How to Acquire Your First 100 Customers

I took a startup course in the MBA program at one of HBS/GSB/Wharton/Kellogg that was taught by a (in my estimation) great VC. Arguably the most insightful class I've ever taken. I'll give two sets of insights: anecdotes and principles.

(A1) The founders of a successful custom apparel startup didn't get even close to 100 customers until after they had tried two different distribution channels. First, they opened a store and that didn't work. Second, they tried to sell on-line and that didn't work. Finally, with implosion imminent, they tried a hybrid model where you get measured in the store, but every purchase is made on-line and then delivered. It worked.

(A2) Co-founder of one of the publicly-traded food delivery companies told us how he started out. Was hungry, realized he couldn't order online, so he sits down and codes an initial web page (as well as an API). Asks a friend of a friend that runs a restaurant to let him list the restaurant on his new site. Guy gives him $140 for one month.

Figures he'll just knock-on doors to add restaurants, but managers kick him out with no meeting. Realizes if he walks in the back door (alley) and pretends to have a meeting with a manager he might get somewhere. So, he walks through the kitchens of 100's of restaurants and they ask him who he is there to see, tells them he has a meeting with the manager. 50% of the time he gets kicked-out, the rest of the time he gets restaurants to agree to being listed.

(A3) My VC professor's fourth business was a bridal gown website he purchased with his co-founder. They didn't use paid SEO. Rather, they came up with creative hacks to drive traffic to the site. One of the better ones:

Pay writers in India to compose short articles about stuff happening in the bridal space. The writers read the first articles to be published that morning (UK time) in the BBC, etc., then write up the same stuff, and publish it on their bridal gown page right as (US time) the same stories were hitting presses at the NYT, etc.

Using such hacks, they got their site to number two on google search results without paid SEO.

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(P1) "Half of the difficulty is going from zero customers to one customer. Everything after that is the other half."

(P2) Every startup is a science experiment. Come up with a hypothesis, test it, and see what worked and what didn't. Rinse, repeat.

Following a structured, hypothesis-driven process is key. Literally, write in a journal what your hypothesis/assumption is, how you are going to test it, and what you hope to learn from the test. Next week, write-out what your hypothesis is, what you need to do this week to make further progress on validating/invalidating it, what progress you made the week before in validating/invalidating it, and what your plan for the following week is. Continue writing out these four things every single week to stay organized.

(P3) If you feel extremely strapped for cash, view this as a blessing in disguise. There is some creative hack that will allow you to validate/invalidate your hypothesis or set of assumptions - you just haven't found it yet. Running solid, structured experiments (i.e. process) is most important. Love process.

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Unless you have blown way past 100 customers, the sciency/experimental aspect of a startup doesn't change. And even inside unicorns, management is (hopefully) still ultimately just running a never ending series of experiments.

This is nicely put together - thank you.

My entire business is actually in helping people get customers and at least half of our clients are those seeking P/M fit who partner with us to get early demos of their product (or even pre-demo conversations) scheduled. I have a sketchbook full of cool SAAS ideas that I'm not savvy enough to build. But I'm good at getting customers so viola that's my business.

I would offer these tips if you are trying to start a business - any business - and need a nudge to get your first few customers.

1. You don't need to be different. The world is HUGE. Most of your potential customers have never heard of your competitors. In fact, they may well be saying "I wish this-thing-that-solves-a-need existed" without knowing that 20 versions of that thing exist. We tech folks drastically overestimate the amount of time and energy people put into finding ways to solve problems they have. Most folks just live with the misery.

2. Your competition sucks. If you pick up the phone and start the process of selling than you already way ahead of most of your competitors. Why? Because most of them act like they sell but they really just sit and agonize over one more line of code or one more feature instead of getting out there in front of customers. Use this to your advantage! Your product is already good enough, so stop developing it and go find users.

3. Your network is a goldmine. We had a potential customer approach us to help set 20 demos a month for their SAAS product. So far they had scheduled zero demos even though all 3 founders had over 1000 LinkedIn connections. Instead of taking them on as a client I consulted with them for a couple of hours on how to reach out to people they already knew. (Side note: If you won't put your product/service in front of EVERYONE you know who is a potential customer than you are lacking confidence. This can be solved, but selling to people you know is MUCH easier than selling to strangers. Offer something you believe in and the conversations come easy).

4. People hate cold callers, spammers, and unsolicited messages. So make warm calls (after an introduction) and send relevant emails (how it is you know they have this problem and how you can help). Do not be fearful of reaching out! People ARE interested in real things that solve real problems and they will pay real money for that.

5. Charge more. Charging a low price doesn't motivate buying any more than a high price discourages it. Don't price your SAAS at $2 a month because you are afraid no one will pay $5. Don't price it at $10 because you are afraid no one will pay $50. Especially in B2B when purchasers aren't often spending their own money. Problems in the business world are worth more than $5, $10 or even hundreds of dollars to solve.

Good luck to all of you. Finding new customers can and should be fun, not a source of stress. And seeing the first official sale or first dollar in the bank is a high that never gets old.

C

I will circle back and read this over the weekend but my advice is this:

Get to 10 customers, and then double down on anything that worked.

Some ideas for the first 10:

- write an essay about something interesting that you can weave your business idea into, submit to tech blogs like hackernoon

- join a maker group that can help you in an informal quid pro quo with social media shares and upvotes

- launch on hacker news, product hunt and indie hackers. All have their rituals. Spend a little time, not too much, to get it right.

- contact all the people you talked to before/during product development (bc you did talk to people, right?)

- use an seo keyword research tool or just start searching for things and use the suggestions at the bottom of the google results. Write actual content on your website that is directed toward answering these questions. Seo compounds slowly so start early.

- find places your customers are (questions on quora or stack overflow; Facebook groups; etc) and learn about them and interact without being spammy.

These are the techniques we used to take Cronitor to 10 customers and then hundreds more.

My wife and I are bootstrapping a business, and we're nearly at 100 customers (92 right now). I would not say it's an easy road. We've been working on it full time for 1.5 years so far.

A couple things I've realized while doing this:

1. Business is a competition. Much like in sports, skills are only built up through practice. For an entrepreneur this means actually selling something. You will start at level 0. There is no substitution for actually doing the work.

2. The bigger you grow, the easier it gets. A year ago we were running around like headless chickens not knowing what to focus on. Now that we've got a core group of customers, and it's much easier to decide where to go. We can start to plan a month or two months out now. Opportunities such as partnerships also present themselves as your business grows larger.

This is super timely — looking forward to take a look at this in the evening. Wish this was in an ebook format so I could stick it into my Kindle and read it that way though. You might want to check out Calibre, it's an app that automatically converts to more ebook-friendly formats. Might be worth a shot.

BTW - you might want to just host the PDF on your website behind an email wall and put it behind Cloudflare. I just spent 10 minutes trying to get the PDF, it's that busy on Google Docs.

Edit: I just tried to convert it, it works okay, not super great, since the source is PDF. I'm sure you have the raw text document, you can flawlessly convert from that to EPUB/MOBI if you want.