Your First 100 Customers: How Indie Makers Build Early Traction Without a Marketing Budget

The first 10 customers are the hardest. Not because finding 10 people who want your product is objectively difficult - it isn't. But because everything feels uncertain before you have them.

You don't know if your landing page works. You don't know if your pricing is right. You don't know if your positioning is talking to the right people. You have a product, a URL, and a quiet, nagging fear that nobody cares enough to pay.

Getting from 0 to 100 customers is the phase where most indie products either find their footing or quietly disappear. It's the phase that no growth playbook prepares you for, because all the growth playbooks assume you already have a product that works. They assume you know your customer. They assume you have a repeatable acquisition channel.

In the beginning, you have none of those things. And that's fine, because you don't need all of them to get to 100 customers. You just need to do a few things right.

Let me tell you what those things are.

Why 100 Is the Magic Number

You can lie to yourself with 5 customers. Five customers might be your friends, your Twitter followers, or people who felt awkward saying no. Ten customers is better, but still easy to explain away. Twenty is interesting but noisy.

At 100 paying customers, you have something real. Real signal. Real patterns. Real data about who stays and who leaves, what features people actually use, and whether your pricing makes sense. At 100, you have enough to run experiments, make decisions, and know whether you're building something people genuinely want.

100 is also the point where word-of-mouth starts to work. When 100 people have used your product, some of them are talking about it. When 20 have used it, nobody's talking about it yet.

That's why 100 is the target. Not because it means you've made it. Because it's the threshold where your product stops being a guess and starts being a business.

Forget Channels. Start With People.

Every growth article you've read tells you to pick a channel. SEO. Content marketing. Cold outreach. Communities. Twitter. Product Hunt. Pick one, go deep, be consistent.

That advice is right for your second hundred customers. For your first hundred, it will slow you down.

In the beginning, channels are too impersonal and too slow. The average blog post takes months to rank. The average Twitter account takes years to build an audience worth monetizing. The average Product Hunt launch gives you one day of borrowed attention, not a steady stream of paying customers.

For your first 100 customers, the fastest path is people, not channels.

Specifically, it's three kinds of people:

People who have the problem you solve. You need to find them wherever they already are. Forums, Slack groups, subreddits, Discord servers, LinkedIn communities. Places where people with a specific problem gather and talk about it.

People who know people with the problem. Other founders, consultants, community managers. Not customers themselves, but connectors. One genuine recommendation from a connector is worth ten cold outreach attempts.

People who are already listening to you. Your existing network, however small. Your email list, if you have one. Your Twitter followers, if you have any. People who already trust you, even a little. This group is the smallest, but they have the highest conversion rate of anything you'll try.

Before you set up any campaign, any ad, any SEO strategy, write down 20 people you can contact this week. Not to pitch them, but to have real conversations. Tell them what you're building. Ask if they know anyone who has the problem. Ask if they'd be willing to try it.

That's your first channel.

The Direct Outreach Playbook That Actually Works

Direct outreach has a bad reputation because most people do it badly.

They write cold emails that start with "Hope this finds you well." They send DMs that are four paragraphs of product features. They join communities, post a link to their product, and wonder why nobody clicks.

The outreach that works looks nothing like that. Here's the approach that has consistently worked for me:

Find the right people first. You're looking for people who have already shown signs that they have the problem you solve. They've asked about it in a forum. They've tweeted about their frustration with existing solutions. They've written about the workflow you're improving. These people already know they have the problem. You're not creating awareness. You're just introducing a solution.

Lead with the problem, not the product. Your first message should not mention your product. It should demonstrate that you understand their situation. "I saw your post about [X]. I've been thinking about this problem a lot and had a few questions." Open a conversation. Don't close a sale.

Listen before you pitch. Ask them what they're using today. What's frustrating about it. What their ideal solution would look like. You'll learn something useful in every single conversation. And you'll find that many people, after you listen for 10 minutes, will ask what you're working on. That's when you mention your product.

Make the ask tiny. Don't ask for a paid subscription in your first conversation. Ask if they'd be willing to try it for free. Ask if they'd spend 15 minutes looking at it and giving you honest feedback. The easier you make the first step, the more people will take it.

Follow up. Most conversions don't happen on the first message. They happen on the second or third. Not because people were waiting to be nagged, but because life got in the way. A single genuine follow-up converts more leads than a hundred cold emails.

Done right, direct outreach doesn't feel like marketing. It feels like talking to people. That's because it is.

Community Presence That Doesn't Feel Spammy

Communities are one of the most powerful early-customer channels available to indie makers, and one of the most commonly misused.

The mistake is showing up to a community and immediately posting about your product. You're a stranger in someone else's living room, handing out business cards before you've said hello. People ignore it or, worse, call it out.

The approach that works is slower and more obvious: show up, add value, become a familiar face.

Pick two or three communities where your target customers hang out. Subreddits, Discord servers, Slack groups, Indie Hackers - whatever is most relevant to your niche. Don't try to be in 20 places at once. You want depth, not breadth.

Spend the first two weeks just answering questions. Not promoting anything. Just being genuinely helpful. If someone asks a question in your domain, give them a real, thorough answer. An answer, not a pitch.

When you do mention your product, make it relevant. "I built something for this exact problem" is completely acceptable when someone is asking about the problem you solve. It's not spam when it's relevant. It becomes spam when you say it on every thread regardless of whether it fits.

Share your building journey, not just your launches. "I'm working on a tool for X and I'm stuck on Y - would anyone who's dealt with this be willing to chat?" is more interesting than "Check out my new tool X." The first starts a conversation. The second ends one.

Communities compound over time. After three months of genuine presence, you'll have built relationships with dozens of people who will happily try your product, share it with their networks, and tell you exactly what they think of it.

Converting Early Adopters Before They Disappear

When someone expresses interest in your product - through a conversation, a sign-up, or a trial - you have a narrow window to convert them into a paying customer. Most founders waste this window by doing nothing.

Here's the sequence that works:

Reach out personally within 24 hours. Not an automated email. A personal message. "Hey, I saw you signed up - welcome. I'd love to know what brought you here." This is the message that makes people feel like they're dealing with a human, not a company. It opens a conversation that will teach you more about your positioning than any analytics dashboard.

Get them to their first win as fast as possible. The fastest path to conversion is showing someone a real result before you ask them to pay. Whatever the core value of your product is, help them experience it within their first session. If they have to work hard to find the value, most people won't work hard enough.

Have the pricing conversation in person, not just in email. If you've talked with someone, you can ask them directly: "Based on what you told me about your workflow, do you think this would be worth $X a month for you?" The answer is almost always more useful than a checkout page conversion rate, and it tells you whether your pricing is in the right range.

Ask for the referral at the right moment. The right moment is right after they tell you something positive. Not at the end of onboarding. Not in a follow-up email 30 days later. Right when they say "oh, this actually worked." That's when you say, "I'm glad. Do you know anyone else who would find this useful?" Most people say yes. Most of them follow through.

The early adopters who come in through direct outreach and community presence tend to be your best customers. They're high-engagement, high-feedback, and lower-churn than anyone who finds you through an ad. Treat them accordingly.

What Building in Public Actually Gets You

Building in public has become a bit of a cliche, and the cliche usually misses the point.

Most people think building in public means sharing your metrics on Twitter to go viral. Sometimes that happens. But that's not why you should do it.

You should build in public because it creates a searchable, persistent record of your thinking and progress. That record does three things for your first 100 customers:

It makes you findable. When you share the problem you're solving, the decisions you're making, and the results you're seeing, people who have that problem will find you. Not because you went viral, but because someone searched for the problem and your post showed up.

It creates trust faster than any landing page. When someone lands on your profile and sees three months of consistent updates, real numbers, and honest reflections, they trust you before they've ever talked to you. Trust shortens the sales cycle considerably.

It attracts the right early adopters. People who follow a build-in-public journey before signing up are self-selected as engaged, curious, and forgiving of early-stage rough edges. These are the best kinds of early customers. They're invested in your success because they watched you build it.

You don't need a large audience for this to work. A profile on Makers Page with your real numbers, your milestones, and your connected revenue creates the kind of credibility that turns curious visitors into paying customers. Unlike a Twitter following, it doesn't require you to post every day. It's a passive asset that works for you while you're doing everything else on this list.

The Referral Loop You Should Build Before You Need It

Most indie makers think about referrals as something you add later, once you have enough customers to make it worth building. This thinking is backwards.

The best time to build a referral loop is early, because you can design it into the onboarding experience from the start instead of bolting it on later.

The loop doesn't need to be complicated. In fact, the simpler it is, the better it works.

Version 1: The ask. After a customer gets their first positive result with your product, ask them directly. No incentive. Just a direct, human question from the person who built it. "Is there anyone else on your team or in your network who would find this useful?" Referral rates from this kind of ask are surprisingly high, because it comes from someone who clearly cares whether the product is working for them.

Version 2: The sharing incentive. Offer a simple reward for referrals. An extra month free. A discount. A credit. The incentive doesn't need to be large. It just needs to make the act of referring feel worthwhile and reduce the friction of bringing it up with a colleague.

Version 3: The natural share. Design outputs that people want to share publicly. If your product generates something - a report, a dashboard, a visualization, a result - make it easy to share that output and make sure it includes a visible reference to where it came from. This is how products spread without the founders having to do any outreach at all.

Build the ask into your process. Don't wait until you think of it.

The Honest Path to 100

There is no shortcut. I want to be direct with you about that.

The founders who reach 100 customers with genuine, sustainable momentum are the ones who do the same small things consistently for 60 to 90 days. They send 10 direct messages a week. They show up in two or three communities and add real value. They respond to every support email personally. They do weekly reviews and update their approach based on what they learn.

None of that sounds glamorous because it isn't. The path to your first 100 customers is not a growth hack or a viral launch. It's a long series of small, deliberate actions that compound over time.

Here's what I've noticed about the founders who actually get there: they don't wait for a magic moment. They start with the people they can reach today and work outward. They treat every conversation as a learning opportunity, not just a sales call. And they stay consistent even when the numbers are moving slowly, because they understand that slow progress at this stage is still progress.

One thing that helps more than most people expect: keeping your progress visible. When you share your real numbers publicly - even when they're small - you create accountability for yourself and you signal to potential customers that you're a real person who's genuinely invested in what you're building. That signal is worth more than any feature you could add to your product in the early days.

What 100 Customers Actually Teaches You

I want to close with something that doesn't get talked about enough: getting to 100 customers is as much about education as it is about revenue.

By the time you have 100 paying customers, you will know:

• Who your real customer is. Not the customer you imagined when you started building. The actual person who finds your product, understands it quickly, and keeps paying for it month after month. This person is often different from who you thought they'd be. Knowing who they are changes everything about how you market, build, and position going forward.

• What makes people leave. You'll have seen enough churn to understand the top two or three reasons people cancel. These reasons are the product roadmap you didn't know you needed. They tell you what to fix before you add anything new.

• Which words to use. The language your customers use to describe the problem you solve is better marketing copy than anything you'll write yourself. You'll have heard it in conversations and seen it in support emails. Use it. Put it on your landing page. Use it in your subject lines. It converts because it sounds like the customer wrote it, not you.

• Whether the pricing is right. At 100 customers, you'll have a clear sense of whether price was a significant objection or a non-issue. If it came up constantly, you might be too expensive for your market. If it never came up at all, you might not be expensive enough. Either way, now you know.

100 is not the finish line. It's the point where you finally have enough information to make decisions with confidence instead of guesses. Everything after 100 is built on the foundation you laid getting there.

Show Your Progress Along the Way

Don't do this work entirely in private.

Sharing your journey, your real numbers, and your honest reflections as you work toward your first 100 customers serves two purposes. First, it builds the kind of credibility and transparency that attracts the customers you actually want - the ones who choose you because they believe in what you're building, not just because you have the cheapest option.

Second, it holds you accountable. When you've committed publicly to a goal, you're more likely to keep showing up when things get hard. And things will get hard. The weeks when nobody signs up, when someone cancels, when the traffic drops and stays dropped. Having a public record of your journey makes it easier to keep going, because there are people watching who are rooting for you.

List your product on Makers Page. Connect your Stripe. Show what you're building, what you're charging, and how it's going. Not because your numbers are impressive yet. Because showing up with honesty, even when the numbers are small, is what separates builders worth trusting from everyone else who just wants a sale.

Your first 100 customers are out there. They have the problem you're solving. They're already looking for the answer. The question is whether they can find you.

Start the work that puts you in front of them.