How did you get your first customer?
How did you get your first customer?
I was talking to a first-time founder recently and she said "the hardest part of starting a business is going from nothing, to something... "
In that spirit, why not inspire other founders who are just starting out and explain how you got your first (paying) customer...
#ask-ih
I'll start, with an example from a side project I did a few years ago...
I was starting an ecommerce store selling jewellery. The products were being produced by friends of mine in a different country.
Before doing any work or spending any money, I invited ~25 (female) friends who I thought might like the jewellery into a Facebook group and uploaded pictures of the jewellery.
I then asked them to 'like' the pieces of jewellery they thought were awesome and would like to wear themselves.
After they had been through the photos and indicated which pieces they liked, I asked them to preorder any pieces they liked (by sending me $$$ via Paypal/transfer). If they preordered, I promised we would stock that particular piece. if they didn't preorder a piece they liked, I explained that I probably wouldn't stock it and they wouldn't get the chance to buy it any time soon.
That resulted in ~11 preorders for ~$1.5k worth of product - with 0 expenditure and 0 lines of code written!
Did they send you the $$$ to a personal Paypal account? I'm having trouble finding a way to charge the first customers given that I do not have a registered company.
Yes.
This was for a B2C ecommerce product where the risk (and amounts of money) were low.
It looks like you're based in the US (I'm not) - so I don't know what the best advice is in your case, sorry.