How to find and win your first 10 B2B customers

Lenny Rachitsky's fourth installment in his B2B startup series argues that finding your first ten customers starts with trust and hand-to-hand effort, not scalable channels. Drawing on interviews with founders of companies like Figma, Gong, Census, and Canva, he lays out a sequence of seven tactics: personal network, strategic outbound, investor networks, communities, online content, press, and simply launching. The recurring lesson is that the closer and more trusting the relationship, the more willing early customers are to try an unfinished product and give honest feedback. Founders who hustle through these channels are tying their early growth to who they already know and who will tell others.

01Key takeaways

• Begin customer acquisition with friends, former colleagues, and early employees' networks who match your ideal customer profile.
• Make cold outbound work by targeting precisely and changing tactics when responses are poor.
• Ask investors to help research their networks and send cold outreach rather than just making introductions.
• Add genuine value to communities before pitching, since nobody responds well to founders who only sell.
• Build an audience through content and online presence, since it can create word-of-mouth adoption.
• Treat trust as the central asset: early customers who trust you give more honest, useful feedback.

02Key sections

Start with your personal network

Early customers often came through founders' friends, former colleagues, and employees' contacts. These relationships provide the most trust and tolerance for rough early products.

Cold outbound, done creatively

Cold outreach works when targeted precisely, such as finding influential designers on Twitter or filtering Crunchbase for specific company profiles. Adjusting approach when responses are weak is key.

Leveraging investor networks

Founders got early customers by actively researching investors' portfolios and networks and cold-emailing those people, rather than simply requesting introductions. Asking for further referrals extended reach.

Communities, content, press, and launching

Participating in developer and industry communities, building an audience online, earning press, and launching publicly each produced early users, though none scaled on their own.

Trust as the underlying principle

The tactics form concentric circles of decreasing trust, so founders should begin with the most trusted channels and move outward.

03From the post

“Welcome to part four of our series on how to kickstart and scale a B2B business: - Part 1: How to come up with a great B2B startup idea - Part 2: How to validate your idea - Part 3: How to identify your ICP - Part 4: How to find and win your first 10 customers ← This post - Part 5: How to find product-market fit - Part 6: How, and when, to hire your early team - Part 7: How to scale your growth engine Let’s get into it. A huge thank-you to Akshay Kothari (COO of Notion), Ali Ghodsi (CEO of Databricks), Barry McCardel (CEO of Hex), Boris Jabes (CEO of Census), Calvin French-Owen (co-founder of Segment), Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO of Canva), Christina Cacioppo (CEO of Vanta), David Hsu (CEO of Retool), Eilon Reshef (CPO of Gong), Eric Glyman (CEO of Ramp), Guy Podjarny (CEO of Snyk), Jori Lallo (co-founder of Linear), Julianna Lamb and Reed McGinley-Stempel (co-founders of Stytch), Mathilde Collin (CEO of Front), Rick Song (CEO of Persona), Rujul Zaparde and Lu…”

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.