How to Get Your First 10 Customers

When most founders look for customers, they reach for cold email and automation tools. But your first 10 customers almost never come from a tool. They come from you, working your warm network and doing the unscalable things most people won’t.

In this episode of Startup School, YC Visiting Partner Max Kolysh breaks down the real tactics for getting those first 10 customers — where your buyer actually spends their time, why showing up in person wins, and why doing it yourself is your biggest advantage right now.

(Channel description, Y Combinator YouTube — Startup School.)

Kolysh / Y Combinator — How to Get Your First 10 Customers (2026-06-22)

A ~14-minute Y Combinator Startup School talk published 22 June 2026, presented by Max Kolysh (YC Visiting Partner). The talk is a tactics companion to YC’s existing strategy advice (doing things that don’t scale, founder sales, charging for your product). Kolysh built it from a Bookface (YC’s internal social network) survey in which dozens of founders described how they actually closed their first 10 customers; the video is a compilation of those patterns.

This is the wiki’s first dedicated early-stage GTM-tactics source. It sits adjacent to the founder-vantage enterprise-sales material already in the corpus — Luminai (warm-intro discipline at the hospital-C-suite altitude) and Campfire (stay-in-founder-sales-mode) — and generalises their founder-led-sales-as-doctrine claim into a step-by-step first-10 playbook. It is one of the four anchors of the wiki’s founder-led-sales concept (with Rubinstein & Onyemah, Dinakaran, and Glasgow).

TL;DR

The talk’s spine is a three-stage map of where customers come from:

• Customers 1–3 — work your warm network first. Almost without exception in the founder survey, the first two-three customers came from people one introduction away: former colleagues, classmates, friends in the industry. The reason isn’t that intros are a magic trick — it’s that early buyers buy because they trust the founder, not (yet) the product. Order of attack: personal network → second-degree LinkedIn connections (ask for warm intros) → AI network-search tools (e.g. Happenstance, a YC company that lets you query your extended network in natural language). When you ask for an intro, make it trivial: name who, why they’d care, and the exact forwarded blurb.
• Customers 4–10 — do things that don’t scale. The surprising survey finding: many founders closed early customers by showing up in person — not settling for a Zoom. Worked anecdotes: a founder who flew to a single executive buyer four weeks in a row (the buyer kept rescheduling; he kept showing up; eventually closed); a founder who flew to Hawaii, got kicked out after 8 minutes, and turned that customer into one of his biggest accounts. Small conferences convert far better than cold email to the same person — a mini-playbook of back-to-back 15-minute Calendly slots, emailing the attendee list before and during the event. Micro-events (founder dinners / happy hours, 6–10 people, $50–100/head) convert even better — ‘once someone’s eating dinner with you, it’s very unlikely they’re going to ignore your email afterwards.’
• Find where your customers complain online. For consumer / SMB products there’s usually a public place the pain is already being expressed — often Reddit (also Facebook groups, Discord, YouTube comments, industry forums). Worked anecdote: a healthcare founder whose ‘whole job for a couple of months’ was responding to Reddit/Facebook complaints (2–5 posts/day, some shadowbans, many customers). The durable advantage: Reddit threads get indexed by Google and keep paying off for years.

Three more tactical layers:

• Going outbound (once you’ve exhausted warm channels). Tooling progression most founders used: Apollo (lead database + email-finder + basic sequencer; generous free tier — ‘for most founders at this stage, Apollo alone is enough’) → Clay (AI research/enrichment workflows; matters when you qualify on something specific like installed software or recent hiring) → LinkedIn Premium (richest fresh professional data; send a connection request without a message, then a short DM on accept).
• Frame outreach as advice, not a pitch. The most effective early outreach was often framed as asking for mentorship, a product review, or a whiteboard session — not a sales call (with the honesty caveat: only if you genuinely want to learn). Worked variations: a founder who asked dozens of CEOs to be his mentor (short, real messages; several became customers); a founder who talked to 200 salespeople before the product existed (maxing weekly LinkedIn connects to test one hypothesis/week — ‘user research on steroids’, ~50% accept, ~20% to calls); a DevTools founder offering free architecture whiteboards that ‘just happened to require his exact product’; a founder selling to lawyers who paid them $100–200/hr for product feedback (~30% accept; high enough conversion that CAC stayed reasonable).
• Writing outreach that sounds human. Keep it under 75 words (long emails get ignored and read as LLM-written); the single most important line is a clear call to action; the one-minute sanity check almost nobody does — read the email out loud to a friend and rewrite anything you wouldn’t actually say. Highest-converting outreach often gives something first (a quick vuln scan, an onboarding teardown, a short compliance audit note) — ‘20 minutes of work before asking for 30 minutes of someone’s time is a reasonable trade.’ Always follow up 3–4 times over a couple of weeks.

The governing frame: ‘the reason this messy middle phase from 4 to 10 customers works is that you personally, the founder, are doing it.’ Showing up at an office, DMing on Reddit, or sending a researched email signals something automation can’t fake — that you care enough to put your own time in. That is the early-stage founder’s one durable advantage over incumbents, and prospecting tools only begin to matter at 10–20 customers.

What was actually ingested

The full ~14-minute transcript (auto-generated captions, light ASR cleanup for tool/product names — Apollo, Clay, Happenstance, Calendly). Chapter structure from the creator description preserved in the TL;DR. The full raw transcript is at raw/videos/how-to-get-your-first-10-customers.md.

Relation to the AI lens

The talk is only lightly an AI source — its substance is founder GTM tactics, not AI deployment — so it carries no dynamic_capabilities: tags (it sits outside the Warner & Wäger digital-transformation lens). Its AI touches are incidental: AI-powered network search (Happenstance), AI enrichment (Clay), and the warning that cold emails ‘will assume you used an LLM to write it’ if they’re too long or templated — a small but real datapoint that AI-sounding outreach is now a negative signal buyers actively screen for, complementing the wiki’s automation-vs-augmentation note that augmentation works when the human’s judgment (here, sounding like a real person) stays in the loop.

Linked entities and concepts

• Y Combinator — the channel/publisher; Startup School. Source-count: +1.

Dangling (single-source mentions, deferred per the second-source promotion rule): Max Kolysh (YC Visiting Partner; presenter), Happenstance (YC network-search company), Apollo, Clay (outbound/enrichment tools).

Caveats

• A YC Startup School talk with an implicit recruiting/advisory motive (apply-to-YC framing). All worked anecdotes are paraphrased founder self-reports from an internal Bookface survey — directional, unverified, and survivorship-biased (these are founders who got their first 10 customers).
• Presenter surname (Kolysh) taken from the creator description, not stated on-camera.