How to get your first 10 customers│for first-time founders
Here's my last video on how to get your first ten customers.
This video is for first-time founders.
My first startup failed. Because I made a lot of mistakes. I hope this will help founders not to make the same mistakes as me.
👉 Click on the image below to watch the video.
Drop your comments or questions! 😁
For those who don't have time to watch the video:
Here's a quick wrap-up:
#1 BUILD AN AUDIENCE BEFORE YOU LAUNCH
You can have the world's best product.
But what's the point if nobody knows about your product?
So build an audience even before you start building your product.
Start a blog about the problem you're trying to solve. Or a podcast or making videos.
#2 DEFINE YOUR ICP AND BUYER PERSONA
An ideal customer profile is a description of the company that you believe would be the ideal customer for your product.
Ask yourself: what kind of business will benefit the most from your product?
Build also your Buyer Persona.
A persona will quite often represent a specific buyer or decision maker within your ICP.
They can be CMOs of scale-up startups or SDRs of big companies.
There are many free buyer persona templates on the web.
#3 CREATE A COMPELLING LANDING PAGE
In fact, you don't need a product to sell your product.
If you want to attract early adopters, you can simply create a landing page with compelling images, and a unique value proposition, and pre-sell your product.
You can even "Fake it until you make it" with a fake demo video. It's what Drew Houston did for Dropbox on Digg.
#4 USE YOUR NETWORK
Tap into your network.
Reach out to former colleagues, friends, or family members if you think they’re your target.
Schedule a Zoom call and ask questions about the problem you're trying to solve. You can offer them a free trial if they're interested.
#5 SEND COLD MESSAGES
Cold emailing is one of the easiest techniques to attract your first customers.
Finding your prospects' email addresses isn't too difficult, and you can immediately contact potential customers at scale.
You can even search for questions on Reddit, or Twitter or contact people who left bad reviews on review sites such as Capterra.
That's it!
Of course, all these tips depend on your SaaS and your business model. For example, if it is Sales Led Growth or Product Led Growth.
And you, how did you find your first customers?
Follow me for more posts like this!
I see you mentioned cold DM's but I have observed that FB groups and on twitter people very rarely reply to any DM.
Yes. On Twitter, you have to warm them up first. Engage with their tweets for a week or two and then contact them by DM.
For FB, depends on the group!
Great content Sylvain, appreciate your hard work!
Hi @sylvainnaessens I was just checking your video and youtube compressed the audio way too much. "100% / 100% (content loudness -14.0dB)" Not sure what you edit on, but you might want to try increasing the export volume so that YT doesn't compress it too much.
Thank you for your advice! 🙏 I am gonna check it out.
Have you encountered this problem with other of my videos?
First time someone complains about a low volume issue.
I didn't check, will try later. What are you editing on?
You cover some crucial points in the tl:dr, Sylvain. I was not doing a lot of cold calling and outreach with my previous product. The only activity I ended up doing to find potential customers was attending campus tours of schools in New York to speak to prospective college students.
However, with G&E https://geeksandexperts.com/ I have been a bit more active in getting into Twitter DMs, posting more about the journey on Indie Hackers, Product Hunt and more. The idea is to get feedback on whether a micro consulting platform would be helpful for those who want to enter the micro M&A space through companies like microacquire!
This is brilliant Sneha.
geeksandexperts makes sense to me. Even for first-time founders who want to build a micro SaaS.
And your acquisition strategy with Twitter, PH and Indie Hackers is great!
Keep going! 💪
The audio was very quiet in this video!
I'm building linkkraft (Browser that helps you open a large amount of tabs when you need to squeeze out most useful information from it, here note/landing https://linkkraft.com/notes/trails-tree-plus-offline-for-tool-for-thoughts)
I've not launched yet (it's not polished), but it's almost ready. I'm feeling like I'm over preparing and at the same time I'm not so sure how I can sell it without being ready. Likewise, I'm looking for first customers by telling about the product to a broad audience. (so I'm polishing not just product, but also description of value proposition and going to change that note already).
Imaging most ideal customer as scientist/journalist. Thinking about suggesting it to friend of friend (1 scientist, 2 journalist). Also I'm thinking about cold emails to not so ideal customer.
It feels like I'm doing what you're advising. But in the same time I'm not sure about that. Do you think processing on this would be enough, or you have some specific advice, see some mistake that already can be fixed?
Thank you for your message.
Liinkkraft looks very interesting.
Don't over-prepare.
Make a compelling landing page with a unique value proposition and a short demo video where we see you introducing your product.
This type of product must be free at the beginning. A lot of Chrome Extensions for example start with a freemium model and then launch a premium plan.
Give it to the community you know best: Developers? Researchers? Scientists? People like you who have the same need. Who is most likely to share your product?
Set Zoom calls with them to understand their needs better and their objections.
Improve your product and keep them informed.
Once you have 50 to 100 beta testers, launch it on Product Hunt.
Try to talk to @martijnverbove founder of https://historysearch.com/
He is very helpful.
Hope it helps!