How to Get Your First 10 Customers

Name: How to Get Your First 10 Customers
Uploaded: 2026-06-22T16:54:40.000Z
Duration: 13 min 46 s
Channel: Y Combinator

Y CombinatorJune 22, 202613m

Topics9

Getting Your First 10 Customers0:09 Understanding Where Your Target Customer Spends Time1:00 Starting with Your Warm Network2:31 Showing Up In Person4:31 Finding Communities Where Pain Is Expressed6:01 Outbound Prospecting Tools7:30 Non-Sales Framing for Outreach8:30 Writing Effective Outreach Copy10:31 The Customer Acquisition Framework12:00

In a Nutshell

Get your first 3 customers through your warm network of friends, former colleagues, and introductions. Land customers 4-10 by doing unscalable things: flying to meet buyers in person, DMing Reddit complainers, hosting small dinners, and sending researched personalized outreach—not by using Apollo, Clay, or email sequences. Only after 10 customers should you automate; before that, the founder must personally show up where customers actually spend time.

AI-Generated Notes

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Max, a visiting partner at Y Combinator, addresses a common question from YC founders: once you know your target customer, how do you actually find them and start conversations? YC Startup School has released extensive advice on early-stage sales strategy including doing things that don't scale, founder sales, and charging for your product. This video focuses specifically on the tactics for acquiring the first 10 customers, compiled from dozens of founder responses to an internal Bookface post.

Before using any tools or channels, answer one critical question: where does your target customer actually spend their time? Most founders default to cold email and LinkedIn outreach because it's easy to do from a laptop, feels like productive work, and has abundant automation tools available. This approach works for certain buyers like sales leaders who live on computers and spend significant time on LinkedIn. However, many target customers such as school district administrators, property managers, insurance agents, and truck dispatchers don't sit at laptops all day and don't prioritize their inbox as their primary work surface.

One YC founder spent months on email and LinkedIn outreach to a legacy industry with terrible open rates and reply rates. When he finally attended an industry trade show and walked the floor, he closed more deals in 3 days than in 3 months of cold emailing. His customers were on job sites, attended conferences, and picked up the phone. Time spent refining email subject lines and copy proved wasted.

Before any outreach, spend an hour answering concrete questions about your buyer: What does their average day look like? How often do they check email? Do they attend conferences and which ones? Are they on Reddit or LinkedIn? Do they pick up the phone? Do they ask friends for recommendations or read industry newsletters? Inability to answer these questions indicates insufficient time spent with real customers.

Before using email automation or prospecting tools, begin with people you already have connections to. The first two or three customers almost always come from friends in the industry, former colleagues, classmates, or people one introduction away. The reason warm networks matter is that early buyers are purchasing because they trust you as a founder, not solely because of product quality. People willing to bet on a new product from a new company need to trust the person building it.

Work through network sources in order: First, your personal network of former colleagues, classmates, and friends in the industry—these people trust you most. Second, your second-degree LinkedIn connections. One YC founder received intros to approximately half of her closed customers through LinkedIn warm intros. Third, AI-powered network search tools like Happenstance, which allows natural language searches across extended networks to find people with specific roles or characteristics.

When requesting intros, be specific about who you want to meet, why they would care, and what to say in the forwarded email. The easier you make it for the person making the introduction, the more likely it happens.

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How to Get Your First 10 Customers

Getting Your First 10 Customers00:09

Understanding Where Your Target Customer Spends Time01:00

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