workflow.
Re: manual vs automate — 100%. I spent a week manually hunting threads before automating the digest. An hour on signal beats an hour on opener copy.
Curious if IbexAI's sweet spot is B2B LinkedIn intent vs. community threads — different signal shapes, both useful depending on ICP.
The concept of the “infinite increase” from 0 to 1 is a great way to frame that first sale—it really is the moment the lights turn on. Your strategy of targeting people who have already left a "signal" on LinkedIn is much smarter than the usual cold outreach spray-and-pray. It shifts the dynamic from a cold pitch to a relevant conversation.
Since you're helping founders bridge that gap to their first paying user with IbexAI, there’s a competition where you can submit the project—entry is $19 and the winner gets a Tokyo trip.
Prize pool just opened at $0. Your odds are the best right now.
Beyond LinkedIn engagement, what's the most overlooked digital signal you've seen that proves a lead is actually an "Early Adopter Type 1" ready to pay?
How should we proceed?
This is super helpful, especially the part about talking to users early.
I think what I’m struggling with right now is being even earlier than that — getting the first people to discover the product in the first place.
I’m building something in the pet memorial space, and I went down the SEO route to try and capture intent (people searching things like what to write when a pet dies).
But what I’m noticing is that even after publishing a lot of pages, there’s this weird gap where Google knows the pages exist but doesn’t really show them yet.
So it feels like I’m stuck between:
Curious if you or others here did anything specific to break out of that “zero → first users” phase?
going through this right now. the linkedin signal approach is so true. finding people who already post about the problem you solve and just asking them a genuine question works way better than any cold pitch. I might give it a try, thanks
Interesting post and I resonate with this. I am still at the stage with no customers but I feel once I get my first, the rise will feel exponential. I will try and dive deeper to find clients asking for a product like mine.
What I have also done is personalised my cold emails more so the customer feels like its a person trying to sell their product to them, instead of just a random business.
Hey dude, crazy I feel you that's why I built www.axl.onl/ that finds high intent signal on reddit,indehacker and product hunt. It's find where your potential customers are talking about the exact problem your product solves