Ask HN: How long did it take to get your first customer?

Do you mean...

How long did it take to get your first customer?

-or-

How long did your first customer keep paying?

I am assuming the first.

The first time around, it was the day I opened the site, since the site was a store and I knew exactly where to get good free advertising for what I was selling.

These days, the apps I build are a lot more complex and targeted to very specific business use cases... and I'm lucky to get a couple signups in a month, despite nonstop Google/Bing PPC advertising.

From launch? Roughly an hour.

A couple days. I made about $16 before putting things on hold because I was too busy and because I needed to come back with a more scalable model.

But let me tell you, that first $16 is addicting.

From pivot or from first iteration? If the former, a couple of weeks. If the latter, 5 months.

I'm still working on that.

With BugMuncher it was less than a day , and Hacker News is directly responsible.

I posted a Show HN, someone at The Next Web saw that and wrote and article about BugMuncher. On the back of that article I had 5 customers with in a day! Of which I think 4 are still paying customers :)

About 2 weeks, my startup was targeted to students at a specific location.

Not much marketing was done; besides facebook and flyer distribution.