Hi 👋 - What is your tips and tricks to acquire your first customer?

I literally just got my first paying customer last week so I can tell you how it happened for me. I started working on my product about 7 months ago and first got it online in January.

The best advice I have is to be patient and keep working on different angles until someone finally gives you a shot. For months now I have been sending cold emails, posting to IH, HN, PH, FB, and other sites but my first paying customer found my site randomly last week from a link I posted months ago. I had developed a habit of sending every new user to my site a welcome email and ask if they need any help getting set up. I did that for dozens of users and one finally responded and asked to jump on a zoom conference call at 1am. He became my first paying customer that night.

In short, try a bunch of things and just keep working on the product, getting feedback, and improving your processes and something will happen eventually. Don't get discouraged by the people who found immediate success from a viral post if that doesn't happen for you. Have faith and keep moving forward.

@meabed I'm confused. Here's why... the very first lead in on your website says "We help thousands of developers and businesses optimize their workflow by using our APIs". So you help 'thousands'? Doesn't seem like your post above is an accurate portrail of your search for a first customer does it?

I hate to be a knit picker and less than positive, but your post and the lead in to your site leave me very confused about a great many things. Enlighten me, because I'd rather be wrong here in my assessment.

@meabed I recommend you start by creating a marketing funnel for your product so it's easier to see who your ideal customers are.

Relevant excerpt from an article I was working on:

Say you run a cloud CI service like Travis or Circle. You could naively think that you should go talk to any developer or engineering team because it’s a tool for developers. Developers are the correct target demographic, but without considering your marketing funnel your results may vary wildly in effectiveness.

Here’s an example of a marketing funnel for a CI service that targets engineering teams:

Do these engineering teams even know what CI is and how it can help them?

Are these engineering teams currently researching different CI tools?

Do these teams already use an existing CI solution like Jenkins?

Marketing that targets people that don’t even know they need a CI tool is far different than marketing that targets teams that are currently looking for a solution and far different than teams that already have a solution in place and have to go out of their way to switch.

If you’re reaching out to people in your network that work at established tech companies, it’s likely that they already a CI solution in place. It’ll make it harder to get customers and good feedback for your product. If you reach out to people with startups or side projects, you’ll probably have better luck.

You need to match your marketing to where your potential customers are in the funnel. If you’re starting out with a newer SaaS product with few customers, I would suggest that you target people that are either unaware of the problem or solution your product solves. It’ll be much easier and effective to go after people that are not yet doing CI than a team that has to migrate everything from Jenkins to your product.

Full post: https://www.chris.marketing/articles/define-your-marketing-funnel-first/

Your case is similar to the B2B example I outlined above. It's unlikely you'll be able to go to teams that have already implemented one of your solutions email / phone validation, ip geolocation, or currency exchange rates to switch to your solution. Think about it from their perspective. If I already have email validation setup for my product and it works, why would I randomly switch to a service that does it?

You need to reach out and catch people that are starting to create their apps / mvps before they know they need to use one of your products.