In the past few weeks, I've had a few conversations about launching a product. Two were with first-time founders. The third was with an investment team looking at DTC brands. I had three of these conversations in three weeks. And I noticed some recurring themes keep coming up. I thought I'd pen down these thoughts because over the years, I've had to deal with these questions, and learning first-hand from scaling e-commerce and DTC brands, and taking the hard knocks that come with it, has given me a list of things I'd do differently and things I'd double down on. So here goes, and as always, not investment advice ;)
Can I use social media to get my first 100 customers? My brand isn't ready yet, should I wait? How should I think about revenue milestones? When do I start running ads?
I'm writing this because I'm clearly going to have this conversation again, and because the questions themselves are symptoms of the same condition. I've started calling it the add cheese problem.
If you've cooked for a small child, you know the move. You've made something nutritious. They will not eat it. So you melt cheese on top. Suddenly broccoli is acceptable. You feel like you've solved the problem, but you haven't, you've only made the hard thing edible by hiding it under something easier and more palatable.
Founders do this constantly. The hard thing, in the first six months of a consumer business, is finding out whether anyone actually wants what you've built. It's slow, it's bruising, and there's no way to outsource it. So instead, the founder reaches for the cheese. The cheese is a logo. The cheese is an Instagram grid. The cheese is a deck for investors. The cheese is a friend in performance marketing telling you what your CAC should be. The cheese is a merchant pitch. None of these things are bad in isolation, the same way melted cheese isn't bad. They're just not the thing you were supposed to be doing.
I'd describe it as validation avoidance. (I find the cheese version more memorable, but they describe the same thing.) You have built something. You have not yet found out whether anyone wants it. The finding-out part is hard, so you do something else and call it progress.
The add cheese problem is particularly easy to catch in Singapore, where the polish-to-substance ratio at most founder events runs high, and where a tidy brand can get you further into a fundraising conversation than it should. There's a lot of cheese on offer. It's tempting to keep adding it.
So let me say the thing none of the polished newsletters will: almost everything you're worried about is cheese. The only question that matters in your first six months is whether anyone who isn't your friend will give you money for this thing.
On using social media to get your first 100 customers
No. Don't.
I get why the question is appealing. Singapore consumer founders look at US DTC playbooks where someone hits product-market fit on a viral TikTok, and they think the path is: build product, post content, watch customers arrive. It's a fantasy even in the US, and a much more expensive one here, where Meta CPMs are punishing, the addressable audience is six million people, and most of those people are already being marketed to by every other founder in your category and three big incumbents.
If you can't get your first 100 customers without paid acquisition, you don't have a customer acquisition problem. You have a product problem dressed up as a marketing problem. Paid spend will not fix it. It will just let you spend money faster while learning less.
You cannot learn what you need to learn through a Meta dashboard. You learn it by watching someone hold your product in their hands, hesitate, and decide.
On your brand not being ready
Branding is the most expensive cheese on the menu, and the one founders reach for first.
Here's what nobody tells you when they tell you "branding matters": at the stage you're at, your brand is the least of your problems.
If a customer doesn't understand what your product is, what to do with it, when to use it, or why they should care, they will not remember your brand. They won't remember your name. They certainly won't remember which pastel shade you chose for the packaging. They will walk away, and the visual identity you spent three weeks agonising over will have done precisely nothing for you.
A brand is a memory structure. It only works if there's something to remember. The product has to do the remembering work first.
This doesn't mean throwing aesthetics out the window. It means your time is better spent figuring out whether people will buy a second time than refining the typography on your label. The brand will catch up. It always does, when there's something real underneath it.
On revenue milestones
Founders ask me how to think about revenue targets way too early. They want to know what good first-year revenue looks like, what to put in their deck, what numbers will impress an investor at pre-seed*.
Revenue matters, but it's a thing you chase after you've earned the right to chase it. Early on, revenue is a vanity number. You can hit it by selling at a loss to people who'll never come back. You can hit it by leaning on goodwill from your network. You can hit it by stuffing channel that won't sell through. None of that tells you anything useful about your business.
The honest milestone in your first six months isn't a revenue number. It's something more like: can I get 100 strangers to pay me, come back, and tell someone else? Pay, return, refer. That sequence is the thing you're really hunting for. Revenue is what comes out the other side.
On who your first 100 customers can't be
I want to say this one gently, but the kindest thing I can do is not.
Your first 100 customers cannot be your friends and family.
I know. They want to support you. They'll buy. They'll say lovely things. They might even tell their friends. But they will not tell you the truth, because they love you and they don't want to hurt your feelings, and the feedback you get from them is worse than no feedback at all because it feels like signal.
You need 100 people who don't care about you. People who will leave a bad Google review. People who will return the product. People who will say "this isn't worth $24" to your face. People who will simply not come back, and not tell you why. Those are the people whose behaviour will teach you something.
If your launch plan involves your friends, your sister, and your old colleagues, you're not running a launch. You're running a baby shower with a Stripe account.
On doing things that don't scale
Paul Graham wrote the canonical essay on this and I'm not going to redo it. But the Singapore version is worth spelling out, because most founders here read his essay, nod, and keep doing the wrong thing anyway.
Doing things that don't scale here looks like: standing at a pop-up in Tiong Bahru on a Saturday and explaining your product to fifty people, one at a time, until your voice gives out. Begging a friend who runs a café to put your product on the counter for a month, even though it won't move volume. Going to an event where you don't know anyone, leaving with seven business cards, and following up with all of them. Cold-DMing twenty people on Instagram who fit your customer profile and asking if they'll meet you for coffee. Organising a tasting in your apartment for ten strangers. Carrying boxes of stock in the back of a Grab.
This is the part founders skip because it feels small, slow, and embarrassing. It is small, slow, and embarrassing. That's the point. The shame is doing useful work. It's separating the founders who want to build a business from the ones who wanted the idea of building a business.
The two clearest examples in Singapore consumer right now are Moom and Prefer, and they're two different flavours of the same principle.
Moom went all-in on community. They didn't try to scale a women's wellness brand through Meta ads. They built a base of real customers through their monthly Moom Walk, in-person events, and the unglamorous work (but they really made it look fun on the outside!) of being in the room with their community for years before opening their first physical store at Great World City. Community first, retail footprint after.
Prefer's founders went all in on relentless founder-led hustle as they built in public. Countless pop-ups and tastings to get the product into people's mouths, plus sharing all their learnings on LinkedIn, posting wins, failures, half-ready prototypes, sending samples while getting themselves ready to go commercial. They've been explicit about it: the convention is to build in silence until perfect, and they've done the opposite. The result is a brand that food industry partners actively reach out to, because they've been watching them build for years.
Both sets of founders put themselves in front of customers, repeatedly, over a long period, before they had any right to be polished about it.
One caution though, because founders read this kind of advice and over-rotate on it. Beg and borrow distribution is the right instinct early on, but distribution only works if you can deliver. I've watched founders land a wholesale deal or a chain listing they weren't operationally ready for, and it broke them. Stockouts. Quality slips. Returns. Buyers who never called again because their first 90 days with the brand were a mess. If you can't reliably make, pack, and ship at the volume your distribution promises, getting more distribution is the worst thing that can happen to you. Scale your operations and your distribution in lockstep, not one ahead of the other.
The Singapore-specific texture here is that we're a small market with high density. The corollary nobody talks about is that every single one of those 100 customers can be reached by you, in person, on foot, in a single quarter. There is no other market in the world where the founder of a consumer brand can plausibly meet every early customer face-to-face. That's not a constraint. That's an unfair advantage. Use it.
The cure for the add cheese problem is to put down the cheese and sit with the discomfort of feeding the kid the actual vegetable. In your first six months, the work is not strategic, not deck-worthy, not photographable. It's being there, in person, with your product, watching strangers decide.
Everything else (the brand, the social, the deck, the retailer pitch, the ad budget) is cheese. It's downstream of getting the hard part right.
The thing about validation avoidance is that it always feels like progress while you're doing it. The deck looks good. The Instagram grid is coming together. A retailer took your call. None of those things are bad. They're just not what you needed to be doing, and the longer you spend on them, the longer you delay the only feedback that actually matters.
And here's the unromantic part nobody likes to say. You'll mostly get it wrong the first time. The first version of your product won't quite land. The first pitch you give at a pop-up will be clumsy. The first batch of feedback will be confusing or contradictory. That's the work. You try, you listen, you tweak, you try again. You go back to the same customers and ask what changed. You go to new customers and ask what they see that the first ones missed. You do this every week, for months, while everyone around you is asking when you're going to "scale" or "raise" or "launch properly."
There is no shortcut around this part, and there is no proxy for it either. You can't outsource it to your operator, your agency or your intern. As the founder, you have to be the one in the room. The signal degrades by the time it reaches you secondhand, and you'll make the wrong call based on a sanitised version of what your customers actually said.
The founders I've watched build real things for the Singapore consumer all share this trait. They kept showing up. The ones who didn't, mostly stopped before they figured it out.
* Not always applicable. There is a bigger discussion on whether your product should be a VC fundable one, or not. Which is probably another essay by itself.