How to get your first 10 SaaS users without fake traction
Names you can spell. Jobs they finished. No waitlist theatre.
SaaSInvader Editorial · Oct 18, 2026 · 3 min read
Ten is a small enough number that you cannot hide behind software. If you cannot list ten people who finished the job, you do not have traction. You have a site.
This is not a growth loop. It is a week of uncomfortable, specific asks. The Indie Hackers archive is full of versions of the same week. Treat those posts as field notes, not proof that Reddit “converts at 9%.”
Write the ten as people, not personas
A persona is a slide. A person has an email. Before you post anywhere, write ten rows: name or handle, where you found them, the job they already do by hand, the date you will follow up. If the table is empty, you are still designing.
A row that is allowed to exist: “Priya — #invoicing thread on 12 Oct — still pastes CSV into a template every Friday — follow up Thursday.” A row that is not: “SMB finance teams in North America.” The first one can receive a message. The second one cannot. Do not treat the example name as a customer of mine; it is a worksheet shape. Fill it with people you can actually spell.
Where the ten actually are
They are not “on the internet.” They are in a thread complaining about the workaround, in a customer Slack, in your sent mail from a past job, in a catalog of shipped tools adjacent to yours. Max Schubert’s
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A SaaS launch checklist you can finish before you go public
Before you ask for users, confirm the page can be opened, the sentence matches the screen, and you have a way to hear the first ten replies. Everything else can wait.
SaaSInvader Editorial · Oct 18, 2026 · 3 min read
