The power of one paying customer and four places to find them

Whole Foods started with one natural food shop in Texas.

Amazon began selling books out of Jeff Bezos’ garage.

ASOS built momentum by serving a small group of loyal followers who loved its celebrity-inspired products.

What do they all have in common? They started small. All three initially focused on serving a small niche before expanding into some of the world’s largest companies.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a huge user base to grow a digital product. In fact, chasing too many customers at once can be expensive and demoralising. You risk spreading yourself thin, constantly changing direction, and pleasing no one.

The smarter approach is to focus on customer validation. Start with one person who is willing to exchange money for your service.

That single transaction proves there is value in what you’re offering. From there, you can build outwards, finding others with the same needs and gradually growing momentum.

Detective work: four places to find your one paying customer

Serving one tiny niche really well is the leanest way to grow a product or turn a service into a real digital offering. By concentrating on a handful of early adopters, you not only secure revenue but also gather insights that shape your website, marketing, and sales approach.

This detective work is about more than just winning customers. It’s about customer research, uncovering similarities across early adopters, and using that feedback to sharpen your product direction.

The genius of thinking micro is that small interest groups often have similar wants and needs.

Ask yourself:

• What are their common interests or frustrations?
• Do they share certain behaviours or values?
• Do they all like a type of TV?
• Do they all love takeaway curry?

By piecing together these insights, you create a vivid picture of the next group of customers you can serve. Here are four practical places to begin your search.

Option 1 – Go Local

Go after one vertical, provide one service, do it in one location, and do that really well.

If you’re targeting a specific industry segment, start by looking around you. Local markets are often overlooked, yet they’re the best place to test ideas quickly and cheaply.

For example, if you’re building a fitness product, visit your local gym. Chat with members, observe their routines, and listen carefully to their challenges. The goal isn’t to pitch your product immediately but to explore opportunities for customer validation.

Avoid leading questions. If you ask open-ended questions about people’s problems, you’ll get far more honest insights. For further guidance, check out our podcast on user research.

And if there aren’t obvious local interest groups for your product? Don’t worry, the internet offers an even bigger field to explore.

Option 2 – Use online forums

Online forums provide a goldmine of niche insights. Communities already exist around almost every interest imaginable, and they can reveal patterns that help your product development team focus on what matters most.

Start with Meetup, which not only surfaces interest groups but also enables face-to-face interactions. LinkedIn groups, Facebook communities, and specialist forums can also give you access to conversations where potential customers are already sharing their needs and frustrations.

A simple Google search can help you uncover forums specific to your niche. Start broad with the platform, then narrow by location. Focusing on smaller, localised subsets allows you to test ideas and achieve quicker customer validation without spreading yourself too thin.

Option 4 – Stalk your competitors

One of the simplest ways to find your first customer is by looking at who’s already engaging with your competitors.

On Twitter, users constantly interact with brands. By observing these conversations, you can learn about common frustrations, desires, and areas where competitors fall short.

You can also check competitors’ social media followers and reach out directly. This might sound bold, but it’s one of the fastest ways to connect with people who are already interested in similar products.

And if you’re worried about starting with just one customer, remember: customer validation doesn’t require hundreds of sign-ups. It only takes one paying user to prove your product has value.

Congratulations! You’ve found them. Now what?

Locating a potential customer is only the first step. The next challenge is converting interest into revenue. Here are some lean ways to turn a prospect into your very first paying customer:

Launch a ‘Wizard of Oz’ product

If you don’t have a fully formed product, it’s not the end of the world.

Why not get an MVP together and improve as you go? It’s a faster and smarter way to start collecting money.

Build a snazzy prototype

Nothing beats a simple prototype if you want to sell and demo your idea. In just 24 hours, we can help you through the barriers towards having something you can put in front of your end user.

Drive traffic to a landing page

With tools like Squarespace, it’s easy to build a one-off landing page for little cost. Send some ad traffic to the page, add a ‘buy’ button and test the results.

Start offline

With an offline service, you can deal directly with the customer.

Take manual payments, like our pals Headliner, who ran their service as a phone-based agency, learning about their customers before they built their tech platform.

Pitch to a room

Whatever you do, get out and talk about it.

Host workshops, offer yourself up as a speaker, or attend networking events and collect sign ups.

Run a webinar

Share expertise in real time and ask for manual payments as follow-ups. It’s simple, scalable, and effective for early-stage customer validation.

Look in your customer’s fridge

The more you know about your customer, the more likely you are to be able to offer something of value.

The Lean Startup famously shares a story about a startup for foodies. These guys actually visited their customers’ homes and examined everything in their fridges so they could email them relevant recipes. Extreme? Maybe. Effective? Definitely.

Conclusion

Think of marketing as a laboratory. Every experiment, from online forums to Ads Manager tests, gives you data to guide your decisions. Customer validation isn’t about guessing what people want but testing, iterating, and building based on real feedback.

By focusing on a single paying customer, you can uncover insights that guide your product development team, inform your marketing, and help shape a product that people will genuinely love. From there, you’ll scale naturally, one validated step at a time.

And if you’d like support in uncovering those insights, check out how to conduct expert user research.

Good luck!

One paying customer can shape the future of your product.

Let’s talk about finding, validating, and scaling with the right audience.