B2B SaaS Founders: How did you find your first 10 customers?
Hey Indie Hackers!
Curious to learn how companies in B2B SaaS found their first 10 customers.
Most of our early customers at Simplemnt.com have come from cold outbound. Our deals are around ~10-20k ACV and take around two months to close.
We are currently unsure if we should invest in content marketing, ads, more outbound, self-service signup and usage, etc.
Hey Sandeep - I just launched and I’m doing 100% cold outbound on LinkedIn. I’m getting meetings, but everything is slow. I’m averaging about 9 first meetings conducted per month. I am hopeful to increase that as my targeting improves.
I’m actually very interested in your experience. I have a similar ACV although to start I think it will be $5k-$10k.
Yeah this sounds very similar to our experience. We've been able to accelerate this slightly by using a lead list, though its still a lot of "hand-to-hand combat" which we expect.
9 meetings per month for a newly launched product seems pretty good! We've been live for a year and are still working on our exact ICP. But we are able to close more deals as we understand the problem space more, top of funnel is still our main pain point.
My goal is to close 3-4 deals in my first year. Someone recently agreed to be a trial customer but no immediate budget.
I would highly recommend charging for the product even if it is not ready yet. We sold our first customer on mockups and they were totally fine with that (of course we didn't charge them until we delivered the MVP).
It's a good way to determine if this is a problem people are willing to pay for. If its a big enough problem, folks will find budget.
Yes, this specific point is giving me a very existential headache. They have 40 people on furlough out of a total of 200 so it would be difficult to get priority right now. I think there's an opportunity for budget down the road - at this point, I just need the customer reference/experience/building block. But I have nightmares thinking about building a product that nobody wants.
Simplemnt cofounder here....I would suggest finding another prospect like this customer and see if they have budget. I would recommend against building something for someone who wants to be a trial customer but doesn't want to pay. Seems like they dont have a burning hair-on-fire problem they need solved.
Simplemnt.com looks great! I bookmarked it to check on when I'm back at the office.
Maybe you could help me out too? 🙏 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/help-me-with-ideas-and-ill-owe-you-one-445c28913c
Hey Sandeep,
For Hellonext it was majorly through Product Hunt, Hackernews and IH (of course). Though these initial users were not high-paying customers, we did manage to get some feedback from them to improve the product.