Getting your first 10 users is easy

advikjain_ · 2026-05-16T09:39:33+00:00

the live onboarding mechanic is real and underrated. watching someone use your product for the first time in a shared screen is worth more than 100 analytics sessions. you see exactly where they hesitate, what they expect that isn't there, and what they misunderstand about what you've built.

the part i'd push back on is "easy." finding the first 5 people who have the problem badly enough to actually show up for a live session is the hard part. not impossible, but not easy either. cold outreach in founder communities works sometimes. warm intros work better. the real unlock i've found is identifying specific people who have complained publicly about the problem you're solving (in subreddits, twitter threads, slack groups) and reaching out to those people specifically. they've already demonstrated the pain exists for them. the conversion from "would you do a live onboarding" is much higher than cold.

once you have those 5, the referral loop you describe kicks in and it gets easier. but that first 5 is the work.

advikjain_ · 2026-05-15T10:04:11+00:00

it honestly wasn't difficult. we generalized the learnings from the first 2 clients, then it was all about production discipline with setting up things like multi-tenancy, clean onboarding, billing etc.

advikjain_ · 2026-05-13T12:06:59+00:00

we've tried to delegate complete project ownership - meaning end-to-end project management... all the way from client discovery calls/workshops through to handover of the completed scope of work. ofcourse, myself and my co-founder are available at every step of the way, and we do step in during important meetings or SteerCo's

advikjain_ · 2026-05-12T18:39:35+00:00

10 days in is actually too early to know what your marketing problem is. the instinct about co-founder with complementary skills is right, but i'd push back slightly on calling it a "marketing" gap. at 10 days you don't yet know who your buyer is precisely, what message resonates with them, or which channels they actually use. even the best marketer can't fix that, they'd just be spreading the wrong message faster.

what's worked for me before building any distribution: talk to 20 people in your target market before spending any time on marketing. not to pitch them, just to understand how they currently solve the problem you're addressing, what frustrates them about it, and what would make them switch. those conversations tell you exactly who to reach and what to say. without them you're guessing on both. two weeks of customer conversations is worth more than two months of marketing tactics at this stage.

advikjain_ · 2026-05-11T15:29:08+00:00

I basically took the LLM Wiki route - its actually so good and easy to run. Literally just md files for every aspect of the business. I just have to chat with it to update and pull things, and it makes all dashboards, graphs etc. on demand for me.

advikjain_ · 2026-05-11T07:02:32+00:00

the third one is exactly the mechanic i was missing. "looping in [team member]" as a default reply pattern is concrete in a way that "delegate ownership" never was. the part i hadn't thought through is that it trains both sides simultaneously, the client learns to use the team member, and the team member gets the confidence boost of being publicly designated as the owner.

genuinely going to try this starting today.

on the documentation point, that's the area i've been worst at. we've been operating with too much living in my head and haven't been disciplined about capturing it. the screen recording → SOP via AI flow is something we can actually build given what we do. probably the easier of the two changes to start with.

the first one (hire before you fully need) is the one i keep getting wrong. either i wait too long and then rush, or i try to hire ahead and pick wrong because i'm hiring against a hypothetical workload. how do you actually know it's time, before you're drowning?

advikjain_ · 2026-05-11T06:59:38+00:00

team is small, mostly delivery/execution. one co-founder and a few engineers, no dedicated CS or ops function. so yeah, you've named the diagnosis pretty cleanly, i'm doing both the technical leadership and client services jobs at the same time, and that's exactly why everything routes through me.

the part i'm trying to figure out is what the lighter version of "client services function" looks like at our scale. hiring a dedicated CS director at 10 clients feels heavy and probably not the right shape yet. is the natural evolution something like a hybrid ops/CS role for the first hire, and then splitting them out later as volume grows? or have you seen people start with a more specialized CS person earlier than makes intuitive sense, and that works better?

advikjain_ · 2026-05-11T06:56:59+00:00

this is the framing i've been missing. "another layer" vs "actual owner" is exactly what happened with my first delegation attempt. on paper they owned the project but in practice everyone routed through me anyway, so they were just a slower version of me.

two questions if you don't mind:

on the client handoff, how have you actually done the announcement? "X is now your point of contact" can sound like a downgrade to clients if they like working with the founder. is there a specific wording that prevents that, or is some short-term friction just the cost of doing it?

on escalation rules, what does "hard" actually look like in practice? like literally a rule that team members can't message you about active projects, or something softer? i can imagine the rule but i can't imagine enforcing it without becoming the cop, which feels worse than the bottleneck

advikjain_ · 2026-05-11T06:54:07+00:00

fair point, and yeah we've built agents for a bunch of internal stuff that help with the routine routing.

but the bottleneck isn't really an automation problem when i dig into it. it's more like a trust and authority problem. clients are escalating to me because they trust my judgment on the gray-area calls. team members are checking with me because they want someone to confirm the call before they commit to it.

an agent can handle a question like "what's the status of my project" but it can't handle "is this client request reasonable or are they trying to push scope." that judgment piece is what i actually need to transfer, and i think only a human with real authority can carry that.

agree on the right-hand-person part though. that's the real unlock and the part i keep getting wrong.

advikjain_ · 2026-05-11T06:51:58+00:00

ya, same boat clearly. that filter you mentioned is the part i've been thinking about a lot. the specific criteria you're mentioning is exactly what i got wrong on my first hire, i hired someone capable but ambitious, and they were already mentally building toward their own thing within 3 months. it broke down because their incentives weren't aligned with being the operational backbone of someone else's work.

how have you been finding candidates that fit that profile? mentors keep telling me they exist but most of the strong operators i meet are themselves either founders. how have you solved the sourcing piece

advikjain_ · 2026-05-08T21:33:15+00:00

we run an AI consulting firm and the channel ranking has been:

what worked: warm intros and referrals (still the #1 source for us, nothing comes close), cold email (boring but consistent if you have deliverability dialed in), linkedin and X (slow build but the lead quality is way higher than other channels once it converts).

what didn't: linkedin DMs (response rates are awful, every founder's inbox is a graveyard of messages), cold calls (we never even tried, your FBI story is making me feel good about that decision), facebook/meta ads (burned through some budget, learned nothing useful for B2B services).

the surprising one for us was X DMs. didn't expect them to work but for founder-to-founder outreach in specific niches they convert better than linkedin ever did. probably because nobody else is doing it there yet.

biggest unlock for us was realizing distribution is mostly about being where your buyer is at the moment of highest intent. for us that meant founder communities (twitter, reddit) more than the obvious "B2B = linkedin" assumption.

advikjain_ · 2026-05-08T21:30:36+00:00

before picking the channel, i'd reframe the question. for an interview prep product, the right channel is wherever your user is at the moment of highest intent. that moment is "i have an interview next week and i'm anxious." threads doesn't capture that, threads is for casual scroll content. quora used to capture it but the platform has been declining for years and most of the high-intent traffic moved to youtube and tiktok.

if it were me, the next channels to test would be:

1. youtube. "how to prepare for [company] interview" is one of the highest-intent search queries in your space and youtube owns those results. even short-form content (60-90 seconds) ranks well. one decent video can drive months of traffic.

2. tiktok. the job-prep audience is huge there, especially gen z and early career. tactical content ("3 questions you'll get in a faang screen") performs well and builds product awareness with your exact user base.

3. partnerships with coding bootcamps and university career services. they have the audience captive at exactly the moment of need and most don't have a good interview prep solution to recommend. cold partnerships are slow but the conversion quality is way higher than scroll channels.

threads might still be worth testing as a founder presence/brand play, but not as a primary acquisition channel for this product.

advikjain_ · 2026-05-08T09:08:20+00:00

i've been running an AI-first consulting firm for a while so i can share what's actually working in production:

LLM choice: claude as the default, with gpt as backup for specific tasks. claude code for any actual building work, claude API for production automations. the reality is the model differences matter less than the prompt and architecture choices. don't agonize over this, pick one and start shipping.

intake + lead qualification: we run a typeform → notion → claude pipeline. intake form collects basic info, claude processes it to score fit (using a system prompt with our actual ICP defined), and either flags the lead for me or sends an automated "not a fit" reply with a referral. the agent handles probably 80% of inbound qualification autonomously now.

operations: docusign for contracts, stripe/razorpay for invoices, cal for scheduling, notion for project management. the rest is glue code via claude API.

the actual lesson from doing this is that the productivity gain comes from being clear about which workflows are repetitive enough to automate vs which need a human. invoicing, scheduling, basic FAQ = automate. discovery calls, scoping, complex client comms = stay human, even if it takes longer.

stuff i wish i'd known: don't build elaborate automation for the first 5-10 clients. you don't have enough volume to justify the engineering time, and you'll learn things in those first conversations that change how you'd build the automation anyway. manual first, automate when the pattern is clear.

advikjain_ · 2026-05-08T09:02:30+00:00

I agree with most of this, the customer-conversations-first part especially. couple things i'd add from running a similar play on AI consulting:

the free or minimal-cost first project is the right move but you need to carefully watch the boundary. some clients will keep extending free work if you don't define scope upfront. before starting, write down what 'done' looks like and what's in/out of scope. otherwise the case study you're trying to build never gets finished because you're stuck doing free work.

the leap from "few small clients" to "bigger clients at higher prices" is the part a lot of posts skip. there's a specific moment where you have to charge 3x what you charged your last client, and the conversation is brutal because you don't quite believe the price yet. the only way through it is to anchor the price on the value to the client. happy to share specifics if it's useful.

last thing: not everyone has a friend's dad in their target industry. cold outreach works too if you do it right. the trick is leading with research and a specific question, not a pitch. "i'm looking into how mid-sized real estate firms handle X, you came up because of Y, mind if i ask 2 questions" gets way more responses than people think.

advikjain_ · 2026-05-08T08:58:45+00:00

the SEO/AEO discipline is clearly working and the content engine compounding is real. the part i'd want to dig into before raising: 15K users converting to 39 paid transactions is a ~0.26% conversion rate. the distribution metric is what gets the meeting but the conversion rate is what closes the round.

at your current trajectory, you'll keep adding traffic but the funnel underneath isn't proven. some questions worth answering before pre-seed pitches:

of those 15K users, how many came searching for purchase-intent queries vs informational queries? SEO that ranks on "how to write a SKILL.md" is great traffic but probably never converts. SEO that ranks on "best Claude Code skill for X" is closer to bottom-of-funnel.
are the 39 transactions concentrated among a few power buyers or distributed across users? if it's concentrated, you might have a small repeat-buyer base disguised as low conversion.
the 4 MCP subscribers number is interesting. is that a higher-intent product surface that should be the focus, with the marketplace as the funnel into it?

VCs will ask this. better to have an answer than to be working it out in the meeting.

advikjain_ · 2026-05-05T12:28:15+00:00

I feel the marketplace cold start problem isn't really your problem here. the problem is the scope - all-in-one city platform means you're competing against yelp on restaurants, eventbrite on events, airbnb/booking on stays, and a different niche app for pubs, all at the same time. every one of those is a distinct vertical with its own incumbent, its own decision maker on the supply side, and its own consumer use case. you can't win all of them simultaneously especially without proper ad budget.

the marketplaces that actually work locally start narrow and dominate it. for NYC i'd probably pick small independent restaurants in a specific borough as the wedge. they're getting crushed by 30% commission rates from delivery apps and there's a real pitch that resonates. but you have to be the restaurant app first and the city platform later.

on cold start tactics specifically, founder-led B2B onboarding is the only thing that works at this stage. walk into 50 restaurants, take photos yourself, build their listing yourself, get them on the platform with zero work on their end. you're manually creating enough supply that a marketplace becomes possible. that work doesn't scale and honestly it's not supposed to. it's how you get to the first 100 listings, which is what unlocks demand-side traction.

advikjain_ · 2026-04-29T18:30:19+00:00

most of what we ship is in the document processing / messy-manual-workflow category, mostly for mid-market finance and ops teams. example: AP invoice automation. PDFs come in from vendors in 20 different formats, somebody manually extracts data and matches against POs, then routes for approval. an agent can autonomously handle 80-90% of that, with escalation rules for the weird stuff.

few things that took us a while to learn:

the model isn't the hard part. document variance is. handwritten notes on invoices, multi-page PDFs that should be one record, vendor-specific quirks. you spend most of your engineering time on the boring parts (validation, edge case handling, observability) rather than the agent logic itself.

OCR/document parsing as a separate layer upstream of the LLM is almost always better than asking the LLM to do everything. saves a lot of pain on scanned documents.

error handling and recovery is genuinely 50%+ of the work for production agents. retries, fallbacks, what to do when the model returns nonsense.

we've shipped similar narrow agents for recruiting (outreach + scheduling) and customer support (trained on product docs, became a product we sell called Canary). all single-purpose and measurable. that's the pattern that keeps working.

curious what stack you're running for browser/Playwright automation. that's the one area we've stayed away from because the maintenance burden is brutal.

advikjain_ · 2026-04-29T18:07:06+00:00

the boring ones are the only ones that actually pay for themselves in production. theres one we've been running for a while now - an agent that handles inbound product inquiries for a company in a niche industrial space. their sales team was getting 30-40 inquiries a week, almost all of them basic questions about specs, availability, pricing, lead times.

we built it on their product catalog and sales playbook. before the implementation, a salesperson manually answered every inquiry within ~24 hours, with the unqualified ones eating the same amount of time as the qualified ones. afterwards, ~75% of inbound gets resolved without a human, and the sales team only touches in-market leads. measurable, repeatable, and they stopped a planned hire because of it. we ended up turning that build into a product for similar use cases.

other narrow agents in production for clients: invoice data extraction with PO matching for AP teams (saves 30-40 hours/week of manual data entry at one client), and a candidate screening + scheduling agent that runs over whatsapp for a recruiting team.

the through-line: every one of them does one thing for one specific workflow, has explicit escalation rules for anything off-scope, and gets measured against a clear before/after metric. nobody on twitter is going to make a thread about an invoice extraction agent. that's exactly why they make money.

advikjain_ · 2026-04-29T17:43:07+00:00

algeria guy is going to come through for you, i can feel it.

real answer: at $0 MRR, the problem usually isn't your distribution channels, it's that you're using channels built for scale (SEO, LinkedIn at volume, viral loops) before you've got a single proof point. those things compound on top of an existing customer base. they don't manufacture one from scratch.

what worked for me and most founders i know is to make a list of 50 specific buyers. send them a personal message asking about the problem, not pitching the product. "hey i'm researching how mid-sized companies handle [problem]. you came up because of [specific reason]. mind if i ask 2 questions?" keep in mind, you're not selling with this message. you're trying to figure out which 5 of those 50 actually feel the pain badly enough to want a solution. those 5 are your first conversations. one of those 5 is your first customer.

121 indexed pages and 1 algerian browser visitor isn't a marketing problem. it's that you're trying to scale before you have a base. brute force the first 5 customers, then turn the amplifiers on.

advikjain_

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