Y COMBINATOR'S ACTUAL PLAYBOOK FOR GETTING YOUR FIRST CUSTOMERS IS NOT WHAT MOST FOUNDERS EXPECT. Get your first customer by any means necessary. Even manual work that could never scale to 100 customers, let alone 1,000. Launch the mediocre version immediately. The only way to actually understand what customers need is to put something in front of them and watch what breaks. Then do things that don't scale: - Recruit users one at a time. - Talk to them directly. - Build the product improvement engine that compounds 5% better every single week. The founders who wait for the perfect product before launching are solving the wrong problem. The ones who launch fast and talk to users directly are the ones YC has backed into companies worth $800 billion combined.(CyrilXBT)