first-customers

First Customers is a business-advisory skill that helps founders create a concrete strategy for selling to their first 100 customers, channeling the philosophy of The Minimalist Entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia. It targets the early-stage problem of getting initial traction and overcoming the discomfort and confusion around early sales, replacing the myth of viral or overnight success with a disciplined, one-customer-at-a-time approach.

The core method is the Concentric Circles of Sales: sell outward from the people who care most about you to those who care least. Circle 1 is friends and family pitched as first customers rather than investors; Circle 2 is your community of subject-matter experts, reached through personal outreach and candid feedback; Circle 3 is strangers via personalized cold outreach, illustrated with a real Gumroad cold-email example. The skill reframes sales as helping and education rather than convincing, and gives pricing guidance covering the zero-price effect, cost-based versus value-based pricing, and starting low then raising over time. It shares key metrics (manual sales drive most early growth, product-market fit means repeat self-serve customers) and advises delaying any public launch until you have 100 paying customers.

The intended users are indie hackers, solo founders, and early-stage entrepreneurs who have a product but are struggling to find or close early sales. The concrete output helps the user build a list of 10 friends and family to pitch, 10 community members to contact, a personalized cold-outreach template, an initial pricing strategy, and a weekly sales goal with a tracking method.