How to Get Your First 100 Customers as a Creator
How to sell digital products without an audience: three channels in order, week by week, with the real math on outreach and a $5 a day ad test.
To get your first 100 customers without an audience, skip the hunt for a viral post and run three channels you control, in order: personal messages to people who already know you, direct outreach to strangers who have publicly described the problem you solve, then a small paid test. Capture every buyer's email so each sale compounds.
I shipped my first product to a list of zero, and "build your audience first" is circular advice when you need sales to fund the time an audience takes. So this is the sequence, with the math at each step. When you are ready to take payments, shopspace gives you a storefront, lead magnets and Instagram comment-to-DM on the Creator plan, and takes 0% of each sale for a flat $19 a month billed yearly.
Why going viral is a bad plan for your first 100
Viral is an outcome, not a strategy. Planning around it means planning around luck.
The math is worse than it looks. Say a video gets 50,000 views and 0.1% of viewers buy a $29 product. That is 50 customers, once, and you cannot repeat it on demand. Now say you message 200 people who already know you and 5% buy. That is 10 customers this week, no algorithm involved, and you can do it again next week with a different 200.
For your first 100 you want channels you can repeat and adjust. Viral is neither.
Channel 1: Message the people who already know you
Before you post anything publicly, open your contacts: LinkedIn connections, X followers, old colleagues, the Slack and Discord communities you already belong to. These people know you are a real person, which is most of the trust a first purchase needs.
Write a personal, specific message to 50 to 100 of them. Not a broadcast. Something that is clearly about them:
"Hey [name], I just launched a [template, guide or course] on [specific topic]. Given what you do at [company], I thought it might be useful. Here's the link. If it's not for you, I'd love to know why."
Plan with a conservative assumption. If one in ten buys, 50 messages bring five customers. Not glamorous, but those five give you the feedback that shapes everything after. The last line of the message matters: the people who say no tell you what to fix.
Every buyer here is also your first subscriber. Start the list now, even at five people, because the list is the one asset that compounds. How to build an email list as a creator covers the setup.
Channel 2: Reach strangers who already have the problem
This is the channel most creators skip because it feels uncomfortable. Find 30 to 40 people who have publicly described the exact pain your product solves: Reddit threads, X searches, LinkedIn posts, Facebook groups. Someone who just posted "I have no idea how to price my templates" is a warm lead you haven't met yet.
The message has three parts:
- Reference their situation. "Saw your post about pricing your templates."
- Offer the product as an answer, not a pitch. "I made a pricing worksheet for exactly this. Happy to send the link if it helps."
- Give them an easy out. "No pressure either way."
Read each community's rules first, and never paste the same message into fifty threads. This works because it is personal. Plan for most messages to go unanswered: if one in four replies and half of those buy, 40 messages bring five customers.
Make every post collect emails while you do this
While you do outreach, your public posts can do quiet work too. The simplest loop on Instagram: end a post with "comment GUIDE and I'll send it to you," then let an automation reply to every commenter by DM with a link to a lead magnet, a free download that asks for an email in return. The post turns commenters into subscribers you can follow up with later.
On shopspace this is part of the Creator plan: Instagram auto-DM on comment with keyword triggers, a lead magnet product type for the download, and email sequences that follow up after someone joins. How Instagram comment-to-DM works walks through the setup.
Channel 3: A small paid test
Once warm outreach runs dry, usually somewhere between customer 20 and 30, run a small paid test. The goal is not to scale. It is to learn whether strangers will buy.
- $5 to $10 a day on Meta or Pinterest ads, aimed at one specific interest.
- One landing page with one offer, one price and one button.
- A price that can carry the ad cost.
That last point is where most first tests fail, so do the math before you spend. Say clicks cost $1.50 and 2% of visitors buy. You need 50 clicks per sale, so each customer costs $75 in ads. On a $49 product you lose $26 every time someone buys. Get the page to convert 4% and the cost per customer drops to $37.50, which leaves a margin. The levers are price and page, and digital product pricing strategies covers the first one. If you want to retarget people who visited but did not buy, the Meta pixel and Conversions API are on shopspace's Pro plan.
How to sequence it, week by week
Do not run all three at once.
| Week | Channel | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 2 | Messages to people who know you | Customers 1 to 20 |
| 3 to 4 | Outreach to strangers with the problem | Customers 21 to 50 |
| 5 to 6 | Paid test at $5 to $10 a day | Customers 51 to 80 |
| 7 to 8 | Fix the page, then ask buyers to share | Customers 81 to 100 |
In weeks 7 and 8, email your first 80 buyers and ask each one to forward the product to one person who would find it useful. If one in ten of those people buys, that is eight more. You are close.
The goals are targets, not promises. What matters is that every week you know which channel you are testing and what it produced.
What your first sales cost you in platform fees
When revenue is small, platform pricing matters more than it seems. There are two models: no monthly fee and a percentage of each sale, or a flat monthly price and 0% per sale. Card processing (Stripe or PayPal) applies on every platform, so it is left out to keep the comparison fair. The 10% below is an illustrative cut, not any one platform's rate.
| Monthly sales | Platform taking 10% per sale | You keep | shopspace Creator ($19 a month billed yearly, 0% per sale) | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $100 | $10 | $90 | $19 | $81 |
| $500 | $50 | $450 | $19 | $481 |
| $2,000 | $200 | $1,800 | $19 | $1,981 |
Be honest about where you are. Below about $190 a month in sales, a 10% cut costs less than $19 flat, and a no-monthly-fee platform is the cheaper place to start. Above it, the flat price keeps more, and the gap grows with every sale.
By the time you reach 100 customers at $49, a 10% cut has taken $490 you never see. Start a 7-day free trial of shopspace and keep it: 0% per sale, flat $19 a month billed yearly.
The number that matters more than followers
Landing page conversion rate. At this stage followers are noise. If 1,000 people see your page and 0.5% buy, that is five sales. Get the same page to 3% and it is 30 sales from the same traffic, with no new followers at all.
The parts of a page that converts are learnable: a specific headline, a clear outcome, proof from your first buyers and a checkout with no detours. Increase storefront conversion rates goes through each one. Track visitors, purchases and revenue. Not likes, not reach.
The verdict
You do not need an audience to reach 100 customers. You need a product that solves a specific problem, a hundred or so personal messages, a page that converts, and an email list that keeps every buyer. Start with the people who know you this week, add strangers next, and pay for traffic only once the page has shown it can sell.
When you are ready to put the product live, set up your store on shopspace with lead magnets, email sequences and Instagram comment-to-DM included on the Creator plan. A card is required at signup, nothing is charged for 7 days, and if you cancel inside the trial you pay nothing.