The hardest milestone in any startup journey. How long does it really take to get someone to pay you? Data from 227 founder stories.
Average time to first customer: 3 months
Fastest recorded: 1 days | Based on 227 stories
Key insight: Getting your first customer often takes longer than expected. Don't be discouraged if it takes a few months - that's normal.
Pro tip: Direct outreach (cold emails, DMs) and communities tend to work fastest for getting your first customer. SEO takes longer but builds sustainable traffic.
Glow AI launched on November 7th, reached $10K MRR by November 9th, and accumulated 32,000 downloads in just 3 days. Influencer Equity Strategy...
I validated Buffer with a landing page before writing any code. Within 4 days of tweeting about it, I had my first paying customer. The Validation...
On March 1st 2023, OpenAI announced the ChatGPT API. Right on that day, I came up with the idea to create a new UI to solve my own pain points with th...
Getting your first customer is the hardest part. After that, scaling gets progressively easier. Here's what comes next: