The most reliable way to get your first customers is through doing direct sales

Marketing, building an audience and communities gets all the attention nowadays but the most reliable way to get your first customers is by doing direct sales. This also allows you to talk to (potential) customers directly and get valuable feedback to improve your product.

Sure, this may not scale when you’re growing (beyond your first customers), but it follows the advice of Paul Graham’s essay “Do things that don’t scale”. To quote him directly: “Startups take off because the founders make them take off”.

Simultaneously you can start making content for your target audience which in time will be a good SEO investment to get incoming leads.

Once you’ve got some users, assuming you have a paid service, you can experiment with re-investing that revenue into ads, sponsoring newsletters, etc. Now you’ll eventually start getting inbound leads, and you already have a sales process and/or onboarding flow to take care of them.

All you have to do now is to start sending some emails. No large audience or big budget needed. Make your business take off!

What do you think? How are you growing your business?