Referrals need people who have already worked with you. Reviews need people who have already worked with you. Search visibility accumulates over months and rewards businesses with a history. Case studies need cases. The advice that works in year two is unavailable in week two, and reading it while you have nobody is discouraging in a way that is rarely acknowledged.
So the first ten come from somewhere else entirely, and it is worth being honest about where.
They come from people who already know you
Not from marketing. From your existing life: former colleagues, former clients from whatever you did before, people you know socially, people who know what you are competent at because they have watched you be competent at it.
That is uncomfortable for a lot of people, which is why it gets skipped in favour of building a website. A website is a legitimate thing to build and it will not produce your first customer. Somebody who already trusts you will.
The website is for the person who has heard about you and is checking whether you are real. Somebody has to tell them about you first, and in month one that somebody is you.
Say it plainly and say it specifically
The thing that stops this working is vagueness, not reluctance.
Telling twenty people that you have started a business produces sympathy and no leads, because nobody can act on it. Telling twenty people that you help restaurants in the valley get their bookkeeping in order, and that you have space for two more this month, produces referrals from people who know a restaurant owner.
The test is whether somebody could repeat what you said to a third party without you present. If they would have to paraphrase, and would get it slightly wrong, you have not given them anything to pass along.
Specificity feels like it narrows your options and it does the opposite at this stage. A general description reaches nobody in particular. A specific one gets forwarded.
The price question in month one
You will be tempted to work cheaply to get started, and there is a version of that which is reasonable and a version which does lasting damage.
The reasonable version is a deliberate, time limited, explicitly stated exception. You are doing this at a reduced rate because you want the case study, or because it is the first project of this kind, and both parties know the normal price and know this is not it. That is a trade rather than a discount.
The damaging version is quoting low because you are nervous, without naming it as an exception. That sets your actual price, attracts the customers most sensitive to it, and makes raising it later a conversation with every existing client rather than a decision about new ones.
If you take work below your rate, say what the rate is while you do it.
Take four things from every early customer
Each of the first ten is worth considerably more than the invoice, and most of that value is not collected because nobody asks at the time.
Ask for a review while the work is fresh and the result is visible, not three months later when they would have to reconstruct how they felt. Ask whether they know somebody with the same problem, at the moment they say they are pleased. Ask what almost stopped them from hiring you, which is the single most useful sentence you will get all year. And write down where they came from, in one column, because six months of that record is the only reliable information you will have about what actually works.
The invoice is one number. The review that takes your listing from two to three is worth more, because at that count each one moves you materially. The referral produces a customer you spent nothing to acquire. The objection they name tells you what to address on your pricing page, which affects everybody who visits afterward. Four things, all available for the cost of asking, and all unavailable in a month when nobody thinks to ask.
Then it changes
Somewhere around ten customers the situation is different, and the change is not gradual.
You have reviews, so somebody looking you up finds evidence rather than an empty profile. You have people who can refer you, and some of them will without being asked. You have a description of what you do that has been tested on real prospects rather than written at a desk. You know what you actually charge and which work is profitable.
At that point the standard advice becomes available, because the standard advice assumes the position you have now reached. Search work, content, partnerships, and a referral habit all start functioning, and they compound in a way that direct outreach does not.
The part worth remembering
The first ten are the hardest and they are not a marketing problem. They are a matter of telling people specifically what you do, repeatedly, to individuals rather than to an audience, and accepting that this is slower and more personal than any of the digital work.
Everything on this site about search, content, and referral systems applies afterward. None of it applies first. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something that works for a business further along than yours.