How to Get Customers When Nobody Has Heard of You

Your first ten do not come from a funnel. They come from you.

I lived in lower Manhattan on September 11th. Every client I had was in those towers.

The detail I have never been able to shake is the shoes. Shoes all over the street, because people kept running after their shoes came off.

In the weeks after, I watched companies try to rebuild from nothing. Servers gone. Offices gone. No idea how to get back online. So I started helping. Free. Nights and weekends, on top of my job at Microsoft. Then I left Microsoft to do it full time, and that is the day Henson Group was born, out of a one-bedroom apartment, with me as the first and only employee for nine months.

Nobody had heard of me. I had no brand, no case studies, no website worth the name, and no funnel.

What I had was a reason to knock on the door.

Nobody is searching for you, so stop waiting to be found

Every founder I advise at zero customers is doing some version of the same thing. Polishing the site. Rewriting the positioning. Setting up automation for a list that does not exist.

That work feels like progress because it looks like what real companies do. Real companies do it because they already have demand to route. You do not have demand yet. You have to go get it with your hands.

Go where your people already are

Your first customers are somewhere right now, complaining about the exact problem you solve, in a room you are not in.

Find the room. Get in it. Be useful in it for a month before you ever mention what you are building. This is slow and it works, which is why most founders skip it for something fast that does not.

Talk like a person

The fastest way to lose a first customer is to sound like a company that does not exist yet.

No "we are pleased to introduce." No feature list. Say what you saw, why you built it, and ask if they want it. Founders think they need to sound bigger. At zero, sounding small is the advantage.

Offer what only a small hungry company can

You cannot beat an incumbent on features, trust, or price forever. You can beat them on things they structurally cannot do.

You can give a customer direct access to the founder. You can build the one thing they need this week. You can answer at 11pm. You can do it free until it works.

I gave away IT migrations. Completely free, to companies that had just lost everything. Some of them got back on their feet and hired me to build and run their infrastructure. That is how the client list started. We kept doing free migrations for years afterward, as a standing tradition, because it was the thing that built the company.

Make it impossible to lose by saying yes

An unknown company is a risk, and risk is what kills your first deals, not price.

Take the risk off the table. Free pilot. Month to month. You do the setup. Cancel anytime and keep the work. Every sentence you add that reduces their downside converts better than every sentence you add about your product.

None of this scales, and that is the point

Doing unscalable things until you have ten customers is not a failure of strategy. It is the strategy.

Those first ten are not revenue. Ten customers will not change your life. What they do is turn "some founder with an idea" into "a real company that other people can believe in." They give you proof, references, and the pattern you will eventually build a system on top of.

That apartment company went from one employee to four to twelve, then global. Number one Azure CSP. Inc. 5000 at a 2,809 percent growth rate. Seventy million in ARR, zero outside funding, and eventually a merger into a hundred and twenty million dollar company.

It started with free work for people who had never heard of me.

Do the things that do not scale. Then, and only then, build the machine.