Y Combinator: How to Get Your First Customers (Startup Advice)

The talk opens with YC's most famous piece of advice, originally from Paul Graham: "Do things that don't scale." The partners explain that founders obsess over scalable growth strategies (SEO, paid ads, viral loops) when they have zero customers. But those channels require product-market fit to work. Your first 10-100 customers must come from brute-force personal effort — cold emails, showing up at meetups, DMing people on Twitter, literally knocking on doors.

The "Collison Install" gets highlighted as the ultimate example. When Patrick and John Collison were building Stripe, they didn't send people a signup link. They'd meet developers, hear them complain about payments, and say: "Give me your laptop. I'll integrate Stripe right now." This eliminated every friction point in the signup process. The lesson: remove every possible barrier between your potential customer and using your product, even if it means doing manual work that would be absurd at scale.

A major theme is the danger of building in isolation. The partners share that at least 30% of YC startups pivot significantly after talking to their first real customers. The founders who wait 6 months to launch, perfecting their product in secret, almost always discover they built the wrong thing. The recommendation is aggressive: within the first 2 weeks of having an idea, you should be talking to potential customers — not coding.

Pricing strategy for early-stage startups gets a clear framework. Many founders want to offer their product free to "reduce friction." But YC argues this is a trap. Free users will say your product is great to be polite. Paying customers — even at $1/month — reveal whether you're solving a real problem. The act of pulling out a credit card is the single strongest signal of product-market fit. If nobody will pay anything, you don't have a product yet.

The talk emphasizes that your first customers are discovery tools, not revenue sources. Every early conversation should end with: "Who else should I talk to?" and "What's the #1 thing that would make this 10x better?" These two questions, asked consistently, will reshape your product and naturally expand your customer base through warm introductions. The compounding effect of referrals from happy early customers is more powerful than any marketing channel.

The session closes with a tactical playbook: make a list of 100 potential customers, personally reach out to all of them within 2 weeks, get 10 on calls, convert 3-5 into paying users, then iterate based on their feedback. This "sprint" framework has launched hundreds of YC companies from zero to their first meaningful traction.