I built my product. Now how do I get customers?

Short answer: your first customers come from one of five places — communities, building in public, launch platforms, content/SEO, or direct outbound. Pick the one where your buyers already are, and start this week.

You built something. Maybe in a weekend, maybe with Lovable or Cursor or v0. It works. You shipped it. And nobody came. Making a product got radically easier; getting people to use it did not. Here is the honest breakdown of every path — what it's good for, how long it takes, and the mistake that kills it.

Which channel should I start with?

The right one depends on three things: whether your buyers already gather somewhere, whether you have (or will build) an audience, and whether you have more time or more money. Match the channel to where your customers already are — don't pick the one that's most comfortable for you.

Here's the trap almost everyone falls into: distribution feels scary, so you retreat to the thing that feels safe — building more product. Another feature, another polish pass. It's procrastination dressed up as work. The product is done enough. The channel is the job now.

Where are my buyers already gathered?

If the people who would pay for your product hang out somewhere — a subreddit (r/SaaS, r/Entrepreneur, a niche one for your vertical), an indie-hacker Discord, a niche Slack, a Facebook group — that is usually the fastest path to your first ten customers.

Be useful there for two to three weeks before you pitch anything: answer questions, share what you're learning, link your product only when it genuinely answers someone's question.

• Time to first result: days to a couple of weeks.
• Good for: products with an obvious existing community.
• The mistake that kills it: showing up, dropping a link, and leaving. You'll get banned and remembered. Give before you ask.

Should I build in public?

Post your journey — real numbers, real setbacks, what you're learning — on X and LinkedIn. Base44's founder, Maor Shlomo, built the whole company in public and later posted that one update added 5,000 users and a third of the product's revenue in 24 hours. The founder becomes the channel, and milestone posts ("we just hit X") drive the spikes. It's slow to start and compounds if you stay consistent.

• Time to first result: weeks to months (it's a compounding play, not a quick one).
• Good for: founders who will post consistently and are willing to be public.
• The mistake that kills it: posting only when you have wins. The setbacks and the real numbers are what make people follow.

Should I launch on Product Hunt or Hacker News?

They give you a one-day traffic spike and, if it goes well, durable backlinks and a batch of signups. Use your one good launch when you have a working product and ideally one real result to point at.

• Time to first result: one day (the launch), then a tail.
• Good for: a concentrated burst and social proof.
• The mistake that kills it: launching early to an empty audience with nothing to show. You get one clean shot — don't waste it.

Does content and SEO work for a brand-new product?

Yes, but slowly. Write the answers to the questions your customers type into Google and, increasingly, into AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity. A good post keeps bringing people for years.

• Time to first result: three to six months before it compounds.
• Good for: problems people actively search for.
• The mistake that kills it: expecting it to work this month, or writing for search engines instead of for a real person with the problem.

How do I get customers with cold outbound?

If you know exactly who your customer is — "founders building dev tools," "letting agents in Leeds," "heads of RevOps at Series B SaaS" — you don't have to wait for them to find you. You go straight to them by email. It's the most direct path when your buyer is specific and reachable.

Most builders avoid it because doing it by hand is miserable: finding the right people, researching each one, writing something that doesn't read like spam, sending, following up, and sorting the replies. A cold email that works is short, references something real about the recipient, and asks for one small thing.

The numbers set expectations: the average cold email reply rate sits around 3.4%, while tight targeting and real personalization push well-run campaigns into the 8-12% range. The gap between those two is entirely craft and targeting, not volume.

• Time to first result: days once you're set up (you control the volume).
• Good for: a specific, reachable, high-value customer.
• The mistake that kills it: blasting a generic template to a huge list. That's spam, it hurts your domain, and it doesn't work.

If outbound is your path: automate the grind

The bottleneck in outbound is the manual labor, not the idea. GenSend (what we build) is an agent that removes everything between "I know who I want" and "they replied" — you brief it on who to reach, it does the finding, writing, sending, and reply-sorting.

We're early and we won't pretend otherwise, and we won't fabricate results: outbound only works when your product solves a real problem and your targeting is tight. If outbound is your path, point it at your market → try it free — Pro is $20/mo.

So which one should I pick?

• Your buyers gather somewhere obvious → communities first.
• You'll post consistently and want an audience → build in public.
• You have a real launch moment → Product Hunt / Hacker News.
• People search for your problem → content / SEO (start now, it's slow).
• You know exactly who your buyer is and can email them → direct outbound (automate the grind so it doesn't eat your week — that's what we built GenSend for).

Most builders combine two or three of these. The one mistake to avoid: waiting for customers to find you when you already know who they are. In that case, go to them.

You did the hard part. You built the thing. Getting it in front of the right people is a solvable problem — pick the path that matches where your customers already are, and start this week.