Share your story: How did you find your very first Paying Customer for B2B saas product?

in case this is something you've struggled with, I have about 15 podcast episodes where I ask successful founders and Indie Hackers exactly how they made their first, tenth, and 100th sales.

We go into excruciating, step by step detail of how exactly it went down, what mistakes they made, and what you should do differently in your own business.

Here's the most recent episode, where @baird talks about finding his first customers for Wavve.co and Zubtitle.com

Mine was from a tech conference where they gave us a table. Number 2 was from a 1 Million Cups talk.

Hi, 👋 Michael here I am the founder of Story Creator.

I was able to acquire my first customer from a cold DM. I reached out with a very personal video message. Then from there, we formed a genuine connection. We scheduled a call and from there it was really a user interview. Not much selling involved.

He mentioned he needed audiograms for his podcast and would like animated text intros. So I explained that my tool does all of that effortlessly.

From there I gave him a few free videos to feel it out and he loved it. Now he uses it for all his episodes.

Our company is a B2B SaaS [FinTech] solution. Our most successful strategy early on was sponsoring newsletter from bloggers with trusted content in our space. Generated significant inbound traffic to our site. We managed to convert those into pilots and paying customers. Apologies for the brief response but feel free to message me for additional details, happy to share.

Not sure what type of product you're selling, but here are some tips for a product geared toward enterprise:

1. Find the right person

The most important thing is finding someone whose job performance is measured by a metric you can improve AND who has the ability to make a purchasing decision. This will usually be someone at the Director level or higher.
If you can picture a scenario where the person gets a promotion as a result of implementing your product, you should be able to make a case for a discussion. Cold emails or LinkedIn messages with the right content that plays to the person's own professional interests worked well for us.

2. Convince them you can deliver

The first sale in B2B is always the hardest because you have no references and no case studies. We got the ear of a Product Director at a top retailer through the approach above. But the larger the company, the more risk averse they tend to be. Initially we were written off as a non-starter since we were a 2 person company with no track record. We offered to travel to their campus on our dime to educate their team on our field (NLP) and they took us up on it. We did all-day training sessions which were 80% general "state of the art" and 20% how our solution solves their problems. This built goodwill. We then followed up over the following weeks with multiple demos of our technology applied to their data. This eventually got us a paid pilot. At this point since you have no customers and ample time on your hands, you should pour 100% of your energy into overdelivering on the pilot. Your biggest selling point will be your responsiveness to their specific needs. Granted, this whole approach only really works if you're targeting a very large contract.

3. Close the deal

Congratulations, you've delivered a great pilot and you've been connected with the dreaded procurement person to negotiate a contract. This is too complex to cover succinctly, but the best advice I can give is to start really high because they will bully you way down from wherever you start. This includes the price tag, duration, SLA, everything. As your first sale, you should favor overall deal size over nearly every other aspect ($1M over 5 years is better than $500k over 2 years) since investors will care primarily about the total dollar size under contract.

Hope this is helpful.

For my current project https://www.influencegrid.com/ I cold emailed 5 journalists in the social media space who had written about TikTok recently. You can use https://rocketreach.co/ to find their emails.

This resulted in this article which drove the first few sign ups and keeps driving a trickle of traffic many months later https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-app-lists-tiktok-influencers-by-engagement-topic-and-audience/568736/

I can't contribute anything, but I've tried to sell a B2B SaaS solution before, and the sales cycle and uncertainty were just too brutal to handle.

I had to start another business altogether, as I needed the short-term high of signing up yet another customer every few days, even though they may be low-ticket/low-ARPU.

I learned that, in general, indie hackers aren't built for the cut-throat world of B2B sales.

Hang in there.

Both b2b saas products I've had success with came from building a solution for a company I knew or worked with.
That was an easy sell and in both cases I didn't charge them. It validated the idea and helped me refine it a lot more.
From there I moved to marketplace listings. I like building on platforms that have directories (slack, shopify, salesforce, aws etc all have these). If you solve a specific thing there's a good chance people are already searching for it.

i wrote something about this because i followed this product-market fit process... which ultimately led to sales... but, here's more of a written step-by-step...

so... i can talk about yen:

1. talk about the project (e.g. on sites like IH, product hunt, your own blog, on twitter, fb, etc...!) — i just started talking about it, literally.
2. asking folks, who are interested, to follow the project more closely... like on those sites listed on part 1.
3. start engaging more deeply on sites listed on part 1. become amazing. become valuable. be an excellent community member. a model citizen!
4. some of these folks will follow you back. they might actually sign up for a newsletter or email you or engage with you actively on sites listed on part 1.
5. when you're ready, you start inviting some of these folks to do customer interviews. this isn't a hard process, but, it does take practice and you have to do a lot of them (whatever number you're thinking... multiply it by 10, at least!).
6. build your mvp
7. price the product. don't be fucking lame here: raise prices.
8. introduce the product offering to the community, usually on places listed on part 1 (lol!).
9. if no one bites, get feedback. run the process. iterate on price.
10. rinse and repeat.

i got my first YEN.CAMP doing just that... in 6 weeks we were on the board with $177.00 in mrr.

:)