Guide: How to get your first 10 customers

A lot of us have a misconception that a great idea will drive a lot of customers and everything will move smoothly after launching or better yet, our idea is so great that it will become "viral".

As some have already said, the idea is just a fraction of the start up, execution is all, usually what happens is:

• We realize our great idea is met mostly with indiference at the beginning, because it was just our asumptions.
• We need to figure out how to communicate it and sell it, meaning what to say so people get interested in trying it.
• We realize that we actually need an audience to reliably get traffic and keep getting people to try it.
• We need to keep talking to users, who sometimes can't figure out where the button is (that big, red button found when scrolling down).
• We need to keep modifing our idea week after week with the Actual needs of our users.
• We need to keep jumping hurdles every freakin day to keep moving on.
• Lots of more things to do non-stop.
• We realize that after all you've done, Apple wants a whoping 30% cut of your in-app sales.

In the SaaS world, problems are the name of the game.

Getting started

Let's assume there’s sufficient evidence that there’s real demand or a real problem, and you want to see if you can make some money going after it. Great! You’ll likely ask the next question: “How do I get my first 10 customers?”

To answer that, you’ll need two things:

1. an offer, and
2. potential customers

Wait… what about the product? Hold off on that for now. Typically, I recommend not to build anything, or at least not software. I’ll touch more on that below.

Let’s start with the offer. An offer is a promise you sell to customers about solving their problems.

In most cases, you don’t even need to build a product to sell your promise. To be clear, I’m not saying that you should lie - if you won’t be able to solve the problem, then don’t promise that you can.

Our goal right now isn’t to figure out if you can build it, it’s to figure out if you can sell it.

Here’s why I love offers more than products: they help de-risk two of the three fundamental challenges all startups face:

1. market risk, and
2. channel risk

(Product risk is the third, if you were wondering.)

Market risk is asking the question “Does anyone actually want or need this?” and channel risk asks the question “Can you acquire customers — ideally profitably — through marketing channels?”

In my experience, I’ve seen significantly more startups fail due to market and channel issues than product issues.

Now that you’ve got your offer, let’s talk to potential customers.

It is crucial that you show your offer to the right people, otherwise, the data you get back won’t be accurate.

There’s a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this.

Most people will ask themselves “who do I think has this problem” and then relentlessly hunt those people down - this is a fine start, but we can do better.

What I recommend is to ask yourself this, “who has the problem, knows they have the problem, and is currently DOING something about it?”

The latter part of that is key. You want to find people who are already trying to solve this problem on their own.

Why? Because these people have already decided that it's a problem worth their time/money to solve.

With that context in mind here are some tactics to get your first 10 customers:

Customer Interviews > Sale

One of the easiest ways to get a customer is to circle back with the people you talked to about the problem in step one.

• Pros: It should be an easy sell since you’ve got their contact info and you’ve built a relationship with them already. Also, if they aren’t interested in buying, you can immediately ask questions that help you learn why - this can be invaluable.
• Cons: CDIs can be time-consuming, slow, and it can be really difficult to get a potential buyer on the phone to just “talk”. Also, sales calls can be uncomfortable.

Cold Outreach

With LinkedIn and Hunter.io you can find just about anyone’s contact info and shoot them a cold email or give them a call. The key is making sure there are signals that the people you’re emailing have the problem, know they have the problem and are trying to solve the problem that your offer addresses.

• Pros: It’s a relatively quick and cheap way to get your offer in front of qualified leads and give you the opportunity to talk to a real person to get feedback on your offer.
• Cons: Cold emailing can be a numbers game and isn’t effective for all types of businesses.

Partnerships

Partnering with influencers, businesses, or other authorities that are in a similar niche as your product is a great way to get access to buyers.

• Pros: You leverage the authority and trust built by your partner for a boost in credibility. Also, if you play it right, your product will be in front of the right target audience.
• Cons: Finding quality people to partner with can be tough - few people want to work with the new kid on the block. If you do find someone, you’ll likely have to give up a substantial piece of revenue or equity to make this happen.

Online Ads

If you have a tightly defined customer segment, you may be able to run an ad with your offer directly targeted to those people on Facebook, Google, or any other ad platform.

• Pros: This is a quick and relatively cheap way to get data and your product in front of a lot of people.
• Cons: There isn’t a great feedback loop with ads and the targeting isn’t super-specific. You’ll have data to look at, but ultimately, you won’t know why someone didn’t buy. e.g wrong audience, too expensive, they didn’t like the solution, they thought the website looked scammy, ect…

Online Communities

My personal favorite is to engage with potential customers in online communities. Regardless of your niche, there are almost certainly online communities where your early adopters hang out.

• Pros: Tons of qualified customers that are easy to find and talk to.
• Cons: Most communities don’t allow promotion, so you’ll need to add value and find ways to talk about your promotion. This can take time and be slow.

Adding Content Marketing

Creating optimized content for SEO or Quora can be a great way to catch buyers through search intent.

• Pros: It's free (assuming you write it yourself) and can have lasting effects that create a real competitive advantage for your company.
• Cons: Time-consuming, takes a while to reap the benefits, and similar with paid ads, there's not a feedback loop (ie you won't know what's working and what isn't). When trying to get your first 10 customers, your goal should be to move fast and learn as quickly as possible

Build an Audience First

Depending on the business, it can be much easier to build an audience through a mastermind, online community, or blog to leverage when you’re ready to sell.

• Pros: You build a relationship with your target audience for sales in the future. IMO building an audience is the easiest way for you to be successful.
• Cons: The issue here is that building an audience likely won’t directly test the value proposition of your offer.

This is one post in a series of posts that will come around how to de-risk companies faster. I’ll hang out in the comments for discussion.

Thank you :)