How did you get your first ten customers?
Hey IH,
I’m curious, and I’m sure a lot of others are curious about how you got your first few customers.
Business is incredibly varied. What worked for me may not work for you and vice versa.
It’s when we have many unique perspectives that were able to make the best decisions.
For my most recent launch, we posted that we were launching to a number of relevant Facebook groups. We had 10 paying customers within a week or two.
That part was easy. Building what we said we were going to launch became the difficult part. It helped that the Facebook group we posted in was local. All of our first customers paid by check or Venmo because we didn't even have a landing page yet!
Love the action!
You make it seem so easy :).
I got this in my inbox: https://www.oberlo.com/blog/made-8873-selling-sunglasses
They used several tactics building leads and analyzing data along the way. As I scan the post they did:
Interviews (advertised on personal FB account)
Keyword analysis of the interview responses
Blog posts of the interviews on the store blog
Notification to the interviewees of the interview being published
Asking them to share the post if they like it
Setup FB page
Setup Instagram page and follow people
Schedule FB posts with pre-existing blog content
Schedule IG posts with pre-existing blog content
Send out 9 IG direct messages to (undisclosed selection method) with discount codes
Collected 1 email from store sign in
Send out abandoned cart email
Select audience relevant product to giveaway
Use KingSumo tool to make users promote to enter the giveaway
Post (with permission) to 3 Fashion related FB groups
Collect 556 emails from the giveaway
Collect the verified accounts they followed
Use the demographics of the people (emails and IG accounts collected) and target people who 'liked' those verified accounts with FB ads, spending $40 over 5 days
No clicks were received.
Design new offers/ads, running separate campaigns for users in different country groups
See which group of countries performs the best
Intending to spend $105, cut the ads after $27 when a clear winner appeared
Launch more ad variants to see which gets the most content views
Split test two variants
Setup FB ad campaign optimizing for add to cart/purchases
Split test 2 audiences - US/UK/Australi/Canada and an audience excluding those countries
Filter to include only those who had viewed content in the past 90 days and had not purchased in the past 90 days
Run the ads with $50 daily budget per audience, for 10 days
Prelim results: $342 from 12 orders showing 30% of buyers from USA within 24 hours
Stop the ad campaign
Target USA, Canada, UK, and Australia only with daily budget of $50 with same ad
“I made $5,716.09 in total after spending $758.40 on this ad.”
“All told, I spent a total of $1,225.14 for all the Facebook ads.
I made a grand total of $5,904.59 in revenue, and that meant that my profits – after subtracting my other costs, like the Shopify theme, makeup kit giveaway, etc. – sat around $3,037.05.”
Increase product prices by $5, increasing average basket value
“I was able to make $8,872.50 in 4 weeks” [revenue]
returning visitor rate of 2.71%
conversion rate of 3.79%
profit of $4,365.78.
OK some of it wasn’t explained like after the failure of step 19, how they redesigned the ads, but overall an interesting process/article.
Nice breakdown.
I like the systematic nature of the FB ads. They weren’t going with their guts but instead focused on systematizing the process.
I spent years building an audience on my mailing list first. I got to know those people, now I just build things they'll pay for :)
For Muna I reached out to people/founders in my network. People I worked with, I met or even some whom I only had a short email conversation with. They were all my target audience. I only had a hunch for something I thought was still broken. I asked if they were available for a short interview, via email or video, about their employees and their happiness. Many of them said okay.
I took notes, rethought the solution to the problem and a a bit later followed up with a simple prototype. The positive reactions to these and questions “take my money”, made me to work on the prototype a bit more.
Long story short: some of these became the very first customers. If you are interested, the longer story can be read here.
I currently do the exact same thing for a small, fun side-project 💰 Startup Costs: reaching out to people in my network.
I think this is the best way to go about at first. Be active, helpful and listen. I often get questions by email how people ask “how about if I don't have a big network”? But your network is often bigger then you think: Twitter, Facebook groups, Instagram, Slack teams and even communities like IH.
Nice, thanks for your feedback.
It’s kind of like the Jobs to be done methodology right?
Have you read when coffee and kale compete?
Yes and did read it.
Recommended for others to read it too
Blood, sweat, and tears.
We're targeting B2B companies so a lot of cold outreach to start. After we closed our first few customers, I made it a point to develop close relationships with them and then politely nudge for referrals.
Our price point is pretty high ($3 - $8k a month) so it takes a lot of patience to see the longer sales cycles through.
Oh definitely, but at least those customers are more likely to stay over the long haul.
Would you mind sharing a general email template you use in the initial outreach?
Like I mentioned below, shoot me an email and I'll walk you through it --- marko@sayer.ai
Sure thing
This comment was deleted 2 months ago.
Congrats on the customers! 🎉
I'm pretty interested too in a template if you don't mind sharing.
We use our own product in our outreach, shoot me an email and I'll walk you through our strategy -- marko@sayer.ai
.indiekeep
I have got my first 10 customers from Quora.
Interested into a more elaboration.
People ask questions to find solution to their problem and you answer with a product to solve their problem.
What’s your profile URL, I’ll follow and upvote.
https://www.quora.com/profile/Prasad-Lingawar
Documenting our process of building the business from day 1. Even during the prototype phase, hence people expecting and purchasing the product at launch.
Be helpful with zero expectation. That can come in the form of education, hands-on help, or mentorship. Be patient and you'll be surprised at how quickly you can get ten people on board.
I mean yea, of course, but how did you put that advice into action?
Tons of stuff you can do:
Write articles on topics you're knowledgeable about.
Film videos and put them on YouTube that you're knowledgeable about.
Go to meetups in your area and give talks (for free) about topics you're knowledgeable about.
Reach out to people you come across who you think you can help and offer a way for them to improve their business.
Release an inexpensive paid course around the topic you understand well.
Offer a free online workshop sharing information about your topic.
Offer your product to 10 people for free and get their feedback. Also do concierge service and set it up for them so onboarding is painless. If those 10 people are happy, ask them to introduce you to people who may want to be paying customers.
Thanks for putting a bit of meat on it :).
Great question. I've just "officially" validated my new project FullStack.Cafe and just got 11-th customer after soft launch one month ago. Here's how I've done that:
FullStack.Cafe is a Q&A platform that helps Full Stack devs to nail a tech interview.
In the "validated" version I'm charging for the unlimited access to the portal that allows to browse ~1400 Interview Q&As and download offline Interview Plans. 10 first Q&As could be opened for free, then I'm asking a visitor to pay. My conversion rate so far is 1.5%.
What I've tried before validated monetization:
trial unlimited period for 2 days, than ask to pay - didn't work
ask to pay for Interview Plan documents to download - didn't work
ByMeACoffee - didn't work
That's it.
That’s not bad at all.
So you didn’t do any direct outreach at all?
I did. To people who've been following me on Dev.to (~500) I've sent a welcome message with a link to the service. Even if CPI is unknown It's a decent and cheap marketing channel to my audience any way. It's also pretty easy to outreach devs on LinkedIn (still plan to do that in scale down the track).
My first 5 from Page Flows came from links I put on one of my other, related sites (UI Movement)
My first ~5 came from doing programming/consulting for clients who were the target market for my SaaS. The next ~25 came from being helpful in a targeted forum (in my case Shopify's). More here if helpful (https://tylertringas.com/chapter-5-getting-your-first-customers/). Very curious to see what others come up with.
Nice, what was the timeframe for your first 25?