Getting your first 10 customers from X

The way I'd get the first 10 customers for a SaaS from X is boring. Find people who are posting about the problem you solve, reply to them like a person, and do it every day for a few weeks. No viral thread, no launch, no ads. Just replies, and a simple sheet to keep track of who wrote back.

It works because a new account has almost no reach. With 80 followers, your posts get seen by roughly those 80 people, most of whom are other founders. A reply to someone who is stuck lands in front of the one person who needs help, at the moment they need it. That's a better trade than any post you can write in week one.

Where your first customers are hiding on X

Your first customers are already posting. They just aren't using your words. Nobody tweets "I need an uptime monitoring solution." They tweet that their site was down for three hours and nobody noticed. Look for these kinds of posts:

The math of the first 10 customers

Before you start, work out what you're signing up for. Say you send 15 replies a day. In my experience, when the replies go to people with a real problem and actually help, about 1 in 10 turns into a conversation: they reply back, ask what you use, or open a DM. That's 1.5 conversations a day.

If 1 in 10 of those conversations ends with someone paying, you get 0.15 customers a day. Ten customers takes about 67 days. That's slower than most people hope, and it's why most people quit in week two.

There are two levers. Send more replies, or reply to better people. Going to 30 replies a day halves the time to about 33 days. Only replying to people who are actively looking can double your conversation rate to 1 in 5, which halves it again. Do both and you're at roughly 17 days. Play with your own numbers here:

What a day looks like

1. 1Spend 10 minutes searching X for posts from the last day that mention the problem. Search the pain, not your category. "status page down" finds more buyers than "uptime monitoring".
2. 2Pick the 15 where the person is clearly stuck, not joking or venting for likes.
3. 3Write a reply that helps even if they never click your profile.
4. 4Go back to yesterday's replies and answer everyone who wrote back. This is where most sales start.
5. 5Log every conversation in a sheet: handle, problem, where it's at, next step.

Turning a conversation into a customer

When someone writes "oh nice, what's the tool?", answer in one line in public and offer to send a link by DM. In the DM, skip the pitch. Ask what they're using now and what made them post. Then offer something that doesn't scale: a free first month, or you setting it up for them on a short screen share.

The first 10 customers are as much about learning as revenue. Ask every one of them why they paid and what almost stopped them. Their exact words become your next replies and the headline on your homepage. I wrote more on the reply part in replies that don't sound like sales.

Mistakes I made so you don't have to

The slow part is the searching. That's the part I built KittyLeads to do: it scans X around the clock for people posting about your problem, scores how likely they are to buy, and drafts a reply for each one that you send yourself. But this method works fine by hand. If you want to see what doing it manually costs in hours, I broke it down in KittyLeads vs searching X manually, and there's a page on how it fits solo SaaS founders.