How to find your first 10 customers in 10 days without talking about your product features

Attn: SaaS Startup Founders:

How to find your first 10 customers in 10 days without talking about your product features using “10 Smart Market Diagnosis and Profiling Questions” by Dan S. Kennedy

How to find your first 10 customers using a proven framework?

The following is a short introduction on how to find your first 10 customers for your startup. This is based on my experience working with startups and talking to founders who were successful at finding their first 10 customers.

I am not going to get into details of what your product or service should be, but rather focus on how you can find your first 10 customers in 10 days without talking about the features of your product.

If you're a B2B SaaS founder, the most important thing might be to start asking yourself "smart" market diagnosis and profiling questions and start thinking about your first 10 customers. The best way is to find out what would make them satisfied and understand your customer deep down. First, start asking questions to yourself like:

• How many target customers do I have and what is their typical demographic"?
• How can I get my most committed customers to become promoters of my product or services?
• What are common complaints or challenges that are faced by our target audience?
• How are other companies in the industry addressing these challenges?
• What do they offer that may work for me, too?
• Who are my competitors and why should people choose me over them?

What can I offer to my target audience,

In the following, we applied the “10 Smart Market Diagnosis and Profiling Questions” by Dan S. Kennedy

10 Smart Market Diagnosis and Profiling Questions” by Dan S. Kennedy

Q1. What keeps them awake at night?

When I was starting the business, the question that kept me awake at night was "will this company succeed?

I knew people were prepared to buy what I had to sell. We took lots of care in putting together a service that would deliver value for customers and an easy process for them to use it. So why did I have sleepless nights? Because when you're running your own company - particularly if it is one with no track record or external validation - everything rests on your shoulders. There is nobody else who can step up and do what needs to be done if you don't get it right. It's hard not to think about things like "what happens if we run out of cash" or "if we fail will my investors be upset?"

Q2. What are they afraid of?

I recently attended a B2B SaaS Startup event. The speaker said that he gets very nervous before every pitch, regardless of what type of company is being pitched to nor how much value it provides in clients' business.

He also shared the following tips in terms of pitching:

1) Don't rush out with your first pitch

2) Keep it simple

3) Remember whom you are talking to

4) Provide them the immediate pain

5) Be honest

6) Tell stories

7 ) Say thank you

Q3. What are they angry about? Who are they angry at?

They are angry because they know that their company is not performing as well as it could, and they feel frustrated about the fact that no matter what they do, nothing seems to work.

The thing is, I am not sure anymore. I have spent the last 6 years of my life trying pretty hard to understand how people buy things that are written in English on paper or screens. Sure, it has been a wild ride with more failures than successes, but hey! you live and you learn. I have learned some amazing stuff across 4 million page views and several hundred thousand blog posts read by thousands (or hundreds) of human beings (and bots). I can't even begin to describe what this journey has taught me about marketing — well actually — no; oh wait — yes I can:

Marketing comprises everything that surrounds any activity whatsoever relating to identifying or satisfying consumer needs for particular products and services including advertising research studying behavioral patterns.

Marketing is about getting people ready for your product. Branding takes them away from the competition. Promotion creates a desire for it. Customer Service delivers the value once they have bought it while public relations builds loyalty to the company itself, its core belief system, and vision

Q4. What are their top three daily frustrations?

They spend too much time finding the right sales leads.

They can't get enough qualified prospects at their fingertips anywhere or anytime. This is especially true in smaller companies with only one or two people handling marketing and sales.

They struggle to find what buyers are Looking For

If you can help them solve these three daily frustrations, they will be your loyal buyer for life!

Q5. What trends are occurring and will occur in their businesses or lives?

Trends in business

1. Efficiency (i.e., use less labor force): I am able to use less labor force because I have been able to automate many tasks with technology.

2. Automation (i.e., reduce labor): remove the human element to lower costs and improve quality; eliminate unnecessary material handling.

3. Reducing ordering frequency by faster fulfillment; improve customer service by real-time communication with customers that weren't possible before the Internet of Things, etc.; self-serve computer kiosks that don't require local employees because all transactions are done electronically without human contact, etc.

4 . Replace salespeople & unproductive tasks with technology/automation: automation reduces errors because there is no "gray" or ambiguous area where someone can deliberately or accidentally make mistakes due to

Q6. What do they secretly, ardently desire most?

The more they succeed, the more nervous and miserable they feel. The ultimate solution is not to aim for money or fame but rather to be happy with who you are and what you do.

Money can buy happiness if it's used in ways that align with your gifts and passions. It's when we're piling up riches just for the sake of it that we get into trouble: chasing an unquenchable fire, never satisfied no matter how much we acquire. All this comes from a sense of identity based on scarcity and lack, which feels like there isn't enough time or resources to live life fully becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We know deep down inside that life is meant for so much more than purchasing products.

Q7. Is there a bias to the way they make decisions?

They use more logic- or data-driven decisions. When making or evaluating an important decision, they will consider the following 4 criteria:

They will weigh heavily the risk-reward ratio. The more uncertain I feel about this decision, the greater the perceived rewards need to be in order for me to make this decision.

They will consider previous decisions that yielded positive or negative results and what alternative actions would have been undertaken if they had known it was going to go differently than expected.

They are not above rehashing past mistakes - whether personally made by them themselves or others they've observed - to avoid making similar mistakes again, doing things better next time, etc.

Another question is titled "They keep their emotions out of important decisions", which is great because many founders struggle with rationalizing extremely emotional business or personal decisions.

Q8. Do they have their own language?

Having its own language is a big indicator of tribalism. The language part can be simple or complicated depending on the level of sophistication and abstraction, but it exists as a means to further differentiate from other tribes.

I found an interesting follow-up question about the tribe's "secret handshake" that Dan Kennedy has asked his audience at one of his speaking events:

Q9. Who else is selling something similar to them, and how?

A recent write-up by Thomas Davenport in the Harvard Business Review " Competing on Analytics, Data Mining and Predictive Techniques ", led me to think about this. He says that analytics are being used by businesses in several ways :

For example, one company tracks how long it takes its customers to fill out online forms. They noticed that when certain fields were livelier than others (for instance, when there were lots of competitors listed), people took longer to submit their data. So they changed the way people filled in these fields -- for instance, showing only three competitors rather than five -- thus reducing completion times. That simple implementation can save up to 10 hours of staff time per week on entering new orders into the system.

Q10. Who else has tried selling them something similar, and how has that effort failed?

I have been told that I should contact the [Insert company]. [Story of how their effort failed].

[Note: You can find a great example of this in "The Most Dangerous Business Book Ever Written" by Guy Kawasaki. In one chapter, he tells a story about his previous venture and how it flopped.]

The 'How did we get started?' Story

This is an interesting question because people love to tell stories, and why not include something like this in your startup's marketing material?

It shows growth and validation for any startup and helps build rapport with the reader/listener you're communicating with. Therefore, when they later read or hear your tagline (whatever it will be), they'll remember you.

So here is what you can do right now

You should use social media and cold calling to find out customer problems. For the first 10 days, you will call up 100 prospects on a daily basis and try to understand their pain points that can be solved by our product. If we get 10 customers then it's good enough for us, if not then we need to re-do our market diagnosis again.