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How to Get Your First Customers | Startup School

Y Combinator · 674.1K views · 2022-12-29 · 22:54

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Overview

A Startup School talk by YC partner and former Airbnb growth head Gustaf Alstromer on how startups get their first customers. It covers doing things that don't scale, founders learning sales, the sales funnel, and charging your first customer.

On Hacker News

Commenters recommend the whole talk as practical, tactical advice for early customer acquisition and outbound sales.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2023–2025

Topics

Startups & entrepreneurshipProduct, marketing & salesLaunch, SEO and repeatable acquisitionFounder communities and accelerators
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startupssalesgrowthy combinatorb2blaunchfirst customerstartup school

What people said

PUSH_AX · 2023-07 · Strong recommendation

I watched this just yesterday [VIDEO] The entire video is really good actually I recommend watching the entire thing.

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jppope · 2025-12 · Recommendation

I spent the first chunk of my career doing sales (2nd half spent in software engineering). Theres a lot of good books out there but you're going to find a lot of the direct advice to be non-applicable (as I'm sure you can pick up from the comments). Most of the Literature out there is directed at professional sales people, who for the most part are non-technical, have the backing of a marketing org, and are also different than a founder. Anyway, heres a reading list. Most of the trainings I've been a part of were custom built to the org or market, and frankly I learned more from Rules of the Game by Neil Strauss. I did enjoy "the Wedge" training by Randy Schwantz... that one you should do the video not the book. It also sounds like you could use some marketing stuff so I'll throw some of that in there too. In no particular order, and please keep in mind this is off the top of my head: * Influence (the classic) * YC videos (e.g. [LINK] , [LINK] , [VIDEO] , etc) * Thinking Fast and Slow * Purple Cow * Clayton Christensen stuff * Spin Selling * Challenger Sale * Guerrilla marketing (for the mental muscle) * Jeffrey Gitomer (basic but useful) * Lean Startup (for positioning) * Charisma Myth * Minimalist Entrepreneur (bits and pieces) * The presentation secrets of steve jobs (just a good book on presentations, framed around Steve Jobs to sell more) For what its worth this question comes up fairly often. It seems like technical people would like a "technical people" guide on how to

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O__________O · 2023-01 · Reference

Not sure if this is YC company, but YC has been using this recently on their YouTube Startup School videos; for example, look at the description of this video: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Y Combinator, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

Indie Picks uses video metadata for classification. The description above is an uploader excerpt, not an independent review.

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Indie Picks: Independently collected SaaS and AI product videos, organized by a founder handbook. Topics and relevance are metadata-indexed; full-video editorial review has not been completed. Descriptions are uploader excerpts where available.

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