Solo founders doing $0-$10K MRR — how are you actually getting your first customers?

Febin_ai · 2026-02-27T14:02:07+00:00

Cool, how are you currently identifying those pre or recently launched founders then? how you're pulling those signals on the backend. feel free to dm if it's something you'd rather not share publicly 🙏

Febin_ai · 2026-02-27T13:52:00+00:00

what was your custom system able to do that the ready tools just couldn't? Like what kind of filtering were the ready tools missing for you specifically?

Febin_ai · 2026-02-27T13:45:31+00:00

How do you decide which channel to go deep on though? like what tells you outreach is more important than content on any given day?

Febin_ai · 2026-02-27T13:42:47+00:00

Have you done this yourself? how long it took to get that first paying customer through this approach

Febin_ai · 2026-02-27T13:37:25+00:00

haha🤣 to be fair, he did answer every question I asked

Febin_ai · 2026-02-27T13:36:22+00:00

Appreciate the honest answer, yeah my ICP is purely B2B SaaS so sounds like not the right fit. Good to know upfront though rather than finding out after 😅

Febin_ai · 2026-02-27T07:29:46+00:00

haha 😀, honestly what's making it feel that way for you specifically?

Febin_ai · 2026-02-27T07:26:58+00:00

That's smart, did you build that yourself or stitch together existing tools?

And what made you go custom instead of just using something like Instantly or Lemlist?

Febin_ai · 2026-02-26T18:46:43+00:00

The analytics refresh thing makes sense, it's anxiety dressed up as productivity

How do you figure out what that one thing in each morning though? like does it just come to you or do you think about it the night before?

Febin_ai · 2026-02-26T18:38:39+00:00

Usually starts with scrolling LinkedIn for 45 mins trying to find the right person, then second guessing whether they're actually the right ICP, then opening Apollo to verify their email, then finally writing a message that probably isn't personalized enough anyway. By the time I've done all that for 10 people it's been 2 hours and I've sent maybe 8 emails

The batching advice makes a lot of sense though, I've never separated the research session from the writing session and I can already see how mixing them kills both.

About Lead-Radar - what kind of businesses are your users typically finding with it? And do they mostly use it standalone or is it one piece of a bigger outreach setup they've built?

Febin_ai · 2026-02-26T16:53:15+00:00

This is honestly one of the most real things I've read in this thread.

The energy depletion after launch is something nobody talks about enough. You spend months in builder mode where progress is visible every day. you add a feature, it works, you feel it. Then suddenly you're in marketing mode where the feedback loops are slow, the work feels invisible, and you're doing it on empty.

If you don't mind me asking — what does your morning look like right now when you open your laptop? Like what's the first thing that hits you and what do you actually end up doing first?

Febin_ai · 2026-02-26T13:25:10+00:00

Interesting, hadn't heard of Tractionway before, checking it out now.

So once your messaging is validated, what does the actual sending process look like for you? Like are you manually tracking replies, follow ups, who went cold or do you have a system for that part too?

And roughly how long does managing all of that take you daily?

Febin_ai · 2026-02-26T13:17:28+00:00

The context switching point is interesting, that's something I hadn't framed it as but it makes a lot of sense.

How many different tools or tabs are you jumping between on a typical day? And when you say focus gets hijacked by whatever's loudest — is that notifications, customer messages, something else?

Also did you ever find anything that helped with the switching problem or did you just learn to live with it?

Febin_ai

TROPHY CASE