How did you get your first 10 customers?
I’ve just picked up my first two beta users, who will test it for a month before i start charging them.
They aren’t warm connections or within my network, I simply found them on Facebook. They were business owners who I thought would benefit from my product, so I reached out. Turns out I was right.
Asked them if they’d be beta testers for me for free for a month, then pay me monthly if it worked out.
I plan on repeating this process over and over until I get my first 10 beta customers.
What do you think? How did you get your first 10 customers?
We used sites like https://alternativeto.net/; we also started small budget AdWords campaigns (e.g. few $ per day) based on "alternatives to ..." keywords.
These two things landed first several customers. And, more importantly, it gave us an opportunity to see in more details what's working and what's not.
Our site is https://guideblocks.com
I was just thinking about this the other day and it's actually kind of interesting, but for me it's been a different channel that works for every new thing that I ship.
My first project, traction came from listing it on market places (think Amazon/Ebay/Etsy and the like).
2nd project, the thing that worked initially to get it to at least 1 sale consistently a day was Instagram ads.
The next project the thing that worked was a combination of Youtube ads and just providing a ton of value and free material in Facebook groups in that project's niche.
Most recently, I launched a web app and got it featured on BetaList which got me the first 25-30 users in about a day which was pretty exciting.
I also worked with a kickstarter backed startup a few years ago and the thing that worked far and beyond any other channel in the beginning for that particular project was leveraging Youtube/Instagram influencers to do reviews of the product.
One thing that I think is also an interesting point - the one channel that I've tried experimenting with on almost every one of these project at one point or another that I've rarely ever been able to see a positive or even marginally significant return on is Facebook ads.
Hi Joshua,
Your question has been asked before a couple of times on the forum now. I recommend you search for "first customers" or similar and read through the threads where advice has already been given to people in your situation.
Good luck!
( @channingallen, @csallen this is one of those recurring topics where some way to highlight/suggest/merge similar threads would be awesome :) )
Don't know how Channing feels about this, but I'm actually cool with threads getting repeated every now and then. Different people end up responding, and I look at threads more as a place for discussion than a permanent repository of knowledge.
Eventually I'd like to add some sort of knowledge-base to IH, though. I really like the idea of community-powered guides that will always stay up-to-date. So sort of like wiki pages, but better formatted to answer people's questions on complex topics like "how do I design a landing page." Planning to do more thinking on this later in the year.
There's a lot of value in enabling people to ask questions which have been asked before. Just the fact that what is true for 2017 is not necessarily true 2018 is enough justification imo.
How about something similar to what StackOverflow does? Where, in the right side you can see similar posts?
I like how StackOverflow does it, too. Would like to do the same, eventually, maybe when/if I get some more engineering help.
Makes sense. I really like the community-sourced wiki idea - would fit in well for people using Stripe Atlas.
Merge posts! Love that idea!!
Also thanks for the tip, did not even occur to me, somehow.
My first ten customers were from Reddit. I posted a pre-launch waiting list on the niche subreddit that would be interested in the product. 50 people signed up for the list, and a month later when the MVP was ready, I launched it to them for free. A month after that, I converted 15 of them to a lifetime discounted plan.
That sounds like a really good strategy. Could you talk more about how you went about pitching the lifetime discounted plan to those users / any takeaways from those that didn't end up taking the offer?
I thought reddit was very anti self-advertising. Did you get any grief about this or did you execute it in a certain way?
Depends on the subreddit; they all have their own rules. In my particular case, I messaged a mod in advance for permission.
I've been learning to code for the past few years, my first clients came from networking events/meetups - one in the summer had over 1000 people and I talked to about 100 of them. The "trick" is to invite people to coffee and *take an interest in them. Build trust and demo your project - it's creating "warm leads" essentially while building your network.
I'm overwhelmed with learning/coding/marketing but I made a place for the good marketing ideas I come across on places like this forum.
http://getmarketingideas.com/ (please let me know what you think!)
Posted to Reddit, Hacker News (ShowHN) and ProductHunt
Most of our first customers were friends, colleagues, and warm connections. We built a product because we saw so many people in our network struggling.
We booked 20 min calls with all sorts of warm connections, and with people through forums and Facebook groups. We learned about their problems, offered some tips, and asked if we could reach out again when they were ready.
It took a long time to get those first paid sales, but once we did it got a lot easier because we could speak to the success of those customers.
We gave discounts, free + extended trials to influencers, and in many cases offered a free consulting call and concierge onboarding, so all they had to do was login and all their info was already there and ready to go.
Reaching out to SaaS founders and startup people on Facebook groups by posting a post (SaaS business owners, Paris startups, Amsterdam startups...), we got our few first thousands $$ solely by doing that.
I'm currently in the process of getting my first customers. I'm basically trading my services to people and companies that are in positions to better help me in the future. e.g. coworking spaces that have multiple startups growing within their walls will hopefully get me more clients, design studios that can recommend me to their clients, etc.