Your first 100 customers. The first 100 people that use your product are validation, yes. Plugins for quickbooks for macbook pro. They prove that you've made something that other people actually want. A shift in your business. Long term, this is a core-business issue. If your product is just “nice to have,” you’ll perpetually struggle to get customers. And getting customers at any price-point higher than $20 will be borderline impossible. At the core of your business, you need to do at least one of the following in a major way: Save time. To get to our first 100, we tried everything you can possibly imagine, from cold calling, creating joint venture partnerships, reaching out to forums like Quora, and even sending hand-written notes with a discount coupon (this put a bright smile to many customers 🙂 ). Get a business bank account. You’ll need to set up a business bank account to deposit payments, pay suppliers and staff, and complete all of the other financial transactions involved in the everyday running of a business. Banks such as RBS offer good deals for small businesses. Make your first hire(s) if you can afford to.
So you’ve got a great product that you believe solves a major issue in your chosen niche. That’s great -- but running a successful startup isn’t just about you. The real question is, how do you go about getting others to recognize this value and adopt your proposed solution?
Every young business faces the challenge of acquiring its first users, but before we dive into specific strategies for doing just that, it’s important to remember who these first customers are and what they mean for your company.
Very few startups hit the market fully-fleshed out with every feature working perfectly. As a result, your initial launch isn’t generally the best time to try to drive massive growth, whether through paid ad campaigns, referral programs or other common growth hacks.
Related: Is Growth Hacking Right for Your Company?
Instead, look at these primary participants as your beta users. Actively solicit their feedback and use their suggestions to improve your product. Once they see your responsiveness and the quality of the product you’re offering, they’ll become the brand evangelists needed to power the next stage of growth.
Now, with that in mind, here are three ideas for finding your first 100 “beta test” customers:
1. Seek out your competitors’ press. If your startup takes an existing product concept and improves upon it, you should be able to find media sources in every industry that have covered your competitors’ solutions. One of the easiest ways to do this is to set up Google Alerts for your competitors’ brand names. Whenever you see their names pop up in the media, reach out to the same publications or reporters to pitch a story about your new solution.
Alternatively, if your product solves a completely new need that isn’t being addressed by the market, you may not be able to “piggyback” on existing stories in this way. Instead, you’ll need to take a broader approach and be more proactive about reaching out to the sources that might be interested in your solution. Consider using sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn to build relationships with the reporters you identify before pitching your story, instead of sending a cold inquiry.
2. Answer pain point questions. If you don’t know what pain points your startup’s product solves, you’ve got much bigger problems than acquiring your first 100 customers! Do not pass “Go” and do not collect $200 -- you’ve got to first figure out the specific problems you’re solving and how your product-market fit does this better than any of your competitors.
Once you know your product’s target pain points, look for places online where people are asking questions related to these needs. If, for example, your startup targets graphic designers, a niche site such as Designer News gives you the opportunity to respond directly to posted news stories and questions -- both demonstrating your authority and including mentions of your product where appropriate. Several YCombinator users also suggest Reddit as a powerful place to find these questions.
Related: 3 Ways to Treat Early Adopters Like Royalty
Just be careful not to spam. It’s far better to become a trusted member of your community than to wind up blacklisted for posting promotions at every opportunity.
3. Talk to people in your industry. Remember at the start of this article, when I mentioned how you should treat your first 100 users as more of a learning curve than a revenue engine? This particular growth strategy highlights exactly how doing so can lead to both product improvements and customer acquisition.
When you’re in the earliest stages of your startup’s growth, one of the best things you can do is to reach out to people in your industry who are both highly-regarded and who might be potential users of your product down the road. But when you reach out, don’t pitch your product. Instead, tell them that you’re developing a product in their industry and that you’d like to pick their brains about what their needs are and how they’re currently solving them.
You likely won’t get a 100 percent response rate (though, as Jason Cohen of WPEngine found out, you can improve your odds significantly by offering to pay these experts for their time). No matter how many interviews you get, use them for information gathering only and ask permission to follow up when your product will be able to meet their needs. If you’ve done your job and created the best possible solution to their pain points, you’ll have the opportunity to acquire these experts as early-stage users and to ultimately have them recommend your product to their followers and customers.
Once you’ve got your first 100 customers, responsiveness is key. Show them how important they are to your company and how much their feedback is valued and they’ll play a major part in driving future growth for you.
Related: 4 Steps to Ace an Early-Adopter Culture
Many startups die trying to find early traction. Here’s how we survived.
When we hit our original goal of $100,000 in monthly revenue, I mentioned that there were plenty of lessons from the early days that still hadn’t been told.
This is one of them.
As we draw closer and closer to our 3,000th paying customer, I get more and more questions about our first users.
Specifically, about how we signed up our earliest paying customers; a huge challenge — and monumental milestone — for any startup.
It’s important to note that these aren’t tactics to get paying customers today. None of them worked instantly for us.
Much like the team at Unbounce, we started working on building our customer base long before we had an actual product. And even after we launched, we offered Groove for free to everyone, so our very first users didn’t pay a dime.
It wasn’t until several months later when we finally turned on paid accounts that we got any paying customers. But by then, we had more than 1,000 free users, and more than 100 of them converted to paying customers on the first day.
It’s not easy, and there’s no silver bullet, but below are the tactics we used to lay the groundwork that let us get more than 100 paying customers in a single day.
Early Customer Development
We’ve made no secret of the fact that we worship customer development at Groove. Getting — and staying — close to our customers has been the lifeblood of our business. Open dmg on windows.
That obsession started long before we had a product. When we were building our first sketches and Groove’s early prototype, back I was the only non-technical person on the team, nearly all of my time was spent on customer development.
1) Reaching Out to My Existing Network
In the early days of Groove, my network wasn’t particularly impressive, but I had gotten to know a handful of small business owners during my time building my last company.
These were the first people I reached out to. I wanted to validate that others had the same pain that I felt with customer service software.
I sent emails to those that I knew had to deal with support for their businesses, and I asked if they’d be willing to talk to me about their experiences.
I was surprised at how willing most folks were to help.
On our calls, I’d ask questions like:
- How is your team handling support right now?
- What do you like about it?
- What sucks about it?
- Have you tried anything else that didn’t work? Why didn’t it work?
Note how none of these questions pitched Groove. In early customer development, you’re not selling. You’re learning.
I’d let the person know that I was hoping to have a product launched in a couple of months, and ask if I might be able to reach out to them once it was live to get their feedback.
“Feel free to say no,” I told them. “This has already been really helpful.”
Almost all of them said yes.
The Prospecting Multiplier: Every time I spoke with someone about Groove, I’d end the call with a simple request: “Is there anyone else you know that might be able to give me good feedback on their customer support experience? Even one introduction would be hugely appreciated.”
Many people did give me referrals, and this created a powerful multiplier effect as we built our early prospect list.
2) Learning From Our Competitors’ Customers
I wanted to talk to people who used our competition’s software so that I could learn how to make our own product better.
So every time I was getting online support from a company — whether I was troubleshooting software or returning a pair of shoes — and I noticed that they were using Zendesk, I’d ask them about their experience.
Again, many people were more than willing to chat, and this led to a lot of great insight that helped us improve our positioning and messaging early on.
Note: you can approach a moral grey area very quickly with this tactic. I do not recommend using this to poach customers from your competitors; it’s sleazy and will probably get you low-quality customers.
On the other hand, I absolutely recommend having conversations with your competitors’ customers about their experience, especially if they’re avid fans of the product. You’ll learn a lot.
3) Fishing on Twitter
Another way I got to chat with people who used competing software is by using Twitter search.
I’d look for people complaining about other support products, and ask them if they’d be willing to chat. This helped us steer clear of building a lot of the existing pains people had into Groove.
Networking
As my existing network wasn’t that big, I worked hard to build relationships with people who could one day get value from Groove.
4) Going to Local Meetups
While there isn’t a whole lot of meetup activity here in Newport, I’m not far from Providence, where the scene is vibrant and events are frequent.
Early on, I’d go to a lot of these events to meet other small business owners. I’d help them however I could (with introductions, advice, etc.), and many of them were happy to participate in the same customer development circuit that I put my own network through.
5) Getting Involved With Local Incubators
A few weeks ago I wrote that getting rejected from YC doesn’t matter. And I believe it deeply.
But incubators are a great source for networking, even if you aren’t a member.
At first, I did things the wrong way: approaching incubator leaders and asking for access to pitch their startups. Not surprisingly, all refused.
When that failed, I tried to build relationships with two or three startups in every local incubator, and then asked for introductions to their classmates.
Many of these startups ended up becoming some of our most active early users.
Turning early leads into users: Most — an overwhelming majority, in fact — of the early people I spoke with did not end up trying Groove. But some did. And that’s why it was so important to put in the time to reach as many people as I could, so that even with a single-digit conversion rate, we could get enough early users to start growing our business.
Don’t take it personally when people don’t end up using your product. Switching is hard, and you’re asking for a lot. Early on, our new users skewed heavily toward teams coming from simply using a shared Gmail inbox, rather than those using Zendesk or Desk, because the switching costs were low enough to take a risk on an unknown product. Now, the ratio looks quite different.
Marketing & PR
Once our beta version was ready for testing, we began to work on getting the word out about our new product.
6) Getting Early Press Coverage
Of all the PR pitches we sent (more than 30) we only got a single bite, from The Next Web. And it wasn’t even really a bit, as they ignored us at first, but then wrote about it after a friend of ours pinged them on Twitter. But fortunately, they liked Groove:
A week later, we had around 1,000 beta signups, many of them driven from TNW.
So naturally, we wrote about it…
7) Creating Early Content
Our early blogging efforts look* *nothing like our blog does today. It was a lot of stumbling and trying to figure things out.
The first post we had that did well would eventually become the post that inspired this Journey to $500K blog that you’re reading now. It was about how we got 1,000+ private beta signups.
Honestly, it’s a bit embarrassing to read. The post would never see the light of day on the blog today, but we took an important first step in realizing the power of content marketing when the post got picked up on Hacker News, and even reached the top spot for nearly half of a day.
The Hacker News traffic brought more free signups, many of them much closer to our ideal customer persona than the average TNW reader.
8) Leveraging the Network Effect for Beta Signups
Like many software companies, we kept our beta limited so that we wouldn’t bite off more than we could chew. So through all of our outreach efforts, we sent visitors to a beta signup form that would put them on a waiting list, and then offer them a chance to advance by sharing the form.
This increased our free beta signups at the time by nearly 30%.
By the time we were ready to turn on paid accounts, we had more than 2,000 people sign up for free Groove accounts.
On the day we made the switch, more than 100 of our free users chose to sign up.
How To Get Your First 100 Customers
And while our product has gone through massive overhauls and improvements since those early days, that first group of customers formed the core of our feedback loop that helped us turn Groove into what it is today.
How to Apply This to Your Business
Some of this stuff might seem silly because of how elementary it is. But that’s the point: nothing that we did to get our first paying customers was magical or impossible.
It was simply hard. It took a lot of legwork. More than I had ever done before.
And it’ll likely be the same for you.
How To Get Your First 100 Customers Make
But you don’t even have to have a product ready to get started. In fact, if you can, I’d start well before you launch.
How To Get Your First 100 Customers Get
No matter what stage you’re in, I hope this post has given you some ideas to get out there and get the traction you need to start growing.