All Segments
How to Get Your First 10 Customers
10 segments available
When most founders look for customers, they reach for cold email and automation tools. But your first 10 customers almost never come from a tool. They come from you, working your warm network and doing the unscalable things most people won't. In this episode of Startup School, YC Visiting Partner Max Kolysh breaks down the real tactics for getting those first 10 customers — where your buyer actually spends their time, why showing up in person wins, and why doing it yourself is your biggest advantage right now. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs 0:00 - Why the first 10 are different 0:54 - Where does your buyer actually spend their time? 2:45 - Customers 1–3: work your warm network first 4:20 - Get in the room: show up in person 5:14 - Conferences and founder dinners 6:15 - Find where your customers complain online 7:30 - How to go outbound: Apollo, Clay, and LinkedIn 8:35 - Frame outreach as advice 10:20 - Writing outreach that sounds human 13:15 - Recap: The first 10 come from you
Segments Timeline
Why the first 10 are different
"Hi, I'm Max, a visiting partner here at Y Combinator. Today I want to talk to you about something I constantly hear from YC founders, which is, "I think I know who my target customer is. Now, how do I..."
Where does your buyer actually spend their time?
"a tool or pick a channel, you need to answer one question. Where does your target customer actually spend their time? Most founders default to cold email and LinkedIn outreach. This is because it's ea..."
Customers 1–3: work your warm network first
"to. The first two or three customers, almost without exception in these founder stories, came from one of these sources. Friends in the industry, former colleagues, classmates from school, or more gen..."
Get in the room: show up in person
"If you haven't worked your network, you're skipping the lowest hanging fruit. One of the most surprising things that came up in those YC founder stories is that so many of them to close their first fe..."
Conferences and founder dinners
"learning was that small conferences tend to work really well. The conversion rate from one real conversation at a small industry specific conference can be much higher than trying to cold email that s..."
Find where your customers complain online
"place online where your future customers are already complaining about the problem you solve. Your job is to find it and then show up there as a real person. For a lot of founders, that place has actu..."
How to go outbound: Apollo, Clay, and LinkedIn
"your customers complain. And at some point, you're going to need to go actually outbound the people who you don't know. Your job is to find companies that match your ideal customer profile, find the r..."
Frame outreach as advice
"interesting patterns I saw is that for a lot of founders, the most effective early outreach wasn't actually framed as a sales pitch. It was framed as something else. Maybe asking for advice or for men..."
Writing outreach that sounds human
"than people think, but a few things really do matter. First, keep it under 75 words. Long emails tend to just get ignored, and they'll assume you used an LLM to write it. Second, the single most impor..."
Recap: The first 10 come from you
"won't. So, you have to really lean into that. So, in conclusion, the first 10 customers will likely not come from a tool. They're going to come from you manually tapping into your network and showing ..."