I Wasted $500 on Ads for 0 Users. Then I Got My First 10 Customers With This "Boring" Method.

If you have ever launched a product, you know the feeling.

We pushed Teamcamp live our all-in-one platform designed to help tech agencies manage projects and heard nothing but crickets.

In a classic founder panic, we threw some money at ads.

That move got us exactly zero paying customers and a serious dent in our motivation.

The gut punch of the failed ads taught us something important: We didn't have a traffic problem.

We had a "we're-not-talking-to-actual-humans" problem. So we went back to basics with a simple, manual plan.

First, we stopped guessing and started listening.

Instead of targeting broad titles, we became detectives on Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

We weren't looking for "agency owners"; we were looking for someone actively complaining, "I'm so tired of juggling Basecamp for tasks, another app for time tracking, and a third for invoicing!".

We looked for the specific pain of paying per-user fees that punish you for growing your team.

Then, we DMed people like actual humans.

Our first instinct was to jump in with a sales pitch. We resisted. Our outreach was basically: "Hey, I saw you're frustrated with [the exact problem they mentioned].

We are founders who got so frustrated with that same thing that we built our own solution.".

No buzzwords, just an honest, "we feel your pain" conversation.

Finally, we showed them the product one-on-one.

This was the magic step. On live calls, we got to see that "aha!" moment when an agency owner realized they could turn tracked hours directly into a professional invoice and get paid via Stripe right from the platform.

We saw their relief when they saw a client portal designed to stop the endless "what's the status?" emails.

It was slow, but it worked. That's how we got our first 10 paying agencies.

The biggest lesson was that in the early days, the most unscalable, human-to-human stuff is what actually moves the needle.

So, I am curious what is the "unscalable" thing you did to land your first few customers?