Where to find your first customers for a SaaS

To find your first customers for a SaaS, start with people you already know who have the problem, then go to the places where buyers already ask for help, and then write to the right person at companies that fit. None of this scales, and that is fine. Your first ten customers come from trust, not from reach.

Below are the questions founders ask most often at this stage, with answers drawn from what fast-growing B2B companies did in their first months.

Where do most B2B SaaS companies find their first customers?

In 2020 Lenny Rachitsky spent more than 40 hours reading old founder interviews and found that only three sourcing strategies account for the very early growth of the B2B companies he studied: tapping your personal network, going to where your customers already spend time, and getting press. He also found that almost every company did the first two at the same time, and that press was rarely how anyone got started.

His 2023 follow-up widened the list to seven channels in a suggested order: your network, strategic cold outbound, your investors' networks, communities, content, press and a public launch. His summary of that research is short: none of these seven strategies scale, and that is why they work.

Is my personal network really enough to start?

For many companies it was most of the answer. In the same 2023 piece, the Gong founders say all of their first dozen customers were some kind of personal connection, and Gusto says its first ten customers came from friends who were starting businesses in California. Slack's Stewart Butterfield described begging friends at other companies to try it, which gave Slack six to ten companies to start with.

The useful part is not the size of your network. It is the filter. Write down everyone you know who matches your ideal customer, or who works next to someone who does, and ask them for a conversation about the problem, not a demo.

What if I have no network at all?

Then go where your buyers already talk. People ask for tool recommendations every day on Reddit, Hacker News, X and Threads, in their own words. A thread where someone asks how to stop no-shows at a dental clinic is a person telling you they have the problem right now. Answer the question first and mention your product only when it truly fits; the steps are in our guide on how to promote your SaaS on Reddit without getting banned.

Each place has its own rules, so read them before you post. The Hacker News guidelines ask members not to use the site primarily for promotion, and the Show HN rules say blog posts, sign-up pages and landing pages are off topic for Show HN. The same rules forbid asking friends to upvote or comment. A Show HN works only when people can try the thing you made.

Does cold email still work for first customers?

Yes, if you do it with care. Rachitsky calls the value of cold outbound one of the biggest surprises of his interviews. Zip says it got its first ten customers by asking for advice on LinkedIn, all of them cold, and Sprig says its first ten all came from cold emails to YC companies.

Careful means three things. Pick companies that clearly fit, write to the one person who owns the problem, and open with a line about their situation rather than your features. Then make sure the email reaches the inbox; our guide on how to keep cold emails out of spam covers the sender rules and the setup.

How many people do I need to reach to get ten customers?

Work backwards from a real funnel. In the 2023 Lenny piece, Stytch says roughly 40% to 50% of its sign-ups converted to demos, and about 20% of those went on to onboard. Take those numbers for a hypothetical scheduling tool for dentists.

• 100 people who say yes to a first look x 40% = 40 demos, and 40 x 20% = 8 customers
• 100 people x 50% = 50 demos, and 50 x 20% = 10 customers
• So ten customers takes roughly 100 to 125 interested people at the top of the funnel

Your rates will differ, but the shape holds: you need many more conversations than customers. That is why the channels that put you in front of people with the problem today matter more than the ones that build reach slowly.

Why does reaching buyers early matter so much?

Because buyers decide before they talk to you. The 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, a survey of nearly 4,000 buyers, found that buyers first contact sellers about 61% of the way through their buying journey, and that 95% of the time the winning vendor is already on the first-day shortlist.

For a new product with no brand, that is a hard position. A public thread where someone asks for a recommendation is one of the few moments when you can join the journey early, while the shortlist is still open.

How fast should I expect this to go?

Slower than you want, then faster than you expect. In Do Things That Don't Scale, Paul Graham writes that the most common unscalable thing founders do is recruit users manually, and he shows the arithmetic of steady growth: with 100 users, ten more next week is 10% weekly growth. Kept up, 1.1 to the power of 52 is about 142, so 100 users become roughly 14,000 after a year, which matches his figure.

Stripe is his best-known example. When anyone agreed to try it, the Collison brothers asked for the laptop and set them up on the spot instead of sending a link. The lesson for a small SaaS is to remove every step between yes and first use.

A simple weekly routine

• Write down ten people from your network who match your ideal customer and ask each for a short call
• Search Reddit, Hacker News, X and Threads for people asking for a product like yours and answer three threads with real help
• Pick ten companies that fit, find the person who owns the problem and write one personal first line for each
• Set up anyone who says yes yourself, on the same day
• Count conversations, demos and customers so you learn your own funnel

The second and third items take the most time. LitePal does the finding for you: from your site it lists public threads where people ask for a product like yours with a reply drafted for each, and companies that fit with the decision-maker, a checked email and a first line. You post and send from your own accounts.

Paste your site into LitePal to see this week's conversations from people who already want what you sell, each with a reply ready to edit.