How today's fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers

Lenny Rachitsky investigates how fast-growing B2B companies won their first ten customers, drawing on interviews and stories from firms like Figma, Stripe, Slack, Shopify and Airtable. He finds that nearly every company relied on one of three sourcing strategies: tapping personal networks, seeking customers in the places they already gather, or generating press. In practice most startups combine the first two and rely on press far less. The piece matters because it gives early-stage founders and PMs a concrete, evidence-based playbook for the scrappy, hand-to-hand phase of building a B2B product.

01Key takeaways

• Start with your personal network: friends, former colleagues, investors and incubator peers are often your first willing customers.
• Find the online or offline places your target customers already spend time, such as communities, forums or Hacker News.
• Offer to set up early users on the spot, lowering the barrier so they actually try the product.
• Treat early churn and critical feedback from first customers as a source of product direction, not just a setback.
• Use press as a launch amplifier rather than your primary way to acquire first customers.

02Key sections

Why the first ten customers

The author explains that the first ten customers are when founders are most scrappy and doing things that don't scale. He notes that B2B early-growth stories were harder to gather than consumer ones.

Strategy 1: Tap your personal network

Many companies started with friends, former colleagues, investors, and incubator peers. Stories from Slack, Stripe, Salesforce, Gusto and others show early users often came from close relationships willing to give feedback.

Strategy 2: Seek out your customers where they are

Companies found early adopters in developer communities, Hacker News, Twitter, forums and even door-to-door visits. Examples include Shopify, New Relic, Segment, Dropbox and Square.

Strategy 3: Press

Press helped some launches, such as Slack's press blitz and Twilio's TechCrunch launch, but the author stresses that getting press is rarely how companies got started.

Summary and key questions

The three strategies are tapping your network, meeting customers where they are, and getting press, with guiding questions for each to apply to your own product.

03From the post

“Hello, and welcome to a free monthly editionof my weekly newsletter. I’m Lenny and each week I tackle reader questions about product, growth, and working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out at the office 🤜🤛 Q: How did the fastest growing B2B businesses find their first ten customers? “In the early days of Figma, we talked with practically every designer we knew. In search of more feedback, we turned to Twitter which I realized we could use to determine the most influential designers. After getting the data, I further filtered the list to people that were personally inspirational to me. Then I cold emailed / found introductions to many of these people and showed them Figma.” — Dylan Field, CEO Here, Dylan shares how he leveraged (what turns out to be) two of three growth levers used by essentially every B2B businesses to get started: 1. 👋 Tapping your personal network (i.e. his friends) 2. 🧗‍♀️ Seeking out your customers where they are (i.e. Twitter) 3. 🗞 Getting press Below, you’ll learn how twenty other hyper-growth B2B…”

04Frameworks mentioned

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