Ask HN: How did you get your first paying customers?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2017 where @designerlye convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 24 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 13 comments
For my latest business (a productised service that provides unlimited UI design for software teams http://fairpixels.pro ↗) I simply contacted my previous customers.
It's surprising how many of us are always looking for new customers, when sometimes, contacting people who you already have a relationship with works best.
Even if it's your first business. Maybe you know a few folks from your previous job, an internship. These people already trust you, know you and interacted with you before... the easiest way to get your first customer, I think, is through the network you already have.
Browse through your phone and email contacts. Your first customers and users might be sitting in your pocket as we speak :)
I had an ongoing relationship with a company and got them to pay a deposit for a product before we even started the company.
We would not have started the company without that deposit and I would have done something else in that case.
Anyway I think you should know who your first paying customers are going to be before you start anything. But don't take anyones word for anything. Lots of people will say "yeah I'll buy that if you make it" but not everyone will follow through.
I built up a list of early access users for www.sanitycheck.io from a small Twitter following, small podcast listenership, and two seo Facebook groups I was a member of. Got about 50 users in total. 9 months of being in beta and then switched on pricing and got first 10 customers from that.
You should have customers before launch. Read the first four chapters of: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/0989200507 ↗
I found the first few customers for my SaaS problem archive -https://www.oppslist.com/subscribe ↗
Through running a newsletter that provided similar content and promoting there.