Every big company was once a small company.
Apple was once two guys in a garage. The founder of Lamborghini was once a tractor technician.
They got their first customers by talking to them at conferences for computer enthusiasts, and by chatting with local farmers.
It wasn't a scalable process that would grow the company to where it is now. But it was the best process to get the first customers.
Think about 10, not 10.000
Get one thing out of your head. Stop thinking about what comes after ten customers. The goal is ten. Not more.
Imagine if you had a gun to your head and had to get ten customers by the end of the week. What would you do?
I bet you would call every number on your phone, write to all your LinkedIn connections, and hustle in the local coffee shop to get people to buy from you...
The number one thing people get wrong is thinking about scale.
Will this scale? How many customers will I get out of this?
Those are toxic questions. Your goal is one extra customer at a time. If it brings just one new customer it’s a success. When you have one, getting a second will literally double your business.
If you think about scale, you think about future problems. Let’s solve the scale problems once you get to them.
In the meantime, focus. The question that’s written on your wall is how can I get one more customer?
If you haven't yet, read this classic on doing things that don't scale: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
Define the who and where
The basics of getting customers consist of two steps:
- You create something that some people want
- Now you need to get it in front of those people in the right way
I don't have a magical formula for how to build great products. So I can't help you with step 1. Growing a shitty product is difficult, but it can be done (read Reason number 2 in Why you need customers). I'll let you be the judge of your own product. Here is how to nail step 2.
The who
First, you need to define who are those "some people" who want what you’re building.
Go as niche as possible when defining your target market. Remember, that the goal is ten customers.
Facebook started as a social network for Harvard students (just 20.000 people). That's a very small market, but it was easy to understand and sell to.
Instead, if Facebook targeted all the universities in the world, they would get distracted trying to get some users in Oxford, and some in Berkeley, making the effort much harder.
It's easier to dominate small market than a large one. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is. - Peter Thiel
Watch the next 4 minutes about how Amazon, eBay, and Paypal started with markets that were too small for others to even notice – and still built great businesses.
The where
Figure out where those people spend time. This means both online and offline.
Most people are surprisingly similar: they read their emails in the morning, listen to podcasts on their way to work, chat with co-workers about their weekend, go out to a restaurant for lunch, go to the park to walk a dog, cook based on youtube tutorials, and scroll socials before they go to bed.
You would probably find both a Fortune 500 CEO and a developer indie hacker fresh out of school with this schedule.
MVP marketing plan template
Before you read on, fill in this marketing plan template for your product. It's so much easier to work with things formalized on paper.
What are you building? | I am building a mobile app to show you when and where to go for new powder snow in Austria. |
Who is it for? | It's for snowboarders who like going off-piste in Austria. |
Where they spend time online? | They probably follow snowboarders on Instagram, watch snowboarding videos on YouTube, check out weather apps for snow reports, and read snowboarder forums about best off-piste routes. |
Where they spend time offline? | They probably spend time in snowboard shops and pubs in major ski resorts. |
Since you’re just getting started the product should be simple. This means that defining what problem you solve should come naturally. It’s not the time for fancy slogans, simply saying what you do should be enough to get your first customers. Read → Making the perfect landing page (when you have <100 customers) to know what that means for your landing page.
Start hacking growth
Now depending on what you wrote, pick the hacks that fit you the best. Since the goal is ten customers, you really need just one or two hacks to work for you.
Start with these quick non-scalable hacks with an instant feedback loop and no budget required → Hacks to get you from 0 to 10 customers.
Can’t get 10 customers? Move on…
Failing is ok. Don’t take it from me, take it from Michal Jordan.
What is not ok is wasting time on something that will never work. If you can’t get ten customers for your product, how can you expect to get a hundred?
There are so many opportunities out there. Try the next one, and get lucky!
