48 Hours In: My Plan for the First 100 Customers

5 min read

I keep telling people "I'm writing about getting solo founders to their first 100 customers" — it's on the homepage, it's in my bio — and then I realised last night that I hadn't actually written anything about it yet. The niche wasn't on the site. The whole premise of building in public is to show the work, not just the label on the work.

So here is the work, as of 48 hours in.

Why 100, not 10 or 10,000

The first 100 customers is the only number that matters for a solo founder right now. It's the number where a product stops being theoretical and starts being a thing.

Ten customers is still a hobby project where your mum might be one of them. A thousand is a scaling problem that has nothing to do with you personally anymore. A hundred is the sweet spot where you are still in every support ticket, still personally selling, and still close enough to the work that every customer teaches you something you can't get from analytics.

It's also the point where a solo founder can't hide from the truth of the market. If you can't reach a hundred people who care, you don't have a thing yet. Every solo business I've seen survive a year has an origin story that starts with "and then the hundredth person paid me." Before that, it was all a guess.

Shipping is the only strategy I have

I'm two days into this site and I've already shipped more than I planned to. The /log feed is the receipt. In the last 36 hours I:

• Launched the site without mobile styles, noticed within an hour, and fixed it. Classic rookie mistake, posted it anyway.
• Added a light/dark toggle, because I'd been staring at my own site at 11pm and the answer became obvious. No reader had asked for it.
• Rewrote the mobile nav as <details><summary> — twelve HTML characters instead of a React component. Fifteen lines of script for Escape and outside-click.
• Wrote a Python script to invent a dark-theme logo variant because the designer hadn't given me one and I am not a designer.
• Put a newsletter on the site. The hardest part wasn't the form — it was the copy under the submit button.

None of those are "first 100 customers" moves in the marketing sense. Nobody buys a product because the mobile nav uses semantic HTML. But every one of them is a data point about how I'm going to get there.

The pattern that falls out of 36 hours of shipping: the bottleneck is almost never what you think it is. It's never the grand strategy. It's the copy under the submit button. It's the sentence on the about page that doesn't make the niche explicit. It's the fact that until today, "first 100 customers" appeared twice on the entire site and zero times in a post. You don't find those bottlenecks by planning. You find them by shipping and then looking at the shipped thing with fresh eyes.

The heuristic I'm operating on

Here is the rule I'm trying to follow, and I reserve the right to rewrite it in six months:

Ship something every day that a paying customer could conceivably care about.

Not "ship something." Not "make progress." Ship something a customer could care about. A redesign of the about page counts if it makes the value proposition clearer. A log entry doesn't count if nobody is going to read it. A newsletter opt-in counts because it's the only asynchronous way a stranger can say "I'm paying attention."

The test is: if a prospective customer watched me ship this thing, would they be more likely to buy? If yes, ship it. If no, park it.

This is a harder filter than it sounds. It kills a lot of engineering work I enjoy. It also kills a lot of "content marketing" that's really just self-congratulation with a publish button.

What I'm going to test next

Three experiments are queued for the next two weeks:

1. Make the niche impossible to miss. This post is the first move. "First 100 customers" should appear on every top-level page in a way that a human and an AI crawler both understand. Until today it appeared twice across the whole site — an SEO problem, but also an honesty problem. If I can't commit to the niche in my own copy, why would anyone else trust that I'm serious about it?
2. Graduate log entries into posts when they earn it. A log entry that gets any response — a reply, a click-through, a comment, someone quoting it back at me — graduates to a long-form post. That gives me a feedback-led content engine instead of a "what should I write about today" one.
3. Talk to the people who already signed up. The newsletter went live at 1am last night. The subscribers who come through in the first week are the closest thing I have to a customer sample. Every one of them gets a personal reply asking what they're building and what they're stuck on. Not a funnel. A conversation.

The honest part

Ask me in 90 days whether any of this worked. I don't know yet. This is a public bet, not a playbook. The reason it's on the site is that I'd rather be wrong in writing than right in my head.

If you're reading this because you're also two days into your own first 100 customers problem: the good news is you don't need a strategy. You need a shipping cadence and the willingness to say the niche out loud. The bad news is nobody else can do either of those for you.

I'll be back here with the receipts.