Hey Reader,

A few letters back, I gave the first-customer question a single paragraph. It deserved a whole letter. This is that letter.

Here’s where your first customer will never come from: the logo, the website, the LLC, the business cards, the Instagram page. I say that with love, because new founders spend their first three months on exactly those five things. Not because they’re necessary. Because they’re comfortable. They feel like progress, and they risk nothing, and deep down that’s the appeal. A website can’t say no to you.

Your first ten customers come from somewhere far less comfortable: direct conversations with specific human beings, one at a time, where a no is possible.

They are hunted, not marketed.

The good news is that hunting is a system, not a personality trait. You don’t need to be a natural salesperson. You need four pieces, and you can build all four this week.

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Visibility gets you noticed. The work underneath it is what gets you trusted and eventually paid.

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FROM MY DESK

The Hunting Season

The founding-customer offer. Before you talk to anyone, build the thing you’re offering, and it is not a discount. It’s a trade with a name. Full effort at a founding price, in exchange for three things: honest feedback on a schedule, permission to use the results and their words once you’ve earned them, and a little grace while you sharpen the edges. Call it what it is: a founding customer. Names matter more than beginners think. People join founding things. They merely buy discounted ones.

The list of twenty. Not twenty friends. Twenty people who either have the problem you solve or stand next to someone who does. Former coworkers and old bosses. The trade one step upstream of you and one step downstream. People you’ve personally heard complain about this exact problem. The rooms, online or local, where your customer already gathers. Write real names. And if you can’t get to twenty, stop, because that’s not a marketing problem. It’s a signal you don’t actually know who your customer is yet, and it’s a gift to learn that now, at a kitchen table, for free, instead of six months from now under a pile of branding invoices.

The ask. Here’s language you can steal: "You’ve known me through X for years. I’ve started doing Y. I’m taking five founding customers this month, at a price I won’t offer again, in exchange for blunt feedback while I build this right. Is that you, or is it someone you know?" Look at the parts doing the work. It opens with a relationship, not a pitch. The scarcity is real, five and only five, because you genuinely can’t serve twenty founding customers well. The trade is stated straight, no apology. And the last line is an exit ramp: they can help you without buying, which means nobody has to dodge your calls, which means your reputation survives the no.

The founding price, never free. Charge something real. Free customers give you politeness. Paying customers give you the truth, because the truth cost them money. Then build the feedback loop you promised: fifteen minutes after delivery, three questions. What almost stopped you from saying yes? What surprised you once we started? Who else do you know who needs this? That third question matters more than the first two. Your first list of twenty came from your memory. Every list after that should come from your customers’ mouths.

When marketing actually starts. Customer eleven, give or take. Because by then you own three things no agency can sell you...

1. Proof that people will pay real money for what you offer.
2. The exact words customers use to explain why they bought, which becomes your ad copy, written for free.
3. A pattern of who says yes fastest, which becomes your targeting.

That is when marketing can finally do its job: amplify what you already know works.

Now, if you’re twenty years in and reading this with a smile, don’t file it under nostalgia. Your next product, your next location, your next service line: every one of them is sitting at customer zero, and the rules haven’t changed. Companies forget this at scale. They launch the new thing with a budget instead of twenty conversations, then hold a meeting to figure out why something with great branding and no hunting is dying. And here’s the quiet enterprise value angle: a company that knows how to hunt has a repeatable, teachable growth skill on the shelf. A company that only knows how to spend has a payroll line. Buyers can tell the difference from across the room.

P.S. Remember: marketing is amplification. Use it after you know what works, and it compounds. Use it before you do, and you’re paying to broadcast a guess.

NEXT STEPS

Action is the Advantage

I do not write this newsletter to motivate you. I write it to move you.

So here is what I want you to do this week:

✓ Write the list of twenty tonight. Real names, real people. If you stall at twelve, write down what that tells you about how well you know your customer.

✓ Draft your founding-customer offer in three sentences: the work, the price, the trade. Say it out loud until it sounds like you.

✓ Contact five of the twenty before Friday. Not all twenty. Five is a number you’ll actually do, and momentum beats coverage.

✓ Reply with your ask, the exact sentences you plan to send, and I’ll tell you straight whether I’d say yes to it. I read every reply, and sharpening one founder’s first ask is some of the highest-leverage editing I get to do.

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