Fantastic Early Customers and Where to Find Them

In 1942, four friends rented a garage in Girgaon, Mumbai, for 75 rupees a month and started making paint. The equipment was coal furnaces and their own hands. Resin cooked over open flame, pigment ground and stirred until it held. They called it The Asian Oil & Paint Company, a name picked, almost at random, from a telephone directory.

While they could duct-tape paint equipment in their garage, the problem every new company faces hit them quickly: who do you sell to?

Bombay had plenty of paint dealers, but every one of them was already spoken for. Shalimar, ICI, Goodlass Walls, British Paints — the established brands had the city locked up. A garage startup in Girgaon wasn’t getting shelf space next to them.

Instead of jostling with the big brands in the heart of the city, they went to Sangli, a small town with a few thousand people in southern Maharashtra, and opened their first dealership. Then the next small town, and the next. They built a network of 130 small shopkeepers, sold paint in small, affordable packs instead of industrial tins, and went so deep into semi-urban India that by the time the multinationals noticed, it was too late. Within 25 years, Asian Paints, as the startup is now known, became the largest paint company in India.

80 years later, in a coworking space in Jaipur, two young founders faced a version of the same problem.

They had built a payment gateway that any small business could integrate in minutes, not the months that incumbents required. The product was ready. Now the question was: how do you find these small businesses?

They started by walking up to other founders in the coworking space and saying: try us. The first customer was a tiny e‑commerce company selling kids’ clothing. Then they showed up in every WhatsApp and Facebook startup group they could find: Bangalore Startups, Mumbai Startups, Pune Startups; not to pitch, but to answer questions.

The founders were Harshil and Shashank, and the startup Razorpay, now a $7.5 billion company.

Finding early customers is one of the hardest things a founder does. The advice in all blogs and podcasts is fine (talk to users, find your ICP, do things that don’t scale), but it doesn’t tell you what a founder actually did on a Tuesday morning when nobody knew their name.

In this edition of Field Notes, we bring you the anecsights (anecdotes + insights) on finding early customers from Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar (Razorpay), Mohit Yadav (Minimalist), Tarun Dua (E2E Networks), and Deep Kalra and Rajesh Magow (MakeMyTrip), from Season 4 of the Blume Podcast.

Let’s start with Minimalist.

Your first customers will design your brand (if you let them)

Mohit and Rahul Yadav launched Minimalist with the hypothesis that their customers would be young, living in a metro area, aged 18 – 22, and in a higher-income group. The kind of customer every D2C skincare brand targets.

When the brand went live in 2020, they handled every customer interaction themselves. Every email, SMS, DM, comment. 10 AM to 6 PM in the office, then 7 PM to midnight from home, replying to everything. For two months straight.

What they found surprised them.

A handful of customers mentioned they liked that Minimalist listed pH levels on the website. When Mohit saw 5 – 10 such comments, he thought: why not print it on the bottle itself?

“If it is printed, better be like fully, fully prepared about it,” he says. ​“People can ask why this is 3.6, not 3.8. And you should have your answers because I cannot go back and change it tomorrow.”

Customers pushed further. Why does your vitamin C cost what it costs? Mohit realized the answer required more transparency, not a lower price. Ethyl Ascorbic acid from different suppliers ranges from ₹8,000 to ₹35,000 depending on purity. So they started printing the exact molecule name and the supplier name on the packaging. Each time customers asked for more transparency, the founders said yes.

The Amazon sales data surprised them. 50% of orders came from Tier‑3 cities and small towns. Some orders had addresses like ​“exact opposite to this temple on third gully or fourth gully.” Their starting hypothesis was wrong.

“There is an income disparity but knowledge parity,” Mohit says. ​“A person from a low-income background in a Tier‑3 city or village can follow a dermat in the US, know exactly what should go into skincare.”

They also made a deliberate call on which products to lead with. ​“Our first year was all about need-to-have, hardcore problem-based products.” A moisturizer shows no visible difference after 5 – 10 uses. But a serum for acne or pigmentation? ​“If you see a visible change after two weeks, you trust it much more. You’ll come back and buy the non-core products too.”

The result: ₹100 crore in revenue within 8 months. Minimalist was acquired by Hindustan Unilever for ₹2,955 crore. All of it built on what two brothers learned by replying to DMs at midnight.

Build for customers nobody wants. Their love will do the rest.

In 2014, every incumbent payment gateway served one type of customer: enterprises. For small businesses, getting onboarded to accept online payments was like chewing glass: four years of bank statements, photos of the office, and weeks of waiting. 

Razorpay decided to go after these customers. On paper, a terrible commercial decision. Shashank, co-founder, doesn’t pretend otherwise: ​“These are the smallest of customers, so the incumbents are not paying attention. With these folks, there’s no revenue, no volume.”

“But there was a lot of customer love and word of mouth that we could generate.”

Their first customers came from the coworking space they worked out of in Jaipur. Harshil walked up to other founders and asked them to use their payment gateway. The first to go live was a tiny e‑commerce company selling kids’ clothing. (They’re still on Razorpay today.)

The next wave came from media coverage when they got into Y Combinator. Every tech publication in India covered the story, leading to 300 signups in a day without spending a rupee on ads. But Shashank knew it wouldn’t last. ​“It was not something that was repeatable. We focused on — okay, how do we get the next set of customers?”

They found the answer in WhatsApp and Facebook groups. Bangalore Startups, Mumbai Startups, Pune Startups, and the IIT Roorkee alumni group. Whenever anyone posted about payments, Harshil would reply personally. The CEO, answering a stranger’s question about payment gateways. Within months, he didn’t have to. ​“Once they went live with us, they loved us so much that anyone else who posted about payment gateways — we didn’t have to respond,” Harshil says. ​“Somebody else would say: try this.”

But finding customers was only half of it. Keeping them meant showing up when things went wrong, even if it wasn’t your fault. 

Early on, a partner gateway they’d been relying on saw the YC news, got nervous about competition, and cut Razorpay off without warning. Suddenly, no customer could process payments.

“We told everyone that we have to call every single customer and explain what has happened,” Harshil recalls. ​“No matter how many times they abuse us, we will pick up the phones.”

They didn’t miss a call. Fixed everything within a week. Some of the customers who cursed them out that week are still on Razorpay today.

That instinct hasn’t faded at 2,400 employees. ​“Even today, my team jokes that if there is a customer complaint on Razorpay on Twitter, I post into our internal group before my team can identify it,” Harshil says. ​“And sometimes the team says: how do you get this first?”

Your best customer is your biggest billboard

E2E Networks is today India’s largest independent GPU cloud provider. It’s publicly listed with a market cap of over ₹5,000 crore, partners with NVIDIA on its latest GPUs, and in November 2024, Larsen & Toubro backed it with a 21% stake.

None of that was remotely imaginable when Tarun Dua, co-founder and CEO, landed his first customer.

It was an ex-colleague. The pitch was simple, the terms simpler: a ₹30,000 check with one condition — ​“By this date, I need a server in India or you can return the check.” CRN number one. Still a customer 15 – 16 years later.

The second customer found E2E by accident and set an unexpected flywheel in motion. 

Someone running web workloads in the US, called Tarun, looking for a different Tarun entirely. Wrong number. Most founders would have corrected the mistake and hung up. Tarun looked up the caller, found he ran a bunch of websites, called him back the next morning, and got a same-day check. The condition: ​“I’ll take your servers as long as you can deliver 99% uptime.”

A competitor of that customer, called Tarun, asked: Why are their websites so fast? 

“One, we’re hardworking people,” Tarun told him. ​“We’ve fine-tuned their servers. We know Linux. We know Webscale. We know load balancing. The other part is the servers are in India.” Local hosting meant lower latency, something nobody else was offering at the time.

That competitor turned out to be Amit Jain from CarDekho. ​“Then they became an inflection customer for us,” Tarun says. CarDekho was visible in the startup community. When your infrastructure makes a well-known product noticeably faster, people in the market ask why. Flipkart called because CarDekho was on E2E. 

Then someone called because Flipkart was on E2E. Each marquee customer became the next customer’s reason to pick up the phone.

The chain kept going, and soon E2E had 15 odd Indian unicorns running on its servers. For the first six to seven years, E2E had no salespeople. 100%+ growth every year, all word of mouth, with the existing logos bringing in new logos.

When nobody’s buying, change the buyer

MakeMyTrip launched in 2000, right at the peak of the dotcom boom. Deep Kalra’s thesis was simple: ​“What’s being done on calls will move to the internet fast.” And travel was the obvious candidate. You never met your travel agent. You spoke to them on the phone, they gave you options, ran faxes, and waited for your check. All of that could move online.

But this was India in 2000. Fewer than a million credit cards in a country of a billion people. Dial-up internet that crawled when it worked at all.

MakeMyTrip built for three markets: inbound, outbound, and domestic Indian travel. Inbound worked. Domestic and outbound? People visited the site, browsed flights, compared prices. Then closed the tab and called their travel agent.

“They were using us as a frame of reference, compare, go to the travel agent,” Deep Kalra says.

Rajesh Magow, co-founder, observes: ​“If the market is not ready, market is not ready, no matter what you do. You will have to stop. If you just keep pushing the paddle there, you are not going to get the results.”

They stopped pushing.

“So we said, okay, let us stop burning money here and focus only on the NRI market,” Deep says. ​“Smaller but better $1,000 ticket.”

It meant abandoning two of the three markets they’d built for. They’d envisioned MakeMyTrip as the portal for travel to, from, and within India. Now they were retreating to just one slice of it. But NRIs living in America already trusted e‑commerce. They didn’t need to be convinced that buying a ticket online was safe.

Then they did something counterintuitive. They built a call center alongside the website. 1 – 800-India-10. The website let customers research and compare. The phone let them book at a cheaper price. Airlines wouldn’t ​“bounce” on phone-quoted prices the way they would on publicly listed web prices. A $1,000 – 1,200 ticket yielded a clean $100 profit per booking.

The pivot worked. Conversion rates improved. Repeat customers brought down acquisition costs. And the NRI market turned out to be resilient in ways they hadn’t expected. Indians in America kept booking tickets through recessions, through 9 – 11. Weddings, aging parents, and emergencies, family obligations don’t pause.

For four years, MakeMyTrip kept its head down while every competing online travel startup from 2000 disappeared. By 2005, they were the only game in town.

Deep credits this turnaround to their obsession with metrics. ​“You have to listen to the market. You have to see your numbers… If you are not looking at conversion, you are missing the beat at every step of the funnel.”

How obsessive? ​“We would measure every hour today versus the same hour last week on the same day.” 

From 2005 to 2010, MakeMyTrip grew 25X. Today it is a NASDAQ-listed company worth nearly $13 billion.