Name: How To Get Your First Users
Uploaded: 2026-01-14T15:00:05.000Z
Duration: 5 min 41 s
Channel: Y Combinator

How do you get a new product off the ground? When just starting out, where do those first real users come from? Most people aren't early adopters. Ask yourself, how many products do you use today that you were among the first 10 users of? For most people, the answer is zero. Almost no one wants to be a startup's first paying customer. Yet, every great product still manages to find a few people willing to take that leap.

The earliest version of your product only needs to do one thing: survive contact with a tiny group of people who might actually try it. You're not building the final form. You're building something that can evolve. When starting out, you don't just need a minimum viable product. You need a minimum evolvable product.

Before you get discouraged, there are people who love being early adopters. One colleague, Gustaf, worked at Airbnb for years and enjoyed trying out products from startups and bringing them into the company. Others have such a burning issue that they're willing to give any new product a shot if it looks like it could make their life easier.

For example, when the team needed to ship their first inference API, they wanted to ship it fast and didn't want to deal with figuring out billing or public endpoint. Within 3 days, they found and paid a startup whose product solved that issue. They were that startup's first customer. Their size or reputation didn't matter. The problem did, so they took a chance, and the startup delivered.

The lesson is simple. Finding your first users is more of a search problem than a persuasion problem. You're looking for the Gustafs and Ankits of the world, the ones who try new things or have a burning need that you can solve. This has a few counterintuitive implications:

Charge real money early. Early adopters and people with a burning problem are rarely price sensitive. The goal isn't revenue, it's feedback, and paying customers give sharper feedback than free users ever will. You're more likely to get feedback from an angry customer paying a lot of money than from someone who isn't willing to pay.
Use targeted personal outreach. The ways you find these people probably don't look like how you find normal people. A billboard is way less likely to reach them versus something like a targeted cold email or a knock on their door.

How To Get Your First Users

Getting New Products Off the Ground and Finding First Users00:00

Early Adopters Exist00:30

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