There is an odd thing that happens when you scroll far enough down the contacts on your phone. At the top are the people who make up your present life: family, close friends, colleagues, the person you spoke with yesterday. Keep scrolling and eventually you enter something closer to an archaeological record. There is the developer you worked with four years ago, the product manager who left for another company, the person you met at a conference and promised to have coffee with, the former coworker whose number you saved for reasons you no longer remember. Most of us don't think of this collection as an asset. It feels more like digital clutter accumulated through the ordinary process of living and working.
When Luca Bernardino went looking for the first customers for Dawnvox, his customer-feedback SaaS, he did something remarkably simple: he started scrolling. Bernardino was a technical founder who had built the product himself. Dawnvox allowed businesses to collect customer feedback, analyze sentiment and trends, and trigger surveys around particular events. He understood the category because he had encountered similar products at work, but he believed many existing tools were too expensive and too focused on enterprise customers. Small startups needed customer feedback too, and he thought there might be room for something simpler and more affordable.
He also had a useful psychological advantage: he wasn't expecting very much. Bernardino had launched products before, and they had failed. He already had a job he liked and did not want another side project to consume his life, so he gave himself two weeks to build the initial product. It was, in some ways, closer to an experiment than a company. But once the experiment existed, Bernardino encountered the same problem every founder eventually encounters. The software was sitting there waiting to be used. Somewhere in the world were people who might want it. The question was how to connect the two.
His answer began with roughly 50 people whose contact information he already had.
The Network You Don't Think You Have
There is a peculiar mythology surrounding the word network. We tend to imagine something glamorous: venture capitalists, influential founders, executives at large companies, or thousands of followers on LinkedIn. When someone says they have a strong network, we picture a person capable of making one phone call and having doors magically open. By that definition, most people reasonably conclude that they don't have much of a network at all.
Bernardino initially thought the same thing. Then he looked through his phone and realized that years of working in technology had quietly produced something else. He knew developers. He knew product managers. He knew people from previous jobs and people he had encountered along the way. They weren't necessarily powerful people, and most weren't close friends. But some of them worked in exactly the kinds of environments where a customer-feedback product might be useful. A network, he discovered, did not have to mean access to important people. It could simply mean access to relevant people.
He contacted around 50 of them through messages, emails, and calls. He later admitted that the experience felt awkward, which is a detail worth dwelling on because the emotional friction of early distribution is rarely represented on a growth chart. Marketing to strangers can feel impersonal. Marketing to people who know you is different. Someone you worked with three years ago knows who is asking. They know that the polished SaaS homepage belongs to the same person who once sat across from them in a meeting. There is nowhere for the founder to hide behind the brand.
Out of those roughly 50 people, nine signed up. Two became paying customers. Bernardino himself described the result as not particularly amazing. On paper, he was right. Forty-one of the 50 did not even sign up, and only two ultimately paid. But this is one of those moments where percentages obscure what actually happened. Before Bernardino contacted those people, Dawnvox had zero paying customers. Afterward, it had two. Something fundamental had changed.
The important number wasn't two. It was zero.
What Happens When Zero Becomes One
There is a category difference between having no paying customers and having one paying customer that disappears once a company becomes larger. When nobody has paid for your product, almost everything you believe about the business is theoretical. You believe the problem matters. You believe the software solves it. You believe your pricing is reasonable. You believe someone will trust an unknown company enough to put in a credit card number. Those beliefs may be intelligent and carefully researched, but they remain beliefs.
The first customer crosses the boundary between theory and behavior. They don't merely say the product is interesting. They give something up to obtain it. Usually money, but also time, attention, and the inconvenience of learning a new piece of software. This is why the economic value of the first customer is often much smaller than the informational value. A $20 subscription may generate only $20 in revenue, but the person behind it can tell you why they purchased, what nearly stopped them, what they were using before, which feature they care about, and what would cause them to cancel.
Bernardino's first customers therefore gave him something he could not get from market research alone: access to reality. His next move was to expand the experiment. He took essentially the same idea to his LinkedIn network and reported another 30 signups. Then his brother-in-law introduced him to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which allowed him to search more deliberately for people by job title and market. The circle that had begun with the contacts on his phone could now widen beyond people he already knew.
This is where the story is easily misunderstood. You could reduce Bernardino's strategy to "use LinkedIn for customer acquisition," but that misses the interesting part. LinkedIn was not the strategy. LinkedIn was simply the database through which the strategy expanded. The underlying strategy was much more primitive: identify someone who might plausibly have the problem, contact them directly, see what happens, and use what you learn to find the next person.
The Human Algorithm
When someone on Reddit later asked Bernardino whether Sales Navigator allowed him to send messages to prospects in bulk, he explained that he was contacting people one-to-one. Another commenter asked which outbound channel was working best—cold email, calls, or direct messages—and Bernardino said he was relying on DMs. He had experimented with cold email as well, but when someone later asked how it performed, he said it had not worked particularly well and that he had therefore concentrated on LinkedIn.
This sounds almost embarrassingly obvious: one channel worked better, so he spent more time on it. But a surprising amount of startup marketing proceeds in the opposite direction. A founder decides that cold email is supposed to work and then spends three months trying to force it to work. They purchase another automation platform, improve deliverability, generate new sequences with AI, rewrite subject lines, and increase the number of messages being sent. The original hypothesis quietly turns into a commitment.
Bernardino treated the channel as an experiment instead. Cold email did not provide enough evidence, so he moved his attention toward the place that did. The difference is subtle but fundamental. The purpose of a distribution experiment is not to prove that the founder chose the correct strategy. It is to allow reality to choose the strategy.
The one-to-one nature of the outreach mattered too. Modern distribution software is built around scale. If sending ten messages is good, sending 10,000 seems mathematically better. But at the beginning of a company, the founder is not merely searching for conversions. The founder is searching for information. A manually written conversation contains signals that automation tends to erase. Who responded? What did they misunderstand? What question did they ask first? Which description of the product made them interested? Why did someone who seemed perfect decide they didn't need it?
Bernardino had created, without necessarily describing it this way, a human algorithm. Find a relevant person. Contact them. Observe the response. Update the product or pitch. Find another person. Repeat.
Thirty Conversations
Bernardino tried to arrange a call with everyone who signed up. Not everyone wanted one, but by the time he wrote his Reddit account, he estimated that he had spoken face-to-face with about 30 customers. For a large company, 30 conversations would barely qualify as data. For an early-stage founder, 30 conversations can become an entire research department.
The reason is repetition. The first person who complains about a feature may simply have an unusual preference. The second makes the complaint more interesting. By the time six or seven unrelated customers independently describe the same problem, the founder is no longer dealing with an opinion. A pattern has emerged. Bernardino said he listened to these conversations, identified recurring themes, and then built around them. The customers acquired through distribution were now influencing the product that future distribution would sell.
This creates a loop that is easy to miss when marketing and product development are treated as separate departments. The outreach produces a customer. The customer produces a conversation. The conversation reveals a problem. The problem produces a product change. The improved product becomes easier to sell to the next customer. Distribution changes the product, and the changed product alters distribution.
For an early-stage company, the founder who sells the software may therefore learn things the founder who only studies analytics never sees. A dashboard can tell you that 60 percent of users abandoned onboarding on the third screen. A conversation can tell you that the customer didn't understand what the third screen was asking. Analytics reveals behavior; conversation can reveal meaning.
Bernardino then added another question to those calls. He asked customers whether they could think of anyone else who might be interested in the product. He believed some of his subsequent customers came through those referrals. Once again, there was no sophisticated technology behind the tactic. No affiliate dashboard, no referral points, no viral coefficient carefully engineered into the product. There was simply one person asking another person whether they knew somebody.
The Strange Geometry of a Customer
The referral question works because customers do not exist independently from one another. They exist inside social and professional networks. Product managers know other product managers. Developers know developers. Restaurant owners know other restaurant owners. Founders know founders. A customer who fits your ideal customer profile may be connected to dozens of other people who resemble them.
This changes the geometry of customer acquisition. An early customer is not necessarily one endpoint in a funnel. They can be a node.
Decades ago, sociologist Mark Granovetter famously explored what he called the "strength of weak ties." The idea was that acquaintances can sometimes connect us to opportunities our closest relationships cannot, precisely because our closest friends tend to inhabit the same social world we already do. Weak ties reach outward into different circles.
Bernardino's story looks like a small distribution experiment in the same principle. The 50 people in his phone weren't an audience. Most were not close relationships. But they occupied different companies, professional circles, and networks. His LinkedIn connections widened those circles further. Customers created another layer of connections through referrals. Each weak relationship opened access to another cluster of people.
This is why founders who say they "don't have an audience" may be asking the wrong question. An audience and a network are different assets. An audience is one-to-many: you publish something and thousands of people listen. A network is many individual relationships accumulated over time. You might have 500 LinkedIn connections and no meaningful audience whatsoever, yet somewhere inside those 500 connections could be 20 people who experience exactly the problem your product solves.
Distribution does not always have to begin publicly. Sometimes it begins privately.
The Fifty-Percent Discount
Bernardino also gave early users a LAUNCH50 coupon that reduced their first payment by 50 percent. At first glance, this looks like an ordinary promotional tactic, but discounts for unknown products perform a slightly different function than discounts for established ones.
Buying from a well-known company carries relatively little uncertainty. The customer assumes the product works, the company will still exist next month, and someone will answer if something goes wrong. An unknown SaaS company cannot borrow that confidence. The customer is being asked to take a small risk.
A launch discount can be understood as compensation for that uncertainty. The buyer accepts more risk but pays less while doing so. It also solves a second problem that plagues early products: procrastination. A prospect can believe your software is useful and still postpone buying it indefinitely. A temporary offer introduces a reason to decide.
But the discount alone would have been relatively weak without everything surrounding it. The prospect had often encountered Bernardino directly. They could see who built the product. If they signed up, he attempted to speak with them. If they had a problem, the person responsible for the software was close enough to hear about it. The company lacked institutional credibility, so the founder substituted personal accessibility.
That is a form of distribution too.
One Hundred Customers Without a Machine
Over roughly two months, Bernardino says he reached his first 100 customers through a mixture of direct outreach and referrals. There is some ambiguity worth preserving here: his Reddit account does not provide a clean breakdown showing that all 100 were paying subscriptions, so it is safer to treat the milestone as 100 customers/users acquired through the process rather than claim 100 paying accounts. The figures are also self-reported rather than independently verified.
But the mechanics are unusually transparent. He began with approximately 50 contacts. Nine signed up and two paid. His LinkedIn network generated another 30 signups. He expanded his search using Sales Navigator and continued contacting people individually. Early users received a launch discount. He tried to arrange conversations with every person who signed up, ultimately speaking with roughly 30 customers. He used those conversations to identify patterns and change the product, and he asked people whether they knew others who might find it useful.
None of this sounds like what we normally imagine when someone says "distribution strategy." There is no giant launch, no viral video, no SEO engine generating thousands of visitors, and no paid advertising funnel optimized to the third decimal place. It is almost aggressively unsophisticated.
But sophistication and effectiveness are not the same thing.
A distribution system does not become a system when it becomes automated. It becomes a system when the same basic process can produce another customer. Bernardino's process could. Find someone relevant, begin a conversation, get them into the product, learn from them, improve what you're offering, ask for an introduction, and repeat.
That is a machine. It just happens to be made out of people.
Why Founders Look Too Far Away
There is a tendency among entrepreneurs to imagine their market as something distant. Somewhere on the internet are thousands of people who need what we've built, so we immediately begin searching for mechanisms capable of reaching thousands of people. We research advertising, SEO, influencers, Product Hunt, Reddit communities, email databases, affiliates, and content strategies.
Those tools can eventually become enormously important. But Bernardino's story suggests that the first useful market may be much closer than the eventual market.
Before finding a thousand strangers, find ten relevant people who will talk to you.
The point is not that those ten people will scale the company. They won't. The point is that they can tell you what you are actually trying to scale. One will misunderstand your positioning. Another will think the product is too expensive. Someone will tell you that the feature you considered the centerpiece is irrelevant. Someone else will become unusually excited about a feature you almost removed. Another will explain that they solve the same problem with a spreadsheet and see no reason to switch.
And occasionally someone will pay.
That payment is useful. But the clue attached to the payment may be worth more.
The first stage of distribution is therefore not simply the process of collecting customers. It is the process of collecting enough clues to understand why customers appear at all.
Bernardino began with the people already sitting in his phone. He widened the circle to LinkedIn. He followed the channel that responded, abandoned one that didn't, talked to the people who signed up, changed the product based on what they told him, and asked those customers to open the next door.
It is tempting to search this story for the growth hack. Perhaps it was LinkedIn. Perhaps it was Sales Navigator. Perhaps it was the 50 percent coupon or the referral question.
But the more interesting answer is that there wasn't one.
There was simply a founder who shortened the distance between himself and the market until he could see what the market was telling him.
And then he kept going.
Source
This case study is based on the r/SaaS post "How I Got My First 100 Customers" by Reddit user Bernardino_Luca, who identified himself as the founder of Dawnvox.
The founder reported contacting approximately 50 people from his personal network, producing nine signups and two paying customers; receiving another 30 signups through his LinkedIn network; expanding his outreach through LinkedIn Sales Navigator; and reaching the 100-customer milestone in approximately two months through direct outreach and referrals. He also reported attempting to arrange calls with everyone who signed up and having spoken with roughly 30 customers by the time he wrote the post.
In follow-up comments, Bernardino said his LinkedIn messaging was performed one-to-one rather than through mass messaging. He also said cold email had not worked particularly well, leading him to concentrate on LinkedIn DMs. The figures and results described here are self-reported by the founder and have not been independently verified.
Original Reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1cwv4jq/how_i_got_my_first_100_customers/