Fundamentals · 8 min read

7 Acquisition Experiments You Need To Try

how to get your first customers (and what actually works)

by Maya · @buildwithmaya

Untitled draft

Acquisition strategies: how to get your first customers (and what actually works)


If you can market your product in one place, you can market it anywhere.

This is the message I have been seeing over and over again.

The specific channel matters less than the underlying skill: knowing who your customer is, what they care about, and how to put the right message in front of them.

p.s: I mention a number of products in this article, none of them are sponsored, they are tools I have been using myself and paid for.

Before any channel: get the foundation right

Most acquisition advice skips the part that actually determines whether any of it works.

The channel is the last decision, not the first. Before you pick where to acquire customers, you need three things locked in:

1. A clear problem and pain you're solving

You need a specific pain a specific person has right now. The sharper your problem statement, the easier every downstream decision gets. Right now, I have been experimenting with messaging for my new product, Build Mode, but for IdeaPanda, the messaging is starting to come around.

2. Messaging that matches the pain

Your messaging should make your customer feel seen before it sells them anything. If someone reads your landing page and thinks "this is exactly what I've been dealing with", that's good messaging. If they think "cool, but is this for me?", you've already lost them. Every channel you test is really testing whether your message resonates. A channel that "doesn't work" is usually messaging that doesn't work. For IdeaPanda and Build Mode, I scan my landing page with a product called LandingBoost and really see where there could be conversion of messaging leaks. This is one way I try to experiment to get the communication of the pain right.

3. A defined target audience

The tighter your audience definition, the more your message will land. You can find them, write to them, and speak their language. Broad audiences produce broad messaging, and broad messaging converts nobody.

Get these three right first. Everything in the rest of this piece amplifies them.

The channels (and what actually works on each)

1. SEO / Content (doing currently)

The slowest channel to start. The best channel long-term.

A piece of content you write today can bring you customers for three years. Nothing else compounds like this.

What works:

  • Target keywords your customer is already searching (not keywords about your product, keywords about their problem)

  • Write posts that actually solve the problem

  • In 2026, optimize for AI citations too. Write content that answers specific questions directly. I do this by using DataFast to track my traffic and see my visibility in the AI tools and bot tracking.

What doesn't work:

  • Publishing thin content and hoping for the best

  • Writing for search engines instead of people

  • Expecting results in the first three months

Timeline: 6–18 months to compound. I personally am only starting to see some results now, but I know this will compound.

2. Cold outreach (DMs, email, LinkedIn) (doing currently)

The most underrated channel for early-stage founders. You can go from zero to paying customers in a week with nothing but a list and a sharp message.

What works:

  • Hyper-specific targeting. "Founders of B2B SaaS companies doing $1M–$5M ARR" will outperform "small business owners" every time.

  • One clear ask. Not "I'd love to connect and explore synergies." Ask for the call, the demo, or the reply.

  • Personalization that shows you actually looked at their business. One sentence. That's all it takes.

What doesn't work:

  • Spray and pray. Volume without targeting is just noise.

  • Following up six times in four days.

  • Leading with features instead of their problem.

A good cold email is two paragraphs.

Sentence one: prove you know their problem.
Sentence two: make the ask.

3. Communities (Reddit, Discord, Slack groups, Indie Hackers, X) (doing currently)

This is where trust is built. Communities are the highest-trust acquisition channel that most founders do wrong.

Most founders go in and pitch immediately. The community notices. The thread dies.

What works:

  • Be genuinely useful for weeks before you mention your product

  • Answer questions with real insight, not surface-level advice

  • When you do share your product, frame it around the problem you solved, not the features you built

The rule: if your post would still be valuable without the product mention, it's probably fine. If the product mention is the whole point, hold off.

I have experienced personally people trusting my product because they have seen me active on X and sharing my journey openly.

4. Paid ads (doing currently)

Paid ads are often the first thing founders try and the first thing that disappoints them.

The reason: ads don't fix a bad product or a bad message. They amplify what's already there. If your organic conversion is weak, paid acquisition will make it expensive and still weak.

What works:

  • Run ads after you've validated the message organically

  • Start small and narrow. See what converts.

  • Retargeting before cold audiences.

  • Start with people who've already touched your product.

What doesn't work:

  • Spending $5K on ads before you've talked to 50 customers

  • Running 10 ad variations at once with no hypothesis

  • Optimizing for impressions or clicks instead of actual conversions

Paid is a multiplier. Make sure there's something worth multiplying first. This is something I tried out personally by using my X money boost. While it lead to a ton of impressions, it did not result in very many clicks.

5. Partnerships and collabs (pending experiment)

One warm intro to the right audience beats 10,000 cold impressions.

Partnerships work because you're borrowing trusted distribution. Someone's audience already trusts them. When they vouch for you, that trust transfers.

What works:

  • Find creators, newsletters, and products whose audience overlaps yours exactly.

  • Offer something genuinely valuable before asking for distribution (a guest post, a collab product, a revenue share)

  • Keep the ask small at first. A mention is easier to say yes to than a full partnership.

What doesn't work:

  • "Partnership" emails that are really just asking for free promotion

  • Approaching someone with a much larger audience than yours with nothing to offer

  • One-and-done collabs. The best partnerships compound over time.

6. Build in public / personal brand (main channel)

Building in public has become a real acquisition channel. Sharing your numbers, your failures, your learnings, it builds an audience of people who root for you. However, things have changed slightly so you need to be a little more careful about what you post.

BUT what I have noticed is people who root for you buy from you.

What works:

  • Share the real stuff. Metrics, mistakes, what you got wrong. Most founders share the wins. The ones who share the losses build the most trust.

  • Pick one platform and go deep. Don't spread thin across five.

  • Make your posts useful even to people who aren't your customers. The reach gets you in front of people who are.

    I think i recently had a competitor buy the product from me, so you just need to ignore all that comes with building in public and keep going because an audience that supports you keeps going.

7. Do things that don't scale (your first 100 customers) (doing now)

Before any of the above: do things that don't scale.

DM people personally. Show up at the conference. Send the handwritten note. Help someone for free, no strings attached.

Your first 100 customers should be acquired manually. You learn more from 100 handcrafted conversations than from 10,000 ad impressions. And those 100 customers become your referral engine, your case studies, and your product roadmap.

Scale kills learning.

A note on positioning and pivots

Most acquisition frameworks skip this: the channel doesn't matter if the positioning is wrong.

Positioning is the answer to: "Why this product, for this person, right now?"

If your positioning is fuzzy, if someone reads your landing page and can't immediately tell who this is for, no acquisition channel will save you. You'll get clicks and no conversions. You'll get signups and no retention. You'll keep thinking the channel is wrong when the message is wrong.

Getting positioning right usually requires a pivot.

Not a full product pivot. A messaging pivot. "We're an AI tool for productivity" becomes "We help solopreneurs reclaim 10 hours a week by automating their admin." Same product. Completely different conversion rate.

The signal that you need a positioning pivot:

  • High traffic, low conversion

  • Good retention for some users, instant churn for others

  • You struggle to explain what you do in one sentence

The fix is shorter than you think. Talk to the customers who stayed and ask them what they tell other people your product does. They'll hand you your positioning.

The meta-principle

All of this comes back to the same thing.

If you can market your product in one place, really market it, with a sharp message to the right person, you've learned the skill. The channel is just the surface. The underlying skill is knowing who you're talking to and what they need to hear.

That skill transfers everywhere.

Pick one channel. Go deep. When it's working, expand.

Most founders spread across five channels and wonder why none of them convert. One channel done well beats five channels done halfway, every time.

Start there.