Found marketing channels & started marketing

My good friend Ben (he is a big time seller on Udemy) says "First Find Your First Customer".

So I thought hard, searched and found a few (actually many) good marketing channels where I can find potential buyers.

Of course the first port of call was my own closest network. Unlike my older ideas which would get an "I am not sure" reaction from many people, this time I got "oh interesting, look here or there" kind of reactions. This was a positive :)

So I moved on to a slightly wider circle. A few companies that I knew from my past works and I could contact; and then some others that I did not know much but which I suspected wanting this service.

This job of finding the first customer is really really hard. This is going from ZERO TO ONE (as Peter Thiel says) and it is really hard.

But here are the results so far: 43 companies or persons contacted and one person replied saying "Acknowledged, I have forward to the right persons in the company". I look at these numbers as follows:

Emailing companies or persons in this way is like a "slightly-targeted" advertising campaign on platforms like LinkedIn or GoogleAds. So far, about 50 impressions of my Ad (well, 43 to be accurate) resulted in one single click. Anyone who has done Ads would tell you that if you turn 1% of your clicks into a sale then you have a business. By those measures, I need at least another 100 acknowledged (emails such as the aforementioned response I got) to go before I know whether I am in business or not.

Besides, I think those 1/100 kind of statistics apply to one-time-buy products or services. To give your customer support and bug fixing (which would need exposing your source code to a 3rd party) would need a lot more deliberation than a click. So I am gonna set a different goal for myself.

If I get 100 acknowledgements (which at the observed rate would mean at least another 450 cold emails) and if I get 1 "request for further information" from a "curious potential buyer" then I would say I am in business. That one call would equate someone wanting to open their wallet for the service I have to offer - regardless of what the outcome will be, this would mean business - one that may need an expert in sales! :)