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First customers

Skill scaccogatto/minimalist-entrepreneur/skills/first-customers

Create a strategy for selling to your first 100 customers using the minimalist entrepreneur playbook. Use when someone has a product and needs to find customers, or is struggling with early sales. Also use when the user mentions "first customers," "early sales," "cold outreach," "customer acquisition," "how to sell," "finding customers," or "go-to-market." For setting prices, see pricing. For scaling with content, see marketing-plan.From its SKILL.md

Install
npx -y skills add scaccogatto/minimalist-entrepreneur --skill first-customers

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SKILL.md

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Guide the user through selling to their first 100 customers.

Core Principle

Skip the launch. Focus on selling. "Viral success" is a myth. Every seemingly overnight success is built on months or years of hard work. Your job is to sell one by one, learn from each interaction, and build momentum.

The Concentric Circles of Sales

Sell outward from the people who care most about you to the people who care least:

Circle 1: Friends and Family

  • Start here. Yes, it's uncomfortable. Do it anyway.
  • Pitch them on being your first customers, not investors
  • They trust you more than anyone else. If they won't buy, who will?
  • Ask for their honest feedback, not social media posts
  • Kickstarter says: "Support always begins with people you know"

Circle 2: Your Community

  • The community you identified and have been contributing to
  • These are subject matter experts who understand the problem
  • Three steps:
    1. Make a list of everyone who has written or shared anything about a similar business
    2. Contact them all personally — walk them through your product, offer a free meal, do it hundreds of times
    3. Ask for candid feedback — not reviews or social posts, just honest feedback

Circle 3: Strangers (Cold Outreach)

  • Cold emails, calls, messages — this works. It's how Gumroad grew.
  • Sahil literally scoured the web for people who could benefit from Gumroad and emailed them personally, thousands of times
  • Example cold email:

    "Hi John, I saw you're selling a PDF on your website using PayPal, and manually emailing everyone who buys the PDF. I built a service called Gumroad which basically automates all of this. I'd love to show it to you, or you can check it out yourself: gumroad.com. Also happy to just share any learnings we see from creators in a little PDF we have. Let me know! Best, Sahil"

  • Don't copy/paste. Each email refines your ability to write better ones
  • Use each rejection as a learning opportunity

Sales is Not a Dirty Word

Reframe how you think about sales:

  • You're not convincing anyone. You're helping people.
  • You already have a relationship with your community
  • You're selling a product that adds value to their life
  • Turn every failed conversion into an insight — either wrong person, or product needs work
  • Sales is an education process: your customers get to know you, you get to know what's working

Pricing (Charge Something!)

  • There is a massive difference between free and $1 (the "zero price effect")
  • Two ways to charge:
    • Cost-based: Your costs + a margin (e.g., 20-50%)
    • Value-based: What it's worth to the customer, regardless of your costs
  • Start low and raise prices over time as your product improves
  • Pricing is iterative, just like everything else. It's not permanent.
  • Goal: eventually move to tiered pricing as you build brand and value

Key Metrics

  • Manual sales = 99% of early growth. Word of mouth = 99% of later growth.
  • You need far fewer customers than you think. Slack's IPO: 575 customers = 40% of revenue.
  • If your product costs $10/month, you need 200 customers for $2,000/month. At one customer per business day, that's less than a year.
  • Product-market fit = repeat customers who sign up and use your product on their own

When to "Launch"

Don't launch until you have 100 paying customers. Then launch as a celebration of your community's support, not as a customer acquisition strategy. Throw a party. Thank your customers. Invite them.

Output

Help the user create:

  1. A list of 10 friends/family to pitch this week
  2. A list of 10 community members to reach out to
  3. A cold outreach template (personalized, not copy-paste)
  4. Their initial pricing strategy
  5. A weekly sales goal and tracking method

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.

Gives 0 of the 12 instructions most sales audience skills give in 882 tokens

Counted across 401 of the 401 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-08-07

  • Read product marketing context before asking questionsin 21 of 401, across 11 files
  • Acknowledge competitor strengths honestlyin 18 of 401, across 7 files
  • Start every page with a summaryin 15 of 401, across 4 files
  • Use a single, low-friction call to actionin 15 of 401, across 7 files
  • Create a single source of truth for each competitorin 14 of 401, across 3 files
  • Make each follow-up email add new valuein 11 of 401, across 5 files
  • Cut any sentence that does not drive a replyin 10 of 401, across 4 files
  • Tie personalization directly to the problemin 10 of 401, across 4 files
  • Write paragraph comparisons for each dimensionin 9 of 401, across 3 files
  • Link between related competitor pagesin 9 of 401, across 3 files
  • Keep subject lines short and lowercasein 9 of 401, across 3 files
  • Define ideal customer profile from top customersin 9 of 401, across 3 files

Said here and by no other author read

  • Skip the launch and focus on selling
  • Sell outward in concentric circles
  • Start by selling to friends and family
  • Pitch friends as customers not investors
  • Ask community members for candid feedback
  • Contact community members personally hundreds of times

Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once. Length counted with cl100k_base; the agent that loads this file may tokenize it differently.

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