Finding Your First Ten Users When You Have No Network

Photo credit

One of the harder truths of starting something while still in school is that you usually do not have the network most launch advice assumes. The articles tell you to email a warm list of contacts, to introduce yourself to your investor base, or to use the audience you have built over years of writing online, and although those are real strategies for founders further along, they describe a launch that is not yours yet. For a student founder, or any founder without an existing audience, the first ten users have to come from somewhere closer to the ground, and the work to find them is unglamorous but doable.

This piece is about the realistic ways to find your first ten users when you do not have a list, an audience, or a name people recognize, and it is meant to be used rather than admired, because what you actually need at this stage is a small group of real users you can learn from, not a marketing strategy you can put on a slide.

Start with people you can describe, not people you know

The first instinct most founders have is to send their product to friends, classmates, or family, because those people are easy to reach and will reply quickly, and although that instinct produces fast feedback, the feedback is usually too generous to be useful, since people who care about you will tell you the product is impressive in ways that have nothing to do with whether they would use it.

Photo credit

A more useful starting point is to write down, in one sentence, who your first ten users would ideally be, with enough specificity that the description excludes most people. A description like founders in their first year who run a small newsletter is more useful than a description like people who like writing tools, because the first description lets you go looking, while the second leaves you guessing. The specificity of the description is what makes the next step possible.

Where to actually find them

Once you can describe your first user clearly, the search becomes much easier than it sounded. People who fit a specific description tend to gather in specific places online, including

• Subreddits,

• Discord servers,

• Slack communities,

• Niche newsletters,

• Small Twitter circles, and

• The comment sections of writers who serve that audience.

The work is to spend a week reading those places without selling anything, because the goal is to understand the language, the recurring frustrations, and the existing tools that the community already uses. After a week of careful observation, you will know what they care about, how they talk about it, and where they are most active, and at that point you can begin a few small, honest conversations that do not feel like a pitch.

The honest message

When you are ready to reach out, the message that works best is one that does not try to sound like a marketing email.

1. A short, honest note that explains who you are,

2. What you are working on,

3. Why you are working on it, and

4. What you would like from the person tends to outperform any polished pitch by a meaningful margin at this stage.

Founders who write to strangers in this voice receive responses at much higher rates than founders who use the templates they have read about, because most of the recipients are also founders or builders of some kind, and they recognize the tone of someone who is genuinely early.

The first ten users do not come from broadcast, they come from twenty to fifty individual messages, of which perhaps a third get responses, of which perhaps a third turn into conversations, of which perhaps half turn into a willingness to try the product, which is roughly where the first ten users come from. The math is not pretty, but it is also not optional, and it is the work that almost every successful early startup has done in some form whether the founder admits it or not.

Use your real life

The other source of early users that most founders underuse is real life proximity. If you are still in school, you live and study alongside hundreds of people who fit some user description or know someone who does, and a single conversation in a dining hall can sometimes produce a user who would have taken weeks to find online.

The trick is to not lead with the product, since explaining what you are building during a meal makes the conversation feel transactional, but instead to talk about the problem you are exploring and ask the other person whether they recognize anyone in their life who has it.

People are surprisingly willing to introduce you to a friend, a sibling, or a former coworker who matches the problem you are describing, and those introductions are warmer and more useful than almost any cold outreach. Founders who are willing to talk about their work in everyday conversation, without the energy of a pitch, often find their first three or four users through this kind of soft surfacing rather than through any formal channel.

Be visible enough to be findable

Photo credit

A small but underrated source of early users is being slightly more visible than you currently are, which means having a clean landing page that explains what you do, having a public profile that mentions the work, and writing one or two short pieces about the problem you are working on, because users who would never respond to a cold message often find their way to a founder who is publicly thinking about the problem they themselves have. The output here does not need to be impressive, it only needs to be searchable, and a single short piece on a personal site can produce introductions for years after it was written.

What to do once you have them

The most common mistake at this stage is to celebrate the first ten users and then try to find the next hundred, when the higher value move is to spend the next two months talking to those ten in real depth and learning what they actually need. Each of the first ten is a small investment in understanding the market, and the founders who treat them as a research panel rather than a customer base tend to ship better second versions than the founders who race past them to scale a product that did not yet deserve scaling.

A closing thought

Finding your first ten users without a network feels embarrassing at the start, because the work is small, the conversations are imperfect, and no one tells stories about the third honest cold email that turned into a customer. The work is, however, the same work that almost every founder eventually does in some form, and the founders who do it well at the beginning tend to spend less time later trying to fix the assumptions they made when they did not know their users yet. Send the twenty messages, accept the slow yes, and let the first ten teach you everything they can.