a scalable product company

If you're building a scalable product company your first customers are your best evangelists. They're the ones you need to cultivate and nurture to take your message to a wide audience. Wider than you can connect with without them on side. That's why you have to do things at the start like emailing and talking with them personally. You can't do that when you have 1,000 customers, but you need to do that when you have 3.