How to find your first 25 customers, ranked

Friends, family, ex-colleagues, the group chat, the person you sat next to at your last job. Not because they will buy — most will not — but because they know people, and a warm introduction converts better than anything else on this list.

Founders skip this one because it feels like cheating, or because they are embarrassed to sell to people they know. Get over it. Write out every person who might know someone in your market, message them individually, and ask for one name each. Twenty messages is an afternoon and it is the highest return afternoon you will have all quarter.

The catch: it does not scale, and it runs out. That is fine. It is not supposed to get you to 25,000. It is supposed to get you to 5, fast, so you have someone to learn from.

LinkedIn, X, Reddit, Discord, Slack groups, whichever one your customer actually uses. My honest take is that this is the best channel for almost every early company that does not have a network to lean on, and it is the one founders avoid the hardest.

It is a numbers game and a wording game, in that order. You are not writing anything clever. You are finding people who have publicly said something that suggests they have the problem, and saying one specific true thing about it. Nothing about your funding. Nothing about your roadmap. One sentence that proves you read their post.

The reason it beats cold email at this stage is that you can see the person. Their last post tells you what they care about this week. An email list tells you a job title from eighteen months ago.

This is my favourite one, and it is badly underrated. Somebody has already done the work of getting a room full of your customers together. You do not have to organise anything. You just have to turn up and be useful.

Meetups, conference side events, industry dinners, community nights — a lot of them are free, and the ones with a ticket are usually cheaper than a week of ads. Ten real conversations in one evening, with people who cannot close a tab on you, is worth more than a thousand impressions.

Note that this is attending, not hosting. Hosting is further down the list for a reason.

Upwork. Job boards. Subreddits where people ask for recommendations. Forum threads titled “does anyone know a tool that…”. These are people describing their own pain in their own words, in public, with a budget already in mind.

It is a sneaky channel and almost nobody works it properly. A company posting a job for someone to do a task manually is a company that would rather not be doing it manually. That is a qualified lead who has told you their budget without you asking.

Worth separating from newsletters, because people confuse them constantly. A newsletter goes to people who asked. Cold email goes to people who did not. Different skill, different rules, different results.

Cold email is cheap per message, which is why everyone plays it as a volume game — and the volume game is the one that does not work for you. It needs scale to pay, at scale you cannot personalise, and without personalisation the reply rate falls off a cliff. Everyone’s inbox is already full of software that writes “I saw you are scaling your team” to ten thousand people at once.

So do not play it that way. Fifty emails that each reference something real will beat five thousand that do not, and they will not burn your domain. That is a different activity from cold email as it is usually sold, and it is the only version worth your time at 25 customers.

Still works. Still horrible. Still the fastest way to hear the word “no” enough times to learn what is wrong with your pitch.

It only makes sense above a certain price point. If a customer is worth $96 to you, you cannot spend twenty minutes dialling for each one. If a customer is worth $72,000, you can spend a week on one and still come out ahead. Company A from earlier should absolutely be calling. Company B should not own a phone.

YouTube, X, Instagram, TikTok. The good version of this is very good: it builds trust before anyone speaks to you, and it compounds — a video you made in March is still sending people in November. If you produce it yourself, the cost per customer is genuinely close to zero.

Most attempts are the bad version. Two things get underestimated, every time. First, how long the channel takes to grow — you are looking at months of posting into a void, not weeks. Second, how hard production actually is. Writing, filming, editing and thumbnails is four jobs, and being good at your product does not make you good at any of them.

Do it. Just do not do it instead of the first four while you wait for it to work.

A list of people who chose to hear from you is a real asset, and one of the few you own outright — no algorithm sits between you and them.

But it is a slow build, and it needs an audience before it does anything, which means it is usually a second-order channel: something the video or the posting feeds. Starting a newsletter with no audience is starting a shop on a street with no road to it. Start it anyway, keep it small, and do not expect it to carry the first 25.

Higher trust than almost anything else. You are the host, everyone in the room associates you with a good evening, and the conversations are better than anything you get in a DM.

It also costs money, takes weeks of organising, and you are responsible for getting people to show up — which is its own acquisition problem, one layer up. For the first 25 customers it is completely unnecessary. Go to other people’s events until you have a reason to host your own.

Google, Meta, YouTube. Last on the list, and it is not close.

Ads do not create demand. They buy attention, and attention has to land somewhere — a page, a demo, an email sequence, a follow-up. If that somewhere is not built and tested, you are paying to send strangers to a room with nobody in it.

The cost is also more variable than anyone admits. Your CAC depends on your market, your competitors’ budgets, the season, and the quality of the creative — and making the creative costs money too, which people forget to count. Two companies in the same category can see a 10x difference in what a click costs.

Come back to this when you know who converts and why. Then ads are a multiplier on something that already works, which is the only thing they are good at.