EN Aug 9, 2026 · 17 min How 70 Solo Founders Actually Got Their First 10 Paying Customers (2024–2026 Dataset) We read 70 public first-customer stories and recorded the channel, the delay and the numbers for each. Zero founders got their first paying customer from paid ads. 34% got it inside a community someone else built. first-customersresearchoutbound
EN Aug 9, 2026 · 10 min How to Get Clients Without an Audience: What 15 Founders Who Started at Zero Actually Did Fifteen founders in our dataset explicitly started with no audience. Eleven of them got their first paying customer inside an audience somebody else had built — and the ones who went straight to mass cold outreach got nothing. first-customersresearchoutbound