How to Get Your First Customers: 4 Moves That Work in 2026

You get your first customers by talking to the people you built the product for, and the fastest ways to start those conversations in 2026 are a survey ad, a referral message, free content and building in public. The standard list (ask friends, post in communities, cold outreach, launch on Product Hunt) is on Stripe's, Y Combinator's and Lenny's pages, and none of it is wrong. This page adds the four moves I run with founders right now, in the order I would run them, and the two things I tell every founder to stop doing.

One thing first. This is written for the one-person company, the small team, the founder who builds and sells alone. A funded B2B startup with a sales team plays a different game.

Before any move: the base hypothesis and the conversion check

Every first-customer plan starts from one hypothesis: you built something people need. If that is true, your job is to make sure the mechanics between a stranger and a paying customer work, and then to feed those mechanics with attention. If that is not true yet, the product-market fit questions come before anything on this page.

Everyone who comes to me is looking for customers, and everyone is looking for product-market fit. The one goes with the other. So when I look at a product and see real potential, I take the hypothesis as given and go straight to the conversion check:

1. Does the website hook a visitor with their problem, in their words, in the first line? A headline about their Tuesday beats a headline about your feature.
2. What happens after someone leaves their email? If the answer is "nothing yet", that is the first thing to build.
3. Where do people see you between visits: social posts, a newsletter, ads, a partner who already has their attention?

You can run this backwards, too. Put an ad or a landing page in front of people before the product exists and see whether anyone bites. Growth hackers have done it for years. It works only when the page catches people with their problem and never when it leads with the solution.

Move 1: the survey ad

The survey ad is the move I would run first, and it is the one none of the standard lists mention. You run an ad that names the customer's problem and offers a two-minute self-test. The person fills it in for their own sake, gets an evaluation that tells them something true about themselves, and you get a warm lead plus a page of data about what this person struggles with.

Take a platform that connects managers with mentors. Nobody searches for "mentoring platform". Plenty of people wonder whether they are a good boss. The ad says: "Are you a good leader? Find out in two minutes, free." The test asks about their week, their team, the last hard conversation. The evaluation is honest and useful. The follow-up is a conversation, and that conversation is with someone who already told you their problem.

Two conditions. The survey has to be good, which means real thinking goes into the questions and the evaluation, not a quiz that ends in "book a call". And the ad has to be about the problem, not the product. Get both right and you are building a list of people who understand themselves better because of you. A mentor I know sells a paid self-test to couples and by his own account it brought hundreds of customers, so the move carries even with a price tag.

Move 2: the referral message

The referral message is simple: pick people who could be your customers, write to them with the solution to their problem, and ask if they know someone who could use it.

The question changes the conversation. Nobody feels sold to. People like to be the one who knows someone. And every second answer is "actually, me". It costs nothing, it works on LinkedIn and by email, and you learn from every reply how people describe the problem in their own words, which feeds the headline from the conversion check.

Download the referral message and the survey ad

Both moves are in one file: the referral message in a LinkedIn and an email version with the list of ten people for this week, and the survey ad with the headline pattern, ten example lines, the self-test questions, the evaluation structure and a tracking sheet.

Move 3: free content, the medium-term game

Free content is the move most founders simply start too late. Post what you know about the customer's problem, on the platform where they already are, for free, again and again. Alex Hormozi preaches it, and he is right: the people who consume your free material for six months are the customers who need no pitch.

The trap is waiting. Founders tell me they will start posting "once the product is ready". By then the audience they need takes another six months to build. Start the day you start building.

Move 4: build in public

Building in public is how I get my own first customers, and it is free content with a story attached. You take people into the process as early as possible: what you are building, why, what broke this week, what you decided. On a blog, on YouTube, on LinkedIn, wherever your people are.

Every person who follows along is someone who cares about the problem you are solving. That is your list. My build in public page has the method and the rituals; the journal is the proof, one build per episode. The community I am building this way is mid-process right now, so I have no clean numbers yet. When I do, they go here.

What Ole taught me: sell it before it exists

My mentor and friend Ole Kannapinn is an online marketer, and he understood product management better than 95 % of the product managers I know. Whenever he had an idea, he sold it before it existed. The first thing he did was write to people on Facebook, run ads, and set up customer meetings. Customer meetings, customer meetings, customer meetings.

That is the whole lesson of this page in one habit. Talk to your target group. Put 80 % of your time there, and it will still not be too much. The product improves in those meetings faster than in any sprint, and the first customers come out of them because you asked.

Better no customer than a bad one

Better no customer than a bad customer, and the first customer is one of the biggest tests you will get as a founder. You need money, or you need a win, and someone shows up. The question is whether you can stay true to what you are building.

Some founders take the first customer just to have one. It ends in stress, in arguments, and in the worst case in a product that gets built in the wrong direction because that one customer pulled it there. If a conversation shows you a real change of direction and you feel the pull yourself, follow it. If your gut says "this person does not fit, but I need the money", I would strongly advise you not to take them.

The second thing I advise against is solving problems that have not happened. The perfect onboarding flow. The architecture that scales to 100.000 users. The AI bubble and half the podcasts push founders toward the technology and away from the customer. First customer means: get your idea out, no matter how. Run ads, talk about it, write to people. The rest is later.

If you are at exactly this point and want a second pair of eyes on the conversion check, that is the work I do as a founder coach. If you would rather compare notes with other founders first, the Product Bakery community exists for this moment.