I went through 290 founders' MRR posts. The ones past $10k got their first customers a different way
I kept seeing "how I hit $X MRR" posts and every one swears by something different, so I went back through a year of them across 12 founder subreddits. I threw out the jokes and anything about someone else's business, which left 290 founders talking about their own revenue. 209 of them say where their first paying customers came from.
For the ones making under $10k a month, about a third found those first customers in communities like Reddit, forums and Discord, and only around one in ten did any cold outreach. The founders past $10k are the other way round. Only 8% started in communities, and a third got their first customers by cold emailing or DMing people on LinkedIn. One of them put it as "I manually messaged hundreds of people on LinkedIn. Each reply became a potential demo."
That doesn't mean outreach is what grew them, though. When they talk about where customers came from later on, content and SEO comes up most, and outreach is the main channel for only 16% of them. It looks more like they started by asking people directly and built everything else after.
The bigger earners also took longer to get there (a median of about 10 months, against 4 for the under $1k group), were far less often solo (22% vs 82%), and mostly sold to businesses.
The obvious caveats are that it's all self-reported and it's pulled from Reddit, so Reddit is probably overrepresented. A model read each post and I checked a sample by hand. A few of the $10k+ outreach stories also come from companies that sell outreach tools, so I'd take that group with a pinch of salt.
Happy to share the sheet if anyone wants to slice it another way.
The stage split matches what I have seen on B2B tools: communities convert low-commitment products, but once you need a demo or setup conversation, direct outreach is usually how the first ten buyers appear. The part I trust less is memory of the first channel months later. Founders who logged source at signup can name it; everyone else reconstructs a story. Curious whether any of the $10k+ posts described leading with a concrete artifact (teardown, sample deliverable) versus a plain ask, because that changes reply rates more than the channel label.
The channel split is the hardest part to trust, and not because of the sample: community wins are the ones that land as direct or a generic referral, so people rebuild them from memory months later. The founders who can name their exact first channel usually captured it at the source, not guessed it. We split AI/assistant referrers out at the source for this exact reason (amami.dev). Did you ask how any of them knew, or is the sheet just the post text?
One thing the split might hide is what the first message carried. My working bet for first customers (a WordPress directory plugin, so the buyers are small local business owners) is founder-assisted onboarding: build someone's first listing with them instead of pitching. A message that arrives with something already done tends to get replies where a plain ask doesn't, which is closer to your "each reply became a demo" quote than a cold pitch is. It would also fit outreach being the learning channel early: you are testing offers, not just channels.
Did any of the $10k+ stories mention leading with something free, like a teardown or a sample, versus a straight ask?
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Worth adding an ACV lens to the channel split: it may be as much a price effect as a stage effect. Communities convert strangers on low-commitment products; once the product needs a conversation (B2B pricing, setup, trust), the only channel that closes is direct contact — which is exactly where the $10k+ crowd sits. And the later-stage finding is the one I'd underline: whatever started them, content/SEO ended up carrying the load. That makes early outreach less 'the growth channel' and more the learning channel — DMing hundreds of people teaches you rejection reasons at a density no community thread gives you.
The survivorship-bias angle linglistack raised feels like the biggest caveat here: 290 milestone posts measure founders who survived long enough to post, not the ones who tried outreach, got nothing, and quietly quit. I'd also want a per-unit-time view, since outreach founders took a median of ~10 months to get there — if outreach produces one customer per week and community one per month, the "channel" story could partly just be a volume story. Still, the gap holding within B2B only (39% vs 13%) makes it hard to dismiss outreach as pure selection effect.
Totally agree. It's easy to get distracted by premature scaling when the real bottleneck is distribution.
The $90 vs $20 median price looks like the real driver to me. Outreach only pays back when the customer's lifetime value covers the hours spent finding them, which is why it is almost all B2B at the top.
Really useful breakdown. Did you notice whether the founders who got their first customers through friends and personal network kept growing, or did that channel dry up quickly?
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The useful distinction here is “first customer” versus “repeatable channel.” For a narrow digital product, I’d log the first 20 conversations with source, buyer type, objection, and time-to-decision before calling outreach a win. That keeps a lucky sale from turning into a broad positioning claim, and it gives you a cleaner handoff to content or SEO once the same problem starts repeating.
Really useful breakdown, thanks for doing the work. I'm pre-revenue on a flight price-drop app and have mostly been posting in communities. This pushes me to start messaging people directly too. Did the $10k+ group message strangers, or mostly people they already knew?
This matches where I've landed. I'm pre-revenue and looking for my first beta users, and I'm leading with direct messages to agency owners on LinkedIn instead of relying on communities. The "each reply became a potential demo" line is the useful part. Did you notice how many messages the $10k+ founders sent before the first reply, or was it mostly "hundreds" with no breakdown?
One more split I would love to see, because B2B does not quite capture it: the price of the first purchase.
I am a data point from the community side of your table, still at zero. Over the last month I wrote 35 substantive comments on Product Hunt forums, launched there yesterday, and ran about $127 of small ads. The launch sent 44 real visitors, the ads a couple of hundred, and none of either signed up. My product is invoicing sold in packs, and the first purchase is $25.
That price is also why I held off on cold outreach for so long, and only sent my first five cold emails about ten days ago. At $25 a customer, an hour of research and writing per reply cannot pay for itself. At a few thousand a year it pays many times over, which may be most of why the founders past $10k did it.
If the sheet has anything like first-sale price, I suspect it separates outreach founders more cleanly than B2B does. A B2B product sold at $20 a month and one sold at $2,000 a year might live in very different halves of your table.
Good cut to ask for. Only 76 of the 290 gave a price, so treat this loosely, but it leans your way. Founders whose first customers came from outreach charged a median of about $90 a month, content founders about $60, community founders about $20. At $25 a month, communities and content probably pay back faster than one to one outreach does.
The slice I'd want from the sheet is time from launch to first paying customer, split by channel. For someone sitting at zero that's the actual decision: which door gets the first sale soonest, whatever the $10k group did later. If outreach founders got customer #1 in weeks and community founders took months, the 10-vs-4-month median reads very differently than if it's the other way round. Did enough posts give a launch date to measure that?
Not cleanly. Most posts gave the time it took to reach their current MRR, not when the first customer came, and on that measure every channel came out at about six months at the median. Launch to first payment would need a separate pass, and the posts don't usually say.
The B2B split is probably the real variable: buyers with budget are on LinkedIn, not Reddit, so the channel follows the buyer. I see the same thing at SocialPost, where outreach lands best when the person has already seen your posts for a few weeks before the DM arrives. Did your sheet show whether the outreach-first founders kept doing it after their first 10 customers, or switched to content quickly?
Mostly they kept going. Of the 30 whose first customers came from outreach, 23 still named outreach as their main growth channel later, and only 2 said content took over. Almost all of those 23 were selling to businesses, where one more good conversation is worth a lot.
I think this matches what I've seen running outbound for seed to series B founders the last few years. The founders who get past that first 10k almost always did the hard things first, they went and asked real people directly, before any of the content or SEO ever kicked in.
What's interesting, is the reason it works probably isn't the channel itself, it's that cold outreach forces you to talk to someone who isn't already primed to find you, so you get told the truth about your pitch fast. Communities are kinder to a founder's ego, and that's exactly why they don't build the same muscle.
Selling to businesses just takes longer to close, and doing it solo caps how many of those conversations you can run in a week. Would be interested to see whether the ones who got there faster within that group had already sold something before. In my experience second time founders shortcut a lot of this because they already know how to have that first conversation.
I wish I could answer that one. Very few posts said whether it was their first product, so I didn't code it. It's a good field to add on the next pass.
The shift from community to outreach makes sense, but I'd separate cold outreach from revived relationships. A former coworker or customer already knows you, so that conversation is very different from an unsolicited message.
For DictaFlow, community conversations show us which workflows cause the most trouble. Outreach becomes useful when it names that specific workflow instead of pitching "AI dictation" to anyone who writes. It may help to add warm, cold, and inbound columns to the sheet, if the source posts give you enough detail.
Good suggestion. The sheet already separates network and referrals from cold email and DMs (past $10k it's 3 network against 16 cold), but not inbound versus outbound. The source posts usually say enough to tell, so I'll add it on the next pass.
I've put the full write-up here, including the parts that didn't fit in the post: what founders said didn't work (paid ads came first by a distance), what happened when they raised prices, and where they got stuck. The 290 rows are downloadable too, each linked to its source post, if anyone wants to slice it another way: https://kasspian.com/research/mrr-growth
A sample of 290 posted milestones measures the founders who post, not founders. The missing denominator is everyone who ran outreach and never got to $10k — invisible by construction. So "outreach worked for X% of the $10k+ group" is a statement about survivors' playbooks, not outreach's effectiveness. The B2B split fixes one confound; the posting-selection one is the bigger hole.
Fair, and I agree it's the bigger hole. We only see founders who got far enough to post, so this is survivors' playbooks, not proof that outreach works. The closest thing we have to the missing denominator is what they said failed: 31 of the 290 named cold email or cold calling as something that didn't work, so outreach isn't a clean win even inside the sample.
The channel shift at $10k makes sense when you look at what changes. Below $10k, founders are still figuring out who their actual buyer is, so low-precision channels (communities, forums) let you talk to many people and pattern-match. Past that, there is enough signal that cold outreach can be specific enough to work.
The stat I would be curious about: what percentage of the $10k+ group used personal networks vs. true cold outreach? In founder stories, cold often means warm acquaintance not spoken to in 2 years, not actual cold.
Good question, and we did split those out. Of the 48 founders past $10k who said, 3 (6%) got their first customers through their network or referrals, and 3 more through an audience they already had. The outreach third was cold email (8) and LinkedIn and other DMs (8). Your caveat stands though: "cold" is how they described it, and some of those DMs probably went to people who half knew them.
The channel shift at $10k makes sense when you look at what changes. Below $10k, founders are still figuring out who their actual buyer is, so low-precision channels (communities, forums) let you talk to many people and pattern-match. Past that, there is enough signal that cold outreach can be specific enough to work.
The stat I would be curious about: what percentage of the $10k+ group used personal networks vs. true cold outreach? In founder stories, "cold" often means "warm acquaintance I had not spoken to in 2 years," not actual cold.
I’m not sure there’s a real correlation here, but it does make sense. Early on, you usually want to convert fast to validate the MVP and learn what needs improving. Once the product is stronger and you know people are willing to pay, then it makes more sense to push acquisition at scale.
Agreed, it's a correlation, not proof. Your sequence fits what they said about later growth too: past $10k, content and SEO came up most as what grew them, and outreach was the main channel for only 16%. So outreach looks more like the way in than the engine.
The outreach split is striking, but the $10k+ group also skews more B2B and less solo; did you separate channel effects from those differences?
Good question, so I split it. Within B2B only it holds: under $10k, 39% got their first customers from communities and 13% from outreach, and past $10k it's 8% and 42% (136 founders said). Solo only goes the same way, but just 13 solo founders are past $10k, so that part is thin. It's still a correlation, and there's survivorship in it, since people post MRR stories when things went well.
That B2B split addresses the main confound I was wondering about. The solo result is useful context, but 13 founders past $10k is too thin to draw much from. Thanks for breaking it out.