Getting paying customers is HARD! A year later I finally got one. Here's how it happened.
This week was a monumental accomplishment for Email Emu: I obtained my first customer!
It happened almost exactly one year after launching Email Emu, a platform that helps marketers save time when performing email marketing research.
I discovered the idea after talking with a handful of coworkers and marketers in the field. I learned they were manually signing up for email lists, waiting for emails to populate, and ending up with insanely cluttered inboxes. They often had to pay for storage upgrades just to keep all the newsletters they signed up for.
Boom, the side hustle was born.
I quickly validated the idea through an email signup list and a Product Hunt launch, and I was off to the races. I got some traction and was stoked. I decided to start by giving the entire thing away for free for 4-5 months to get people using the product before introducing a paid plan. Over the next few months, I got a few hundred users, with a slow trickle of new users each day.
Then I hit a wall, with only 1-2 new users for a month or two. Then I got featured in a newsletter and gained 200 users overnight. I WAS STOKED. During this time, I was still trying to figure out who my ideal customer would be, talking with people all the time. After the surge died down, it had just been a slow trickle of a few users every few days.
I then launched the paid version and guess what… crickets, no paying customers. Months passed, still nothing. I tried to reach out to people in my network (probably 10-15 people). Some said they would be interested, but not right now as they were in between jobs and strapped for funds (aka not interested and they don’t have the need).
I then tried to run a few discount specials via my newsletter to get people to upgrade to the pro version. Still crickets. I thought, why on earth is no one paying or upgrading? Surely, after having 500 users, someone should be upgrading. Maybe my offering wasn’t clear, my free version was too powerful, or the product wasn’t valuable enough. There could be any number of reasons.
Feeling deflated, I started to question everything. Is this just not a product people will pay for? Did the idea just give me a false positive with the signups from the prelaunch? All these thoughts came to mind. I then started to think about other ideas, losing steam and shifting my focus to other things for a few weeks, feeling uninterested in the “stupid email idea.”
But then I decided to change my target audience from B2C to B2B customers. This gave me new confidence to try a few things I had been scared to try. One is that I will be switching the entire platform to a paid-only service once my rebuild is complete in just a few short weeks. With that, I decided I wouldn’t care so much if there was a mass exodus of users, because if they leave, they probably are not the customers I will be targeting going forward.
Along with that decision, I ran a 48-hour lifetime deal for my newsletter subscribers only, informing them of the change. And you know what?
BOOM. MY FIRST CUSTOMER. I WAS STOKED.
But only one.
Side note: As I am writing this, I just had the idea to offer people reading this article the same offer. So, if you read this far, grab it here closing it in 48 hours.
But you know what? That’s okay because it validates that people are willing to pay for this service. It gives me a boost of energy to keep going, and it will help me build additional case studies. So, I am stoked and glad I didn’t give up.
Now, with newfound energy, my next year will be focused on catering to marketing agencies and sales.
Because in reality doing 2 sales calls, 15 direct outreaches, and zero paid marketing is NOT going to cut it.
and if I am honest with myself, to get Email Emu to grow I have to start doing the things I don’t enjoy like cold outreach and sales.
Usually, if something is succeeding, deep down you know what you need to do you just keep putting it off because it makes you uncomfortable.
👋 P.S. Leave a comment on how you got your first paying customer and what you tried along the way.
