I launched http://newsy.co on Betalist - from which we had several hundred sign-ups. From those sign-ups, about 10% converted.

@ujjwal_sukheja I've found that a quick and dirty (and free!) way has been targeting certain groups/users on social media. For example, in my case I built out a digital fitness platform. I've joined several Facebook groups related to fitness such as HIIT Workouts, Free Workouts, Dad Bods, etc. I've found users here are pretty engaged and being targeted when responding to people's questions/posts has a fairly high click-through rate (~25% based on our scrappy calculations).

For any startup, getting the first 10 customers can seem like climbing a mountain. Depending on your business and industry, you can try attracting the first few customers with social media or email marketing. These are two inexpensive marketing channels that can create a buzz around your product or service and help you get the attention of the right prospects. Moreover, once your campaign goes live, you will receive a lot of queries about how your product works, what are its key features, and more. To manage all such queries you can go for ProProfs Help Desk (https://www.proprofsdesk.com/), which is a free customer support tool. You can easily track every product-query and respond faster using canned responses. I hope this helps!

First 10 were from SEO and from referalls. Referalls I've got through PH launch and Indie Hackers.

My first customers came all from cold email. But I'm a sales guy turned founder. I know learning sales is hard (especially if you're selling B2B) - so I'm working on learnsales.co and I'd love to hear your feedback!

The best thing I did was simply to hang out where my users hang out. Join a niche community and add value to their discussions. I found a number of Slack groups which are fairly active and I regularly engage in conversations there. Naturally people will notice and visit your website or request access if they're interested.

Imho, it really depends on your product and your sales funnel. If you're in B2C using social media, newsletters and startup launch platforms is a good idea. However, if you're dealing with B2B market, pretty often it makes no sence. You won't sell, say a $20K crypto key protection enterprise certificate through Facebook. The rule of thumb however, is to go where your customers are and reach them there or/and find a "big fish" to piggyback on it's network. It's easy, for instance, if you're building some add-ons for Shopify. But usually it can be done with most of the products. Find out who your customers are, what do they like and look for a partner in this particular field. For instance, if you target gen X, they are considered to be environmentally friendly, you can partner with an environmental program to get more impressive reach using your parntner's network.

Use your immediate network first - be careful with who, however. Make sure it is people who will give their most honest and constructive feedback. Use this feedback to improve your product and then move on to cold email (Linkedin Sales Navigator is great) and describe the positive experiences from your existing users.

I networked with people in AI, developers who liked anime [I'm serious], free thinking rogue freelancers, entrepreneurs with a wacky side, writers and artists in the tech field. Then I asked for email addresses, and continued tending the garden, so to speak. The soft sell works best for me. Building relationships, first. Really being invested in your community, and those who you want to actually adopt your product. You have to show you want to work collaboratively with this method. You're not there just to pitch. You're there to help them succeed, too. I think it's more genuine, but not everyone has the time, the brand, or the drive to grass-roots in this way. Which is perfectly reasonable.

For us we brought our product (a spinning standing-desk mat) into a relevant workplace and just gave out samples. The workers loved it so much we started getting orders the very next day!

I released my themes for free on wordpress.org to get downloads and sold premium upgrades. There are lots of ways to get customers, but I would recommend to anyone getting started with online entrepreneurship to leverage a marketplace. There are tons to choose from. I have a friend who built a video course business from launching on Udemy, but you could use Etsy, the Chrome extension store, the App Store and Play Store, Unity marketplace, Amazon, eBay, etc. Once you've locked in some regular sales from the marketplace, you can build your own platform via your site and email list, and then you won't be dependent on a marketplace anymore.

I always love reading posts like this to see what other companies do to increase their customers. Hope this brings a lot of opportunities for those who aspire to increase customers. Thanks for sharing this info. I'd love to hear your feedback!