The weekly question, the unscalable move and the small gathering that turns strangers into your first users. There’s a particular silence early founders know well. When the product works, goes live and no one pays attention. 

Technical founders feel this hardest. The instinct is to keep building (more features, more polish) when the actual problem is that the product has no address. You built something good and forgot to give anyone a way to find it.

Sabeeha Banubhai is the founder of Jack Studios, a Joburg studio she grew from a university side hustle into a custom software practice that’s helped 150+ tech founders launch. She’s watched dozens of good products die quietly, and she’s blunt about why.

Early on, the goal isn’t a thousand users. It’s the next two. Then the next five. The founders who get traction do unscalable things to find real people, one handful at a time — instead of waiting for a launch that markets itself.

“In the early stages, do things that don’t scale. Stop worrying about a thousand people when you have two users; figure out how to find the next two, then the next five.”

One question, asked weekly, closes the awareness gap faster than any growth hack: How would someone realistically discover us this week?

Not in theory. This week. The honest answer is usually “they wouldn’t,” which is the point. The discomfort of answering it forces you to do something about distribution instead of disappearing back into the build.

Awareness doesn’t have to be digital, and it doesn’t have to be broad. If you know precisely who needs your product, you almost certainly already know some of them, or know someone who does.

Sabeeha’s example: An optometrist building a digital health record. Niche product, not on social media, tiny market. But he knows exactly who his users are (other optometrists), and he already knows some who know others. The narrowness is the advantage, not the obstacle.

Do something that doesn’t scale. Get ten of the right people in a room, even just for snacks and an hour. Frame it honestly: here’s a problem I have, you have it too, let’s figure it out together.

“People buy into a product they help build. Make it an event worth attending, listen to what they currently use, and give them a mock account to play with and break.”

Early on, their feedback and usage are worth far more than their money. Get them using it, watch where they trip, and let them feel ownership of what it becomes.

A user who gets real value from your product tells other people — without being asked. That’s your cheapest, warmest channel, and it only switches on once a few people are genuinely getting value.

Sabeeha’s line: a user who saves two hours will tell others: “this saved me time so I can go play padel.” That word-of-mouth is what turns the next two users into the next twenty. You don’t need a thousand clients to start. You need the ten you’d most enjoy working with, getting enough value to talk.

You stop waiting for a launch moment that was never coming, and start building the small, real base that every scaled company began with. Ten users who get value and talk beat a thousand who signed up and vanished.

It takes a week to ask the question and an afternoon to host the room. It gets you the first users that everything else compounds from.

This is one piece of Your Product Works. So Why Is No One Buying? Sabeeha’s full masterclass inside the Founder Collab that gives a complete diagnostic for why products that work still don’t sell:

You’ll also get access to 40+ other masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.

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