How to scale after first paying customer?

Posted by machopanko 1 hour ago

Hey guys,

Super excited to have experienced my first taste of success with my first paying customer after two weeks of launching.

Built this while finishing my thesis and working contract gigs. Saved 18k, spent six months shipping features and fixing bugs, and honestly wasn’t sure anyone would use it. So seeing that first customer felt unreal.

Now what? I'm extremely happy about this but at the same time i would like a reality check and I would like to learn how to scale my product. and not got trapped by this founders high that I'm feeling. So my question is, how do i expand from here?

Feel free to give some feedback, thoughts, comments.

Landing Page (explanation) -> https://haxiom.io

Product Page (Application) -> https://app.haxiom.io

Tech Stack:

Backend: ElysiaJS + Axum

Frontend: SolidJS + Rust WASM markdown renderer

Database: PostgreSQL + PgVector

Analytics database: Turso CDN: Cloudflare

LLM/embeddings: Gemini

Infra: DigitalOcean

Comments

Comment by sebg 42 minutes ago

Congratulations on your first internet dollar! So many people try and never make it as far as you have!

Off of the top of my head, a few things to think about as you start / continue this journey:

- find out how the original (only) customer found you and see who else is around - ask for a referral from the original customer - figure out what else you can sell to the original customer

Realistically, it depends on what you mean by "expand". Are you looking to build a venture-fundable business, something that grows into a job replacement for you, or something that helps pay for weekend activities?

Depending on what your aim is the "what do I do next" activities will be drastically different.

So what type of expansion are you looking to do?