# Founder FAQ: How did you get your first customer?

**Author:** Y Combinator
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/JE-founder-faq-how-did-you-get-your-first-customer
**YouTube ID:** NZp5j5hvn9I

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We asked 50+ co-founders from the latest YC batch the same question: How’d you get your first customer? Here’s what they
had to say.

## Transcript

did you find your first customer surprisingly a cold email that's a good question a lot of calls and emailing on Reddit actually we don't have them yet we are currently looking [Music] the first one was actually just kind of very crafted cold Outreach we got our first customer just literally going door to door standing in the sun waiting for the owner to just show up because he was just in his food truck all day and ended up taking a break and then we just capitalized and

closed it actually I'd left a voicemail for one of our physical therapists that we're working with and she called me back and she was like oh tell me more about you know what got your start we actually gave our background on like this is why we got into it and she thought it was like you know we were coming from a good place so she wanted to work with this and it should be just a customer Discovery calls to try and figure out if this was something people would be interested in and we sold it to one company for 250 for a month and we didn't have any code and we just made like made like a version of it in seven days and deployed it it's pretty rough seven days though yeah we got our first

customer by using LinkedIn and at some point we got some conversations with those customers and we started like better understanding the needs better understanding like what kind of solution than it did so we made a mock-up of our Dream personal finance product we made a website for it with a little wait list and we posted it on our Reddit group and within 24 hours there was like close to a thousand people that had signed up for the waitlist it really resonated with a lot of people that were having the same like Financial pain

points as us we launched our close beta and started onboarding those customers for us it was a bit of a wild week in which we launched on Twitter and suddenly a few days later I went from 50 followers to like 10 000 we had 20 000 stars on GitHub we had 150 000 unique visitors a day and so we're really fortunate to have the lightning in a bottle and have all these customers come to us you're asking a great time we actually got our first customer paying this morning how did you find that first customer so we launched we shared what we were doing about two and a half weeks ago on just our linkedins and shared

with our friends and a lot of people came inbound people were really curious about what we were building here um got a great wait list and this customer came through that wait list which was really exciting we don't really have any customers yet but we've got like one really good advisor who sort of made some introductions to Folks at a couple of the big AG tech companies so sort of networking our way in really we are in data so immediately after I get out of here I'm getting on a plane to go to La for a few days and we're kind of we're going to make the rounds of the production companies and see who's interested in this tool how are

you going to try to get that first customer I take all the companies that message me trying to hire me as a software engineer for their biotech company and I respond saying No but how would you like to buy software that does the same thing we have users um and we are currently converting them into paid customers first customer we got was a friend of ours it's like hitting up friends talking to other people in the space that I was close with we launched with friends and family so that way we can test our processes out our pricing and see what was working

what wasn't and then from there it kind of naturally evolved we started getting referrals from our friends and family through our networks trice's extended family holiday home pages to put in the first system which has been great like talk about the best customer for me for him having you know his in-laws holiday home has been a little bit more stressful but I'm like this is great as with a lot of Founders uh your first few customers come from your network and so I was fortunate enough to work with some amazing folks across a wide range of Industries went and kind of told them a

little bit about what we were building and they liked where we were building enough to put real money behind it and so that's how we got the first few customers and you know hopefully the good word we get from them and a few other kind of go to market techniques we're trying will help us really accelerate get way more customers by demo day foreign [Music]
