This looks naive but where do I approach them to build the network?

Are there any events where they might hang out in? If you live in a major city, Lu.ma is a good place to check, but also Meetup as well. How about conferences or social events?

I never had 10 customers . Hence, the question.

One or two people who paid I had are looking for agency type solution and can't provide substantial feedback.

I think the point they were trying to make is that all of this is much easier if you get customers before you start building anything. Then you know you're actually building something that people will pay for instead of possibly just wasting time on something no one wants.

Customers in SaaS for video marketing. Primarily targeted towards tech companies.

When we started our voice AI company 8 years ago, the first customers came from doing a ton of free consulting work. We'd reach out to companies in target industries and offer to analyze their customer service call data for free, then show them what voice AI could do with their actual data.

It felt like being taken advantage of sometimes, honestly. We'd spend weeks building custom demos and proof-of-concepts without any guaranteed return. But when you don't have a network in the industry, you have to do that kind of work to prove your credibility.

The breakthrough was realizing we weren't just giving away free work - we were learning what these companies actually needed vs what we thought they needed. Those free consulting projects taught us more about product-market fit than any survey could have.

By the time we had 10 real paying customers, we'd probably done free work for 30+ companies. The key was setting boundaries about when to transition from free to paid. You have to judge that timing yourself based on the relationship and how much value you're providing.