What’s the Fastest Way to Get Feedback from Your First 10 Customers?

Your first 10 customers are not just revenue. They are the most honest mirror your product will ever have. But most founders treat feedback as a checkbox. Send a survey, collect some star ratings, move on. The problem? The most valuable insights never make it into a form field. They live in pauses, complaints, workarounds, and the things customers say when they feel heard, not interrogated.

The Short Answer

Get on a call with them. Manual, one-on-one interactions, preferably voice or video calls, are the fastest way to get feedback that actually means something. Surveys are easy. Calls are revealing.

Why This Matters

When you rely on surveys or in-app feedback forms for your first 10 customers, something dangerous happens: the feedback gets filtered. Customers self-edit. They give you the polished version of what they think. They skip the messy, half-formed complaints that would have pointed you toward your next big product decision.

Surveys capture what people are willing to write down. Calls capture what they are willing to say. And those are very different things.

On a call, you hear hesitation. You catch the moment someone says “it’s fine, but…” and you can ask “tell me more about that but.” That follow-up is where the gold is. The first objection a customer voices on a call often points directly to your product roadmap. In a survey? That objection gets reduced to a 3-star rating with no context.

Open-ended questions work best in conversation, not in text fields. Asking “What problems were you hoping this would solve?” on a call invites a story. In a survey, it invites a one-liner. And when you combine conversation with observation, asking customers to share their screen or walk you through how they actually use the product, you discover that people do things very differently than they describe.

How This Plays Out

Here is a real example. While building an internal WhatsApp-based product for a company, the team sent out surveys to gather user feedback. The responses came back neat, short, and largely unhelpful. Standard stuff. A few feature requests, some generic “it’s good” comments.

Then the team got on calls with the same users.

The difference was immediate. On calls, users talked about friction points they had never mentioned in surveys. They described workarounds they had built. They revealed confusion about features that, on paper, should have been intuitive. The surveys had filtered out the very insights that mattered most. The unstructured, raw, sometimes contradictory observations that only come out in real conversation.

The lesson was clear: surveys told the team what users were willing to type. Calls told them what users were actually experiencing. That gap is where product decisions live.

The Nuance

This advice applies almost universally to your first 10 customers, but there is one exception: when you are capturing feedback on a very narrow subset of the product. If you need a quick validation on a specific feature toggle or a UI change, a targeted micro-survey can work fine. You do not need a 20-minute call to ask “did you notice the new thing on Screen X?”

But for anything that touches the broader experience, onboarding, core workflows, value perception, calls win every time. Yes, they are slower. Yes, they are harder to schedule. But the depth of insight per interaction is incomparably higher. Ten calls will teach you more than 200 survey responses.

What To Do This Week

Here is your action plan, and the timing matters.

Do not reach out too early. If your customer signed up yesterday and has only poked around for five minutes, a feedback call is premature. You will get surface-level impressions, not real feedback.

Instead:

1. Identify which of your first 10 customers have used roughly 80% of your core features. Check your analytics or just ask.
2. Reach out personally. Not through an automated email. A direct message or personal email works best.
3. Schedule 15 to 20 minute calls at times that work for them. Be flexible.
4. On the call, ask open-ended questions: “What problems were you hoping this would solve?” “What workaround were you using before?” “What would ideal look like?”
5. Listen more than you talk. When they mention a complaint, resist the urge to explain. Instead, say: “Tell me more about that.”

By the end of the week, even 3 or 4 of these calls will give you more actionable direction than any survey ever could.

The fastest path to product clarity is not a better form. It is a better conversation.