How do you get first 10 customers?

Customers in what space? Enterprise bears minimal resemblance to Pre-K Education, which bears minimal resemblance to Small Business, which bears minimal resemblance to ...

Where did you find the first 10 people you talked to when making sure you were building a product people want in the first place? Call them back. Have them try it. If they like, it them tell other people.

"have much of a network." There is your answer, basically walking up to them and talking to them.

Not sure what your audience is but have you tried actually trying to sell to these people in person? I think the vulnerability of it is exactly why people respond to it more.

My experience: I've had a service called HRM.monster, the domain is up for renewal on the 19th of this month, and am thinking on letting it lapse, for a name change - it is off a product called HRMgo, I have had 0 users since the purchase a year ago, and spent $750 for it from a Flippa ad thinking I hit the money spot, found out it was $69 package. I tried to build building relationships with various people to gain their trust in providing services for them for a bridge to their clientele (not compete, but add additional support services), a win win with the company and their clientele. No one wanted to talk with me. I heard comments later-on that said I wasn't made for being in the business.

While my experience may be different than yours, there are other factors at play in with God having todo something with it. There is no greater thing that word of mouth.

I been trying for over a year and too chose to use email as letting clients know I existed, I didn't get anything in return. I would try talking to influencers who you think would benefit by a simple DM or email; you might want to look into LinkedIn's higher tier services for contacts, and services such as audience lab if you have the ability of spending $500/mo you can get a few contact lists, to send additional emails/follow-ups, and building relationships through that or advertising on Facebook, there's also vibe.co, and caasie.co... budget minded services for getting your name and caasie allows targeting specific towards your industry through video ads... where as vibe puts you on billboards.

While I don't have all the answers, having something different than the crowd is also a sell, like creating a service that answers a work problem that you see could turn into a serivce, and that also is viable for other people en masse.

It is really an inundation of services out there as you've stated. The ones with financial backing win, because of the marketing factor, and the NEED. The best thing is to think of a project that women need, as they're the hard core consumer. I can't think of buying myself anything except food in the last 10 years, the occasional new pair of shoes, and slacks/shirt. I've used the same computer for the last 10 years, and its virtually my life rn...

It's best to join a chamber and sell your services to on what you can do vs your product, you sound pretty sound in the AI generated apps, so you've got programming ideas, you could essentially steal someones idea, unless you end up getting requested to sign an NDA with said person.

Sounds like you got a people problem though ;-)

Getting your sales channel right is its own part of the work. LinkedIn is not the only platform. You can sell office SaaS on TikTok too. There's the ad platforms. There's funky stuff like Tumblr and Pinterest. Discord, Facebook groups, etc. Try tools like Blotato which lets you build a following in multiple platforms.

PMF isn't getting to 10 customers - you simply don't have it right now. That doesn't mean the product needs a change, it could mean you're targeting the wrong market. Or you could be selling the wrong part of your product.

You should absolutely not rely on network too, and it's one of the more inefficient ways to market.