How to Get Your First 10 Paying Customers for an Indie App

I build IndieBob, and I am writing this without a single statistic in it, which is unusual for a post with this title. That is deliberate: the previous version of this page was full of numbers — conversion rates, multipliers, how many customers people like you got by day eight — and I could not stand behind any of them. So here is the version I can stand behind.

Your first ten paying customers are not a marketing problem you solve with a growth hack. They are ten conversations. The work is finding people who already have the problem, telling them plainly that you built something for it, and making it possible to pay you.

Why it stalls at zero

Almost always for the same reason: the product was finished and the distribution was not started. Not "was done badly" — was not started. Building is absorbing and legible and entirely under your control; asking a stranger to look at your thing is none of those, so it keeps sliding to next week.

The traps are recognisable, and none of them need a statistic to make the point:

• Waiting for organic traffic. A new site with no content and no links is not going to be found. Search takes months and needs something to index; it is not a launch channel.
• One more feature first. If nobody has said no yet, you do not know what is missing. You are guessing, comfortably.
• Posting once and disappearing. One announcement into a feed reaches the people already watching you, which at this stage is your friends.

Ten paying customers is a small enough number that you can get there by hand. That is the point of the number. It is not a growth target; it is proof the thing is wanted, from people who are not being polite.

Before you talk to anyone

Half an hour, and it saves weeks.

Say who it is for in one sentence. Not "a project manager" — "for people who run a small agency and lose track of what they promised clients in Slack". If you cannot name the person, your message will read as spam because it will sound like it was written for anyone.

Make it possible to pay. A live payment link, whatever the provider. Not "contact us", not "coming soon". You cannot validate pricing if buying requires an email exchange.

Set up tracking before the first link goes out, not after. Put UTM parameters on every link you post anywhere. This costs nothing and it is the only way you will know which of the four things you tried is the one that worked. Retro-fitting this is impossible: the traffic has already arrived unlabelled.

Write down twenty real people or places. Actual names, actual forums, actual subreddits. If you cannot fill the list, that is the finding — you do not yet know where your users are, and that is the thing to go and learn this week.

Week one: talk to people directly

Small numbers, written individually. Find people who have publicly described the problem you solve — a forum post, a question, a complaint — and write to them about that, not about you.

A message that works looks roughly like: you saw the specific thing they wrote, you built a tool for that exact problem, would they like to try it. Short. No pitch deck, no discount, no urgency. Say you built it — being the developer is the most interesting thing about your message and the reason a reply is worth their time.

Then honour the "no". Follow up once. If there is no answer after that, they have answered.

I am not going to tell you what reply rate to expect, because it depends entirely on how well you picked the twenty and how specific your message is, and any number I gave you would be invented. What I will say is that this is the channel that produces the first customer most often, because it is the only one where you choose exactly who hears about you.

Week two: be in the communities properly

The rule that matters is the one every good community has written down somewhere: participate before you promote. Not as a technique to unlock posting rights — because a person who has only ever posted their own link is obvious to everyone reading, and that reputation is hard to undo in a small niche.

So: answer questions in your area for a while. When you do write about your own thing, say plainly that you built it, and post something with substance in it — what you learned making it, what it does not do, what surprised you — rather than an announcement.

Some communities forbid self-promotion entirely, and some forbid AI-written posts. Read the rules of each one and follow them exactly. Getting removed by a moderator in the one forum where your users actually are is a genuinely expensive mistake, and it is permanent in a way that a bad week of traffic is not.

Week three: a launch is a spike, not a strategy

Product Hunt and the directories — BetaList, Uneed, Fazier and the rest — give you one day of attention. Prepare properly: real screenshots and a real recording of the product rather than stock imagery, a clear first comment explaining what problem it solves, and a page ready for people who arrive knowing nothing about you.

Two honest expectations. The traffic is real but brief, and most of it will not buy today — so the most valuable thing you do on launch day is capture people who are interested but not ready, with an email signup. And a launch amplifies whatever you already have: it is a poor way to find out whether anyone wants the product, and a decent way to reach more of the people you already know want it.

Week four: lifetime deals, with eyes open

A lifetime-deal platform can produce a lump of cash and a group of engaged users quickly. It is a real option and worth considering.

Be clear about what you are trading, though. You are selling forever-access at a large discount to people who are specifically shopping for discounts, and you will support them for as long as the product exists. For a tool with low marginal cost and a founder who wants feedback and a runway, that can be a good trade. For a product with real per-user costs, it can be a slow-motion problem you have signed for in advance.

I have not run one, so I am not going to describe what happens when you do.

Where IndieBob fits

Honestly and narrowly, because this post is mostly about work no tool does for you.

The part it genuinely helps with is the tracking above: campaign attribution takes the UTM-tagged links you post and follows them through to signups and revenue, so at the end of the month you know which channel actually produced customers rather than which one felt busiest. There are outreach tools — prospect discovery, sequences, sending through your own SMTP — and email subscribers and broadcasts for the list you start on launch day. Those sit on the paid plan; the free plan covers one project and no outreach sends, which is enough to do the tracking and the writing.

And Bob will give you a short ranked list of what to do next based on your own posts and traffic. What he will not do is have the ten conversations. Nothing will.

The whole plan

Pick twenty people who have the problem. Write to them individually. Show up properly in the two or three places they gather. Prepare one launch. Tag every link you post so you know what worked.

That is not a growth strategy and it does not scale, and both of those are fine — you need ten customers, not ten thousand. Scale is the next problem, and you get to have it only after this one.

Start at indiebob.com if you want the tracking side handled while you do the talking.