How to get (and keep) your first 100 customers (#2)
An 18,000-word playbook drawn from interviews with 7 of MENA’s top post-Series A founders, tackling how to build trust before brand equity, validate before users, retain in transient markets, and know when to follow data – and when to trust your gut.
Jamie Lane & Zoe O Dwyer
May 14, 2025
🔒 Want to know how MENA’s top founders secured (and retained) their first 100 customers?
We’ve spent months building this 18,000-word playbook – drawn from in-depth interviews with 7 of MENA’s most effective growth-stage founders.
The goal? To democratise access to the kind of hard-won insight usually reserved for boardrooms, backchannels, and closed-door dinners – now distilled into a six-step, actionable framework.
Inside, you’ll find the exact strategies these founders used to win their first 100 customers – plus a growing archive of deeply reported pieces on everything from underwriting customers with no credit history, to scaling Arabic-first AI, to building biotech on the edge of regulation.
