There is a specific, humbling challenge at the very start of a company: getting the first ten users. It is not a marketing problem to be solved with a clever campaign; it is a personal, direct, one-by-one problem, solved by a founder willing to do whatever it takes to get a handful of real people using the thing.
The first ten users almost never come from scale. They come from your own reach: people you know or can get to who have the problem, communities you belong to, warm introductions, and direct, personal outreach to individuals. You find them by going to where they are and asking, one person at a time, not by waiting for them to discover you. It is manual and unglamorous, and it is exactly the work the earliest stage requires.
Getting those first users often means doing things that could never scale: onboarding each one personally, solving their problems by hand, giving them founder-level attention no larger company could. That is not a stopgap; it is the right move, because at this stage the goal is not efficiency but learning and a foothold. Founders who refuse to do the unscalable work of winning the first ten usually never get them.
The first ten users are worth vastly more than their number suggests. They are your proof that the idea has any pull, your richest source of feedback, and your first advocates and references. Delight them, learn everything you can from them, and turn them into believers who bring others. Ten genuinely happy users, won personally and served extraordinarily, are the seed from which everything else grows. Everything about growth is easier once you have truly earned them.
Win the first ten by hand. Growth is a later problem.
Valley Tech Lab is a free founder program in the Rio Grande Valley, convened by Greenridge Ventures.