How did you get your first customers?
Hi,
Tough topic, I guess. But, I'm wondering, how did you get your first customers for your product? I mean, I often see a lot of blog posts like "how to get your first 10000 customers", or something like that, with generic information.
Instead, I'd like to be a bit more focused and ask you about your really first few ones. Do you have stories to share?
I think a lot of interesting tracks for growth could emerge from this discussion.
Thanks a lot
Direct, cold email conversations.
We had a landing page built on Wordpress with a Stripe checkout button on the pricing page. Confirmation email upon purchase told them we would email them soon about access to the app. We didn't have a DB in place at the time, so we just sent them the private URL to use the tool.
Probably emailed a few hundred prospects to get a few dozen customers.
We did some social media DM messaging as well. Either way, it was all outbound.
First few customers are far from "growth". You have to do things that don't scale.
I posted on IHs for months helping people with their landing pages.
Then I launched a side project that did very well. With them combined I built enough trust for my first customer to pay.
The rest was similar
Also we have great customer service, I normally answer in under 30 seconds with helpful advice when I'm online.
Hi,
Indeed, maybe we could say it's the seed before the growth.
Thanks for the useful advice.
So, as I understand it, finding your first customers was a difficult task that took months?
Do you have a timeframe to share?
Like 0 customers for the first 2 months, then 1 next month, then 2 over the next 2 months?
26/07/2019
30/09/2019
01/11/2019
01/20/2019
01/22/2019
First 5, very slow
Awesome; did not expect that many qualitative answers.
So, from what I read, the common facts seem to be that:
I shared my second web hosting company, sold a few years ago now, with friends and family. I have a lot of tech savvy friends that run their own websites, so I knew I had people in that group who would be willing to help me out and try a new hosting service.
My first hosting company... man, I don't even know. I probably ran some ads on Google at the time, and promoted it in a bunch of forums and with some friends. I don't think I personally knew any of my customers then.
Hey there,
Great question!
I felt exactly this way as well. Most podcasts and interviews skip over the really interesting detail of those first few customers.
So I interviewed quite a few successful founders and indie hackers on my SalesForFounders.com podcast, and made sure they walked me through how they found their first, tenth, and 100th customer in detail.
For example, this episode with @lynnetye, and this episode with Jeremy Thiessen (who made $150k in his first year, with no landing page).
Hope this helps!
And - if you're a founder and would like to share how you found your first few customers with a few thousand indie hackers - I'd love to feature you on season 3 of the podcast! Just shoot me an email :)
Initially, we built a minimal landing page with a decent portfolio (We had been running a design shop for more than 10 years and we had a good portfolio to show). We pushed the prototype website live within a week. To validate the idea we first published a Show IH post on IndieHackers and hurray! We received our first 4 customers.
This is where we are currently: https://draftss.com
Meetups can be a good place to find users. Chatting to people that are having the same problem or are in the same industry, it's great to be able to say "This is how I solved it" and show off what you have been working on.