How to Get Your First 10 Paying Customers With Zero Audience

Most advice about selling a course assumes you already have somewhere to sell it: a newsletter list, a following, an audience that opens your emails. Getting your first customers for an online course with zero audience is a genuinely different problem, not a smaller version of that one, and treating it that way is where most people waste their first month. You're not marketing to people who already trust you. You're finding the handful of people who need exactly what you know before you've ever spoken to them.

The good news is that ten customers is a small number. You don't need reach, you need to be in the right five or six places where someone is already asking the question your course answers, and you need a couple of tactics that work at that scale instead of a content calendar built for an audience you don't have yet.

Where your first buyers actually come from

They come from places where the question is already being asked, not from channels you have to build an audience on first. A subreddit thread, a Slack community's #help channel, a Discord server for people learning the exact thing you teach: these already contain your buyer, mid-question, with their guard down. Building a following is slow because you're creating demand from nothing. Showing up where demand already exists just requires you to be useful in public.

That reframes the job. Instead of "how do I get people to follow me," the question becomes "where is my exact buyer already typing out their problem today," which has a findable, searchable answer.

Answer questions where your buyer is already asking them

Find three to five communities where people ask the question your course answers: a subreddit, a niche Slack or Discord, a forum specific to your topic. Spend time actually answering questions there before you mention anything you've made. Most communities that allow self-promotion at all still apply something like Reddit's 10% rule: no more than roughly one in ten of your posts should be promotional, with the rest genuine participation, and communities that don't state this explicitly often enforce it anyway through moderator judgement or a quiet ban.

This works because a real answer, given for free, is the best demonstration of expertise that exists. It fails, reliably, when people skip the "answer for free" part and go straight to dropping a link. A comment that's just a URL with no context reads as spam whether or not the poster meant it that way, and it gets removed or ignored before anyone reads it. The honest version of this tactic is slower than it sounds: you're answering questions for days or weeks in a community before your course ever comes up, and even then only when someone's specific question is exactly what your course solves. It doesn't scale to hundreds of communities either. Five where you're a genuine, recognised participant beat fifty where you're a stranger with a link.

Cold but relevant outreach

Cold outreach earns its bad reputation from being done badly, not from being a bad idea. The version that gets a reply has three things: something specific about the person you're writing to, a one-line reason you're worth thirty seconds of their time, and a small ask rather than a pitch. "Would it be useful if I sent over the three-step version of this?" gets a different response than "check out my course."

Response rates for cold outreach to genuinely relevant people are commonly cited in the 5 to 15% range, which means sending thirty or forty specific, well-targeted messages, not a hundred generic ones, is enough to start a handful of real conversations. The honest trade-off: this is manual and it doesn't compound. Every message is written for one person, and doing it well for forty people takes real hours you won't get back by reusing a template at scale. It's worth it for exactly the size of the problem you have right now, which is finding ten people, not ten thousand. If you already work with clients directly, this is close to the same outreach you'd do to find paid work as a consultant or coach, aimed at course buyers instead of retainer clients.

Guest appearances in exchange for a mention

A podcast that already talks to your exact buyer, or a newsletter that already reaches them, has spent months or years building the trust you don't have yet. You're not asking to borrow their audience for free: you're offering something they need (a good guest, a useful topic, an interview that makes their show better) in exchange for a mention that puts your course in front of people who are already primed to listen to a recommendation from a source they follow.

This only works when the fit is real. Pitching yourself to every podcast remotely adjacent to your topic, with a generic "I'd love to come on your show" message, gets ignored at the same rate as any other unspecific cold outreach. The version that works names an episode they've already published, references something specific from it, and proposes a genuinely different angle rather than a repeat of what a previous guest already said. One well-matched appearance, with a clear mention of what you've built and where to find it, can outperform weeks of posting into communities where nobody knows you yet, precisely because the audience arrives already trusting the person who introduced you.

Your course page can rank before you have anyone reading it

A course landing page is a real, indexable page the moment it's published, and it can start ranking for specific long-tail searches long before you have a following, because long-tail queries face far less competition than the broad terms bigger sites already own. Nobody is fighting hard for "how to negotiate a raise as a first-time manager at a startup," but plenty of people search something close to that exact phrase, already deciding whether to learn the thing, and a page that answers it directly can rank for it within weeks rather than never.

The mechanism is the same one this site uses for its own blog: a handful of long-tail pages, each answering one specific, narrow question, clustered around a broader topic. Your course description, your landing page copy, and any supporting post you write should each target one specific phrase a real learner would type, not a broad category term that every competitor with ten times your domain age is already ranking for. The honest caveat is timing: search is not fast. A new page typically takes weeks to get indexed and longer to earn a ranking position, so this is the tactic to start on day one precisely because it pays off later, not the one to rely on for this week's sale.

Recruit a couple of affiliates instead of building an audience first

This is the shortcut most zero-audience creators skip past, because it sounds like something you do after you're already established. It isn't. An affiliate doesn't need you to have an audience. They need a course worth recommending to the audience they already have, and if your course solves a real problem for their readers or listeners, the fact that you personally have zero followers is irrelevant to them.

The people worth approaching aren't influencers with huge followings. They're writers, coaches, or community runners already active in your exact topic, whose audience overlaps with your buyer without competing with you directly. If you teach a skill, look for the people who write about adjacent skills, run communities for the same job title, or already get asked the question your course answers and currently have no good answer to point people to. Two or three of these, each reaching even a modest number of the right people, will outproduce months of posting into cold communities where nobody knows your name yet.

Lesso's affiliate programme makes this concrete: it's free to join, requires no minimum audience size, and pays 50% of Lesso's net platform cut on every sale, for as long as the referred creator's account stays active, with a 90-day cookie window. Here's what that means in real numbers. Say your course is priced at $49 as a one-time purchase. You keep 85% of that: $41.65. Stripe takes its processing fee, 3.4% plus $0.30, which comes to $1.97. Lesso's net after that fee is $5.38, and an affiliate who referred that sale earns half of it: $2.69. It's a small number on one sale and it isn't the point. The point is that an affiliate who has ten readers ask them "how do I actually learn this" gets a real answer to give them, and every one of those readers who buys is a sale you didn't have to generate yourself.

The honest trade-off cuts the other way too: if the affiliate's audience isn't a genuine match, or your course page doesn't convert once someone clicks through, you get nothing from the relationship, because the commission is a share of an actual sale, not a fee for the referral itself. That's exactly why recruiting two or three well-matched affiliates beats mass-emailing every creator you can find a contact for. A mismatched affiliate promoting to the wrong audience wastes their credibility and earns you nothing; a matched one is closer to a distribution partner than a marketing channel.

Putting the five together

None of these five tactics needs an audience you don't have, and none of them works if you only try it once. Community answers and cold outreach get you talking to real people this week. A guest appearance or two, pursued only where the fit is genuinely tight, can put your course in front of a pre-trusted audience within a month. Your own landing page, built around one specific long-tail phrase per page, is the slowest of the five and the one you should start today regardless, because it's still compounding a year from now. And two or three well-matched affiliates turn someone else's existing trust into your first sales without you needing to build that trust from scratch.

Ten customers from a mix of these five is a realistic first month. A hundred from any single one of them, especially from posting a link once and waiting, is not. If you're still deciding whether to build the course platform or the audience first, the case for starting with a course over an audience covers that decision directly, and if you want the maths on what those first ten sales are actually worth once you have them, how much you can realistically earn selling a course walks through it with real numbers.