How did you get your first customers❓

you will find this newsletter helpful! https://www.first1000.co/ (i'm not affiliated)

I'll just leave it here - my article explaining how 42 billion-dollar businesses got their first clients - https://kickstartsidehustle.com/a-billion-dollar-mvp/

If you want, I share this kind of stories every week in my free newsletter, including the most creative marketing campaigns that ever existed - http://kickstartsidehustle.com/

Create B2B Content on LinkedIn and join relevant groups and share insights about your field. After a good reputation, you will find clients easily.

If you are a marketer try to build connections with lawyers car company, and doctors.

My first customer I looked it up on freelancing boards. While doing that I searched if there was a similar paying demand on different freelancing websites, and there was. I put together the solution and applied for each freelancing opportunity with something like " I got what you need already built, and the annual subscription is the same price that I would charge you for the full solution. When are you free to make a zoom call? You can start using it right now"

That helped me to get the first 10 customers.

I got a SaaS that help Brazillian digital-marketers to sell more using Telegram and WhateApp.

A very nice person on Twitter was asking "who had a product with no paying customers", I responded, 10 mins later I had my first paying customer.

For context: i'm talking about an e-mail marketing agency (righthello.com, deceased) and a B2B consulting company (Casbeg.com, alive and well).

Both times we did it the same way. We've built a simple website to enforce understanding what are we offering (you think you know what you are offering, until you need to write it down in a sales offer). Once we had that we've posted it on our private social media (even then we had a little bit of following but nothing huge) and sent out the "Hello World" post to couple of relevant contacts with "hey, i'm starting a new business, based on what you do this might be of interest to You. <link to the post>".

And we were off to the races. Both times it got us first ~10 paying customers.

Hey Frank

This applies to ALL of my businesses and experiences. Doesn't matter if B2C or B2B.

The VERY first customers are all earned through direct conversations. Cold calls. Friends of friends. Direct meetings. Direct calls. Manual work.

Maybe that's the wrong approach, but I always loved it because it makes sure that you are seeding your core customer base with personal connections and high-value connections. Ultimately word of mouth will then take over, granted the product has some value.

Love to read all the comments here on everyone else does it, but for me, I love the manual work that goes into finding your first customers :) It's also nice because they help you with valuable feedback early on, so I like the idea of your first 100 customers being no strangers.

Cheers
Tobias

We had a lot of luck with Quora and Reddit in finding our first customers. This was a couple of years ago and YMMV but we'd find questions on Quora about our customer's pain points and answer them with links to us and a few other sites. Similarly we'd find posts on related subreddits and contribute to the conversation with links to our site. We probably got our first 10 customers just doing this for a while.

Kickstarter!

Launching prayetic.com on Facebook. I have about 2.3K followers and about 35 friends tried it out, and two signed up that day.

Simple and crude, advertise through Google Ads.

I started a design and development agency 2.5 year ago. We landed our first client through a connection in my network and second client, which was big one, was through winning a Request for Proposal. RFPs can be be time consuming with no ROI, but sometimes can bring solid wins. 2.5 years in and its still a struggle. Hope we start seeing a sustainable MRR soon!

I do Tech Consultancy for early-stage startups who want to scale their business.

Most of my customers are referrals and word-of-mouth.

I run a Twitter ghost writing business - my first customer was someone who was looking for a ghost writer and we knew each other already. My next one was another friend. Your first customers will probably be people you know because they trust you already.

using Product Hunt

For one of my products, I was looking for leads on LinkedIn. At first by hand, then I got bored, so I made a program that added, then added a language model to it, and it rewrote itself. In general, this is how my product appeared, which I am now actively developing. By the way, I also use it to find clients for it on LinkedIn. It sounds a bit like self-promotion. I guess it is)))

But other than that, now I'm at a stage where I do not invest in paid channels and explore different sources where I can find customers, reddit, Facebook groups, telegram channels, from telegram channels I have found a few clients. Reddit doesn't work for me

The first 2M ARR SaaS started as a spin of an Advertising agency, So the first clients were our friends, partners and just using our networks.
later we started laser-targeted FB ads showcasing the problem and solution. We literally spray and pray the geo-targeting and it worked. We got first clients from around the world and identified strong markets for us.

I got my first customer from product hunt :)

We did founder led sales, so cold-calling basically!

Some good recommendations have been said before me, so I'm telling you what I'm trying atm for my SaaS startup. At first, I identified my potential customers, for me it's small startups who have some presence on a social media platform for example, Instagram. I cold DM them and offer a free version and free support.

It is very hard to land on the first converted business, but eventually, you will learn the trick and move on. Basically, you need a proper plan, KPI, and arrange your week for each plan you want to apply. For me, I have got my first customer from linkedin using sales navigator, but I didn't completely depend on LinkedIn, used other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, my own website(evalogical), etc.

Had a b2c app on the Google play/app stores. Organic discovery actually worked for us on there, people looked for our keywords, although it did take a bit. Never underestimate being in a searchable directory!

In person events are a great start!

I had a startup almost a decade ago where I got my first handful of customers through personal connects and referrals. It was an online test platform like cordiality. We reached out to startups in our friend circle who were hiring and gave them free trials and then some of them became paying customers and also helped a lot in refining the product.

Google Ads

My first customer was through LinkedIn. I targeted content marketers and emailed them (I think it was through email finder and marketing automation). I've sent out to about 100, while I've removed the free account option. At the end, 1 person out signedup. He's still with us after 3 years:)

We are a platform that find you a peer for updating your progress and action plan for the next ahead in order to be more accountable and not just dream but put into actions. We haven't found the paying customers, but get lots of landing page views through

Online:

• Product launch platform such as Indie Hacker and Product Hunt
• Facebook Group
• Reddit

Offline:

• Startup events
• When meet friends and surroundings.

Hope this might be helpful to you, the builder.

My first project was a CPA network that I launched in 2013. At that time, there were many active niche forums where people gathered, primarily using forums rather than social media. I created threads on all available forums and managed to acquire a few initial clients.

However, I didn't get my first hundred active clients from forums. I was fortunate to meet someone who specialized in teaching marketing and earning through CPA networks. We decided to sponsor his courses so that he could demonstrate all the theory using our CPA network as an example. An additional significant benefit was that people not only learned about our company but also automatically began to trust it because it was endorsed by an authoritative figure :)

Good day! Very interesting.

While doing ideation for the idea. On the call I just asked if they would pay $x for it, and they said YES.

KISS.

When first customer purchased a subscription at Seodity, we didn't even know how they discovered us! However, there were no other customers for several months. It's only recently that we've begun experiencing a gradual influx of new clients, as we've been working on improving our visibility, marketing efforts, and selling directly. Our launches on platforms like AppSumo and ProductHunt have also contributed a bit to our growth (but that's a longer story).