What did Lenny Rachitsky's study of first B2B customers find?
It found that every company it covered got its first customers from some mix of three sources: the founders' personal network, the places customers already spent time, and press. Lenny Rachitsky, who writes Lenny's Newsletter, published the piece, How today's fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers, on 7 July 2020.
Method. Rachitsky writes that the post took more than 40 hours of going through old interviews, finding warm introductions to founders and sending direct messages, and that some of the stories were being shared publicly for the first time. Most stories are quotes from founders or early employees, and some come from earlier published sources.
Sample. Figma plus what the post calls twenty other hyper-growth B2B businesses. By our count it tells first-customer stories from 23 companies, including Shopify, Stripe, Airtable, Slack, Salesforce, Gusto and Segment. Rachitsky chose the first ten customers because that is when a company is scrappiest and doing things that don't scale.
Findings, as the post states them:
- Only three sourcing strategies account for every B2B company's very early growth, against seven in Rachitsky's earlier piece on consumer apps.
- Almost every B2B business both taps its personal network and goes to the places its potential customers spend time. The real question, Rachitsky writes, is "how far your own network will take you before you move on".
- A strong personal network is a big advantage in B2B, and you can build one by bringing on a connector investor or joining an incubator such as Y Combinator.
- The network matters even more if you have to sell the product rather than grow bottom-up, likely because early customers need a reason to trust you.
- Press is rarely the way to get started.
It is a collection of stories. The post doesn't count how many companies used each strategy or give percentages, and it tells only the stories of companies that went on to grow fast.
How did B2B startups use their personal networks?
They asked the people they already knew; Gusto's founders told everyone they knew. Rachitsky's key question for this strategy is who in your network could be a potential customer. The table covers six of the twelve companies the post files under it, with what each source says.
| Company | Where the first customers came from | What they did, per the post |
|---|---|---|
| Slack | Friends at other companies | CEO Stewart Butterfield says the team begged and cajoled friends to try it, started with maybe six to ten companies, and shared it with progressively larger groups. |
| Gusto | Friends starting businesses in California, mostly startups from its Y Combinator batch | Co-founder Tomer London says the three founders told everyone they knew what they were building and asked if they knew someone who would try it. |
| Stripe | Friends and incubator peers | Y Combinator's Paul Graham describes the Collison installation: when someone agreed to try Stripe, the Collison brothers asked for their laptop and set them up on the spot. |
| Carta | Its angel investors and their other portfolio founders | Former CPO Joshua Merrill says investor Andy Palmer brought it into Tamr early on. |
| Okta | Former IT colleagues, alumni networks and angel investors' LinkedIn networks | Co-founder Frederic Kerrest set a target of 15 to 18 new IT contacts at different companies to talk to every month for the first six months. |
| Intercom | People the founders knew from previous businesses | Co-founder Des Traynor emailed people all day, every day, entirely by hand, and says it would still be done by hand today. |
Two more stories from this group carry warnings. Salesforce's first customer, Blue Martini Software, was a company CEO Marc Benioff had invested in, and Benioff knew the call to its founder was asking a favour, while also offering something the founder really needed. Coda's first alpha customer, a startup run by a former YouTube colleague of CEO Shishir Mehrotra, used the product for a couple of months and then churned in one day. The list of fixes it asked for led to a much better product, and Mehrotra's lesson is that lost customers may give the best feedback.
How did they find customers where they already were?
They picked a place their buyers already gathered and showed up there, online or in person. Rachitsky's key question here is who your target customers are and where they spend time, online or offline.
- Figma, on Twitter. CEO Dylan Field says the team first talked with practically every designer they knew. In search of more feedback, they turned to Twitter to work out who the most influential designers were. That list was filtered to people Field found personally inspiring, and Field cold emailed or found introductions to many of them to show them Figma. They kept those designers updated as the product changed, and by launch many of them amplified it.
- Segment, on Hacker News. CEO Peter Reinhardt says Segment launched as an open-source library on Hacker News, and its first customers were people there, mostly small companies looking for better ways to add analytics tracking.
- Airtable and Dropbox, also on Hacker News. An anonymous early Airtable employee says friends and family came first, then the beta was posted on Hacker News. Dropbox's demo video was posted on Hacker News in April 2007.
- Plaid, in developer communities. CEO Zach Perret says Plaid became its own first customer, then grew mostly by word of mouth among developers and product managers, with lots of time spent on forums, IRC, meetups and accelerators.
- Shopify and New Relic, in the Ruby on Rails community. CEO Tobi Lütke says Rails developers asked to license the code behind SnowDevil, an online snowboard store, which led to Shopify. It launched to a waitlist of a few thousand emails in 2006. New Relic started in late 2007, aimed squarely at Rails.
- Square, door to door. Cameron Walters of Square's founding team says the people Square first brought in through a personal network didn't really create repeat usage or become real customers. Local merchants the team could walk to, such as Lillybelle Flowers and Sightglass Coffee, became its first everyday customers.
Does press help you get your first B2B customers?
Rarely, according to the study. "Getting press is rarely the way to get started," Rachitsky writes, and only three stories sit under press. Each had something unusual to pitch:
- Canva: CEO Melanie Perkins says high-profile investors brought some press for the stealth startup, and 50,000 people signed up to its waiting list.
- Twilio: launched on TechCrunch in private beta in November 2008. A couple of days earlier, angel investor Dave McClure had used the service to rickroll TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, which led to the company's first press hit.
- Slack: a press blitz built largely on the team's earlier experience. 8,000 people asked for an invitation on the first day, and 15,000 had two weeks later.
Prominent investors, a stunt aimed at TechCrunch, and a team's prior experience are hard for a two-to-five-person team to copy. Our advice is to leave press until you have customers worth writing about, and spend the first weeks on the two strategies that Rachitsky says almost every B2B business combines.
What if your network is small?
Build one on purpose, which is what Rachitsky's takeaways suggest: bring on a connector investor or join an incubator such as Y Combinator. Several companies in the study got early customers through an incubator or investors. Gusto's first customers were mostly startups from its Y Combinator batch, and Amplitude's came from the Y Combinator network: other companies in its cohort that had questions existing tools couldn't answer.
Okta shows the manual version. Kerrest didn't stop at people known personally. The list grew through alumni networks on LinkedIn and through combing the LinkedIn networks of Okta's angel investors, against a fixed monthly target of new conversations. Keenan Rice, an early employee and VP Strategic Alliances at Looker, adds a third route: customers' and investors' networks, opened up by making early customers successful and asking them to share that success.
If you have few warm contacts, the second strategy matters more. Pick the community where your buyers already talk and become useful there before you ask for anything. Our guide to finding leads on LinkedIn without Sales Navigator covers building that list for free.
A two-week sprint to find your first ten B2B customers
Work your network in week one, then one place your customers gather in week two. The tasks borrow from the companies above; the targets are our suggestions for a one-to-five-person team.
| Day | Strategy | Task, and whose playbook it follows | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Network | Answer Rachitsky's first question: who in your network could be a customer? List friends, former colleagues, investors and incubator peers, and mark who could buy or knows buyers. | One ranked list |
| 2 | Network | Ask each investor or adviser for founders in their portfolio who fit; Carta reached sister portfolio founders through its investors. | Introduction requests sent |
| 3 to 4 | Network | Tell everyone on the list what you're building and ask if they know someone who would try it, as Gusto's founders did. | Every contact asked once |
| 5 | Network | Book calls with everyone who said yes and set them up live on the call, Collison-installation style. | First users set up |
| 6 | Where customers are | Answer the second question: where do your buyers spend time? Pick one place: a subreddit, a Slack group, Hacker News, a LinkedIn or X niche, a local meetup. | One place chosen |
| 7 to 8 | Where customers are | List 30 respected people in that place, as Figma did on Twitter, then email each one or get introduced, and ask for feedback. | 30 personal emails |
| 9 | Where customers are | Share something useful there, within the community's rules: a free tool, a template or data, as Segment did with its open-source library. | One post or launch |
| 10 | Review | Count conversations, users set up and feedback. Set a monthly target for new conversations, as Okta did (15 to 18 a month). | Next month's target |
After day 10, keep it going with a daily habit; our 30-minute founder-led sales routine picks up where this sprint ends. If week two's place is LinkedIn or X, Siela's AI SDR can track keywords and competitors there, so people who post about them or engage with them become leads.
Frequently asked questions
Where do most B2B startups find their first ten customers?
In Lenny Rachitsky's July 2020 collection of first-customer stories from more than 20 fast-growing B2B companies, the sources were the founders' personal networks, the places customers already spent time, and press. Rachitsky writes that almost every B2B business combines the first two. Press covered only three of the stories, and Rachitsky says it is rarely the way to get started.
How did Figma find its first users?
According to CEO Dylan Field, quoted in Lenny's Newsletter, the team first talked with practically every designer they knew. Then they used Twitter to find the most influential designers. Field filtered the list to personally inspiring designers and cold emailed or found introductions to many of them to show them Figma, and the team kept them updated until launch.
How did Segment get its first customers?
Segment launched as an open-source library on Hacker News, and CEO Peter Reinhardt says it took off there almost overnight. Its first customers were the people on Hacker News, mostly small companies whose founders wanted better ways to add analytics tracking to their web and mobile apps.
What is the Collison installation?
It is the term Y Combinator uses, as Paul Graham tells it, for how Stripe's founders, the Collison brothers, signed up early users. When someone agreed to try Stripe, they didn't promise to send a link later. They asked for the person's laptop and set Stripe up on the spot.
Can you get first B2B customers without a strong network?
Rachitsky's study calls a strong personal network a big advantage in B2B, but says you can build one by bringing on a connector investor or joining an incubator such as Y Combinator. Okta also widened its reach through alumni networks and by combing the LinkedIn networks of its angel investors.
How many prospects did Okta talk to in its first months?
Frederic Kerrest, Okta's COO and co-founder, is quoted in Rachitsky's post saying the target was 15 to 18 new IT contacts at different companies each month for the first six months, and that they probably hit 85% or more of it. The contacts came from former colleagues, alumni networks and angel investors' LinkedIn networks.
Sources
- Lenny's Newsletter: How today's fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers (published 7 Jul 2020; checked 20 Oct 2026)