in @ycombinator they have a playbook on how to get customers ASAP for your startup.
if you follow this, you’ll brute force your way to 100 customers, almost no matter what your product is.
Here it is:
1/ launch-max.
product hunt, hackerNews, devhunt, betalist, peerlist, indie hackers, etc. YC tells you to launch 3 times MINIMUM
2/ pull your competitor’s strongest backlinks and get yourself listed in the same places.
whatever article they have listed, you make a better version and ask the site to replace it (or supplement) with yours.
3/ WARM OUTBOUND.
Everyone knows about building in public. but you still need to capitalize on the 99% of leads who see your content but don’t come inbound
scrape everyone who likes your posts on Linkedin each week, check if they fit your customer profile, and message them.
you set this up to fire automatically with @origamichat (i dropped a prompt in the comments)
4/ find 20 to 30 ugc creators on tiktok / instagram in your niche. ask them to create content about your product, ideally from a fresh account.
pay them a fixed fee ($15–$30 per video) plus performance incentives ($1k for 1 million views, etc).
you can use @sideshift_app (best creators imo) and line up 20+ of these creators in 1 day
5/ when building in public, a video is 10x better than an image/text - spam use cases of ur product on X/Linkedin
6/ figure out where your customers actually spend time.
which slack/discord groups are they in? what newsletters do they open? which podcasts and accounts do they follow? pay those people for shoutouts
7/ there's a fresh trend on x basically every week. jump on the relevant ones and fold your product in (like i’m doing right now).
To find trends i just use Origami & search “Lead Gen/GTM posts that are viral on X” to find the best posts every week in my niche
Then, I will reply to those, quote tweet them, and use the formats that work myself
(that’s the secret to why my account has high engagement BTW - you can do this too)
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if you are doing all this every single week and DO NOT GIVE UP (launching, posting demos, contacting new customers)
I guarantee you will hit your customer goals. Then the game becomes retention.
will be posting 2-3 more growth hacks every single week
We went from 0 to 2,200 paying customers in under a year by following @ycombinator's 15 rules:
1/ Do things that don't scale. Get your first 10 customers by hand.
2/ Launch now, not when it's "ready". A mediocre product in front of real users teaches you more in a week than 6 months of polishing in the dark.
3/ Charge from day one. If nobody will pay, you don't have a startup, you have a hobby.
4/ Talk to users every single day. The roadmap you need is sitting in your customers' heads, and they'll hand it to you for free
5/ Always hunt the 90/10 solution. For almost any feature there's a way to capture 90% of the value with 10% of the effort.
6/ There are only two real jobs: write code and talk to users. Everything else (conferences, press, VC coffees, corp dev calls) is fake work.
7/ You pick your customers as much as they pick you. 10 users who love you beat 1,000 who kind of like you.
8/ Growth is an output, not a strategy. Grow before product market fit and all you're buying is churn.
9/ Do less, really well. Pick one or two metrics and judge every task against them.
10/ Know if you're default alive. Paul Graham's question: on current growth and current burn, do you reach profitability before the money runs out?
11/ Don't hire until it hurts. Headcount is not progress, it's burn. Every great startup was embarrassingly small for embarrassingly long.
12/ Momentum is the only real moat in year one. Ship something every week, even something tiny.
13/ Every great startup is badly broken at some point. The game isn't avoiding fires, it's how fast you put them out. Again. And again
14/ Ignore your competitors. Startups die of suicide, not murder. In year one, the only company that can kill yours is your own
15/ Startups rarely die from running out of money. They die because the founders fall out. Brutal honesty with your cofounder is the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy
Good luck !
🏃♂️ I've gamified my own run so I can race my own ghost with the Meta Ray-Ban Display.
I built a web app for the glasses, loaded a previous GPX from Strava, and dropped game mechanics on top.
Pick up coins when you keep pace, sprint zones reward extra points if you push, and a mini leaderboard on the lens shows how you're tracking against your past self in real time.
Best part: it actually works. Seeing your ghost 20 m ahead is a way stronger nudge than any number on a watch. 😅