How to acquire your first 100 customers with no prior experience.

Getting your first customers is hard! After spending a month on building our product 'Outread', we shipped it out to several online communities to get some traction. Little did I realise how hard it was going to be to get our first user. Several times I felt like giving up but startups only take off because the founders make them take off.

Our product, out-read.com lets you read digestible summaries of top research articles. So kind of like the Blinkist for research articles.

Startups are hard but not impossible. A lot of it just comes down to experimentation. I think it was someone on IndieHacker that said - “Work, apply common sense and stuff will happen”. I couldn’t agree more. It’s all about trying to increase your chances of success by trying as many things as possible. Put yourself in the position to get lucky. Doing a lot helps a lot.

After 4 months of hustling, we were finally able to get our first 100 customers and I want to share some resources that we used to get to that stage.

#1 - Online Communities

We leveraged whatever online community we could find. Some examples include - ProductHunt, HackerNews, subreddits (r/entrepreneur, r/startups, r/sideproject) and obviously IndieHacker. We got our first few users through these platforms. A platform that might be worth looking into would be Appsumo. They do marketing for you, so you don’t have to invest a lot of time and money into doing it yourself.
ProductHunt also seems to be a great go-to but make sure to build a community that you can leverage before you launch on ProductHunt.

#2 - Emails

Next, we thought of reaching out to our target market (including executives, researchers, and entrepreneurs) using emails. We scraped emails from online databases and emailed these guys. Unfortunately, the results weren’t great but we got some users chatting with us.

#3 - In-Person

Next, just pitch your idea to whoever you think could be a relevant customer. I attended nearby events like startup panels, conferences and shows to talk to as many people. It’s all about increasing your chances of success by trying as many things as possible.

#4 - Paid Ads

We tried paid ads on Instagram and Reddit. While reddit advertising didn’t give us the best results, we did learn a lot. Instagram, on the other hand, resulted in some paid subscribers. We utilised 'video' influencer marketing to build brand reputation.
We even summarised a research article recently on our website that showed - the more consistent your brand is with the influencer’s image, the more likely it is that users will buy your product. If you don't want to pay influencers, ask them to become an affiliate instead.

#5 - Customer Calls

Any customer we ever received, we reached out to them via email. We tried to set up calls with as many as possible and hear their feedback real-time. Whatever feedback we got through them, we then implemented it on the website. Not only is it a way to make the customer feel valued but you’re also improving your product.

#6 - Facebook Groups

Several facebook groups allow you to post your side hustle or project. These groups are open to trying out new products and can be a great way to get your early users. Here’s a list of top facebook groups that you can use to post your product - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16_jWyq1j7YgkiX4QltHjmbxafY78tIVDQeX8UY5o-jg/edit?usp=sharing

#7 - Blogs

Several online blogs and sites might write about your industry. Reach out to these writers via Linkedin or email. After reaching out to 20 journalists and bloggers, we got 2 to write about us. Don’t worry if it’s just 2 blogs, it’s better than 0 and can still help to reach your goal of 100 customers. Once again, the more you do, the more you get.

Something as simple as “I heard about your blog on X. I am writing to you, to see if there is any way we can convince you to write a review article of our startup?” - will work. Send them a link to your presskit along with this.

#8 - Research other Startup Stories

I definitely read A LOT of blogs and growth hack stories from other startups. I even listened to podcasts and watched YouTube videos. There's always something to be learned if you look into other startup success stories. A lot of the ideas we had around promoting our product were through reading about other startups.

If you haven’t already, check out Paul Graham’s blog - “Do Things that don’t scale.”

Hope that helps!