How to (easily) get customers #6–50, and how I did it

Recap: Our first 5 customers

Last time we talked about getting our first 5 customers through warm leads and how this can be done easily if we’ve been talking to customers throughout the process of forming our idea.

When done this way, by the time we are ready to bring on our first customer, we have dozens of warm leads and know their pain points intimately.

Our goal with customers 6-50

Now we’re ready to get customers 6 to 50, and the process is pretty simple, and in a sense a continuation of where we left off getting customers 1-5.

We will keep the process fairly hands-on, and we want to be sure not to get ahead of ourselves and try to scale things too quickly.

We still have a lot to learn about people’s workflows, and what they expect out of the product. This is when we start to see what people do and don’t find important.

The conversations we’ve had up to this point will have been valuable, but this is when we get to find out if what people have told us turns out to be accurate in reality.

Our product is not yet dialed and there’s still plenty of room for improvement in our product market fit, and we’re likely to find a lot of subtleties in how people use our product and what they find confusing, and that’s our real job right now.

Finding customers 6-50

In my case, after customer 5, I continued to reach out to the warm leads I had generated in all my earlier conversations, but I also was constantly creating more warm leads through cold outreach.

In my case, I was using the tool I was building to automate the outreach on LinkedIn, but my messaging was still very soft and not salesy.

I would say that I’m working on a product and would love their feedback. This was low-pressure and a gentle way to start to build trust. It wasn’t that much different than how I reached out to people for the earlier conversations, except that more of these people were cold leads, and I wasn’t relying on existing relationships or introductions as much. Many people accepted and I did countless demos day after day, for months.

A good percentage of these “demo” calls turned into sales, but they also taught me invaluable information about their processes, the work they use, and their pain points, information that is much more concrete than what you can get from those early conversations.

On top of that, it built a lot of trust and started generating a little more word of mouth.

Summary

For customers 6 to 50, the best thing we can do is to invest the time into continuing to talk to as many people as we can - this time showing them the product and learning all we can from them, both about their processes, pains, and how they use the tool.

And by the end of this, we should start having some meaningful revenue.

After customer 50, we will start to think about all the things we’ve learned and how to best scale.

That’s when the real fun starts.

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