On this page
Somewhere on this page you're hoping to find the formula. Ten customers equals forty conversations equals eight a week for a month, tick the boxes, collect the customers.
I'm not going to give you that formula, because it's fake. The moment you adopt someone else's ratio you're benchmarking yourself against people with different products, different niches, different prices. Some founders get ten customers from ten conversations. Others need four hundred. Both are normal.
What's real: your first ten customers come from talking to people, every day, until the talking has taught you who actually pays and why. This page is what that looks like in practice. How my own first big yes actually arrived, what my beta users saved me from building, whether the ten should pay, and what to do when you're convinced the right people don't exist.
No funnel. No launch. A habit, and a count that only goes up.
Quick answer
There is no magic ratio; some founders get ten customers from ten conversations, others need four hundred, and both are normal. Your first ten come from talking to the right people every day, in one channel done properly, treating those first customers as research rather than revenue. Skip the funnel and the launch; keep a count that only goes up. MyPip finds each morning's people and what to say, so the daily talking actually happens.
How many conversations does it take to get 10 customers?
There's no transferable number. Any ratio you read, including the popular "ten customers is roughly forty conversations", was measured on someone else's product, price and niche, and it won't survive contact with yours. Some founders convert one conversation in ten. Others one in forty. The only number that matters is how many real conversations you had this week.
That's not a dodge, it's the actual mechanism. The thing that moves the ratio isn't a better script, it's reps: speaking to people until your picture of the customer sharpens and the conversion takes care of itself. Alex Hormozi bangs this drum constantly, and he's right about the direction: get on the phone, do the volume, let the compounding work. Paul Graham said the quieter version back in 2013: you recruit your first users manually, one at a time, because you can't wait for them to come to you.
So don't set out to have forty conversations. Set out to have some today, and again tomorrow. If you're not sure who those conversations should be with yet, decide exactly who it's for first, because a hundred conversations with the wrong people counts as zero.
What a real first yes actually looks like
My first serious customer took over a year to arrive and I didn't send them a single message. At my first company, Baseline Media, the first multi-ten-thousand-dollar deal came from Sportskeeda, one of the largest sports media outlets in India, twelve to fifteen months after we started. They found us.
They found us because everything was laid out for them to find. Our value proposition was stated plainly on a clean website. Our content was public on YouTube. Our team was visible. They were building up an in-house production operation ahead of the Qatar World Cup in 2022, they could see exactly what we produced and who we were, and by the time they got in touch they'd already convinced themselves. No long sales cycle. Just timing and price.
What surprised me most was the speed. A deal worth tens of thousands moved in days, because every question they might have asked was already answered in public. That's the part of "getting customers" the conversation advice leaves out: the talking works far better when someone who goes looking for you afterwards finds proof. The conversations plant you in people's heads. The visible evidence closes.
You can't schedule a yes like that for month two. You can make yourself findable from day one, so that when the right customer goes looking, the deal is already half done.
Why your first ten are research, not revenue
The first version of MyPip was the wrong product, and a beta user told me before I could build it. It took me two years to go from idea to public release, most of it in beta, handing it to anyone who'd try it. The original vision was an automated seller: find people, research them, message them, all hands-off.
Then the early conversations started landing the same complaint. "It's too technical." "I'm getting way too much inbound, I can't manage it." "I can't tell which of these people would actually make a difference to my business." Around beta user seven it flipped completely: this was a person walking towards a multimillion revenue target by deeply researching four or five key accounts a day and writing each one a message himself. Not thousands of sends. Five that convert.
That conversation is where MyPip's whole 95/5 idea came from, and it's the honest argument for treating your first ten as research. If I'd trusted my original vision, I'd have shipped one more automated spam machine into a market drowning in them. Beta user seven was worth more than any revenue he could have paid me, because he changed what I was building. Your first ten will do the same if you listen for it: they're not the reward for finishing the product, they're the last stage of designing it.
Should your first 10 customers pay or be free?
Paid, if you can possibly manage it. Someone handing over money is the single strongest signal that what you've built has value, and it's strongest when it comes from a stranger. Free feedback is generous; a payment is evidence. If the choice exists, the holy grail is ten paying customers you didn't already know.
There's one honest exception: people you trust wholeheartedly to tell you the truth. A free seat for someone whose criticism you can rely on is a good trade, and if they later start paying because they actually use the thing, that's the signal arriving anyway.
You can even collect the payment signal before the product is finished. The classic smoke test is a real page with a real checkout, and an honest "this ships in two months" the moment someone commits. It feels cheeky the first time. It's also the difference between a hundred people saying "I'd buy that" and knowing how many actually would, before you spend the months building it.
"I can't find 40 of the right people to talk to"
Yes you can. First question: where have you actually looked? If the honest answer is your neighbours, your old work colleagues and hope, you haven't looked yet. Second: if there were genuinely only forty people on earth who'd use your product, you shouldn't be building it, unless each of them pays you a million a year. The people exist. What you're really struggling with is getting them to talk to you, and that's a different problem with a different fix.
The fix isn't a better blast, it's becoming someone they've seen before. The best salespeople nurture: long-term relationship building, present in the same places, useful more than once, never one-message-and-done. When your name is faintly familiar and your comments have been worth reading, you're no longer another message landing in a full inbox.
And if persistence feels rude, take the benchmark from someone with every excuse not to bother. Harry Stebbings emailed Marc Benioff 53 times, each message personalised differently, before the Salesforce CEO said yes to his podcast (Fortune, 2025). Stebbings runs a huge fund and a podcast with millions of listeners, and he still does the work by hand. If he can send message number 53, you can send message number two.
Forget "first 10, then first 100"
I don't like the milestone framing at all. Set "first 10" as a target and you'll chase the target: discount it, beg for it, hit it, and learn nothing. The numbers I actually watch are different: how quickly are customers arriving, and from where? Then nail the one channel that's producing them before touching a second.
One channel, done properly, beats five done thinly, because every hour in it compounds: your profile grows there, your sense of the people sharpens, your messages get better. When customers start arriving faster from that channel, that's your growth signal. Not a round number crossed.
And whatever the count says, keep the one-to-one relationship as long as you physically can, because customers are the ones who drive the product. Loops, the email tool, is a nice example of the posture: the founder still jumps on support calls. Scaling doesn't mean leaving the conversations; it means handing off everything else so the conversations can stay. When the daily finding and researching is what's eating the hours, that's the part to hand off first, and how the daily list works is exactly that handoff. The talking stays yours.
If you landed here mid-journey: this page is one spoke of a bigger guide, and where to start is the full picture.