How to Get Your First 10 Customers

When looking at the Googles, Amazons, and Apples of the world, and even the IBMs, Nikes, and Coca-Colas, it can be difficult to remember that they weren’t always enormous companies with globally recognized brands and billion dollar budgets. At some point in their past, they were tiny startups trying to get their first customers.

Since you’re reading this article, I’m guessing you’re closer to being the latter — a tiny startup — than the former. In that case, I want to remind you of an ancient Chinese proverb:

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

While I’m sure the proverb wasn’t directly referencing the work of building startups, the premise is certainly applicable. Successful companies aren’t built overnight. They take years upon years of work. And, more importantly, the work builds on itself. The steps you take in the beginning aren’t going to be the same as the steps you take toward the middle or near the end.

Of the many steps you’ll take while building companies, lots of them will relate to your customer acquisition process. After all, if you can’t sell your product, you don’t have a business.

Customer acquisition is also something that shifts substantially as companies mature. For example, the process Google goes through now to get new customers for a new product is completely different than the kind of work Google did when it was a pre-revenue startup. The reasons it’s so different boils down to two things.

Reason #1: More Resources — The modern, enormous version of Google has almost infinitely more resources at its disposal to acquire new customers than it did when in launched in September of 1998. To be clear, that doesn’t mean the current version of Google is going to spend infinite amounts of money to get new customers. That obviously wouldn’t make sense. But a company as established as Google is 20+ years after launching can certainly afford to devote more time, money, and staff to customer acquisition for new products than a pre-revenue startup.

Reason #2: More Trust — Even the best funded pre-revenue startup in history is going to be missing something critical for customer acquisition: brand recognition. Brand recognition equates to trust in the minds of consumers, and trust is the lynchpin of the sales process because it’s what gives consumers the confidence to spend their money. If, for example, Google tried to sell me a toaster in 1998, I’d probably laugh at the absurdity. But, if Google tried to sell me a toaster today, I’d assume there’s something amazing about the toaster even though the company has never done anything to specifically prove its toast-making bona fides. That’s a byproduct of Google having an established and trusted brand.

While mature companies are able to sell by leveraging their resources and the consumer trust they’ve built, your startup won’t have much of either. Because of that, acquiring your first 10 or so customers means — at a fundamental level — finding ways to compensate for lack of resources and lack of trust.

With this in mind, I’m going to share a strategy I’ve successfully used for getting my first 10 customers in a new startup. Each step helps compensate in some way for either a lack of resources, a lack of trust, or a lack of both.

Step #1: Identify Perfect Prospects

Have you ever seen an advertisement and thought to yourself, “Why would anyone ever buy that?” The reason you thought that was because you weren’t the target customer. The company paying for the advertising was willing to bear the cost of advertising to someone like you — someone who wasn’t a good potential customer — in exchange for the benefit of reaching its target customers who likely had other similar characteristics as you (e.g. enjoys the same TV show, reads the same news website, etcetera).

As a startup with fewer resources, you can’t afford the same kind of waste. To avoid this, you need to be certain every person who receives your marketing message and sales pitch is a good potential customer who’s likely to have the problem you’re trying to solve and capable of paying for a solution.

Filtering your customers in this way requires research. In other words, your first customers should never come from paid advertising campaigns or content marketing campaigns with broad appeal. Your first customers should be people you’ve hand selected based on what you’re able to find out about them.

The best way to find these “perfect prospects” is usually via LinkedIn (or something similar). Use search criteria to filter for people who perfectly align with your ideal customer, and build a list of roughly 200 of them to contact. You won’t contact all 200, but this list of 200 gives you a good place to start.

Step #2: Find Contact Info

In the digital age, finding people’s contact information is creepily easy. Lots of paid tools can help you do this — ZoomInfo, Pipl, Full Contact, RocketReach, Clearbit, and on and on and on.

But you don’t even have to pay. If you’re selling to corporate customers, you can guess their email addresses at least 75% of the time. It’s going to be some combination of “first name” and “last name” at whatever the company’s domain is. For a personal email address, the same is true 40%-50% of the time, except they’ll be using an email account from Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, or some other free service.

For example, my name is Aaron Dinin and I work at Duke University. I guarantee, if you put those two pieces of information together in some logical combination, you’ll have my email address.

Still can’t figure out the email address? You can always use LinkedIn to send a message. Or slide into someone’s DMs on Twitter or Instagram.

In other words, surely you can find some way to connect with a great potential customers. If you absolutely can’t, move on. That’s why you started with a list of 200.

Step #3: Connect with Prospects

At this point you should have a way of contacting between 100–150 people. Each of them should be perfectly positioned to get value from your product. Now it’s time to connect.

But you can’t just send an unsolicited message asking someone to buy a product they didn’t ask for from a company they’ve never heard of. You’re going to waste your time and burn through your prospects list.

Instead, circle back through your list of potential customers and identify all the ones you have some sort of personal connection with. Maybe you share a mutual friend. Maybe you grew up in a nearby city. Maybe you both attended the same college, like the same sports teams, or brew your own craft beer. The type of connection doesn’t matter nearly as much as having something personal you can reference in your initial message. It will help you build trust by signaling to the person you’re messaging that you’re a fellow human with a shared interest and/or knowledge.

For help figuring out exactly how to craft a perfect message, here’s a good article about common mistakes entrepreneurs make when sending cold emails.

Step #4: Learn from Prospects

Even though, ultimately, you’re trying to sell a product, it’s critical that your earliest contact with your first potential customers isn’t about selling. Instead, before they start paying, your first customers should be your product advisors. They should be a source of knowledge you can tap to help you develop a product people want to use.

In order to accomplish this, your first meetings with early prospective customers shouldn’t be sales meetings. They should be product feedback interviews. When you reach out, explain that you’re developing a new product you think they’d get value from, but you’re not ready to start selling it. Instead, you want advice about how to make it better, and you’re hoping, considering their perfect combination of experience and knowledge, that they’d be willing to give you feedback.

Step #5: Test with Prospects

Once a prospect has given you good feedback and you’ve successfully implemented their insights into your product, ask them to test it for you… free of charge, of course.

If the prospect won’t test your product for free, you’ve clearly got a big problem and need to figure out why a perfect customer isn’t interested in using what you’ve built. If the value proposition isn’t worthwhile without them paying, how can you ever expect them to pay?

However, assuming you’ve done a good job listening to your prospects, they should be eager to test what you’ve built. In that case, let them use your product and make sure you’re prepared to listen closely to their feedback. Note, however, that feedback isn’t always verbal. It’s also in the way someone uses a product, how often they use (or don’t use it), and so on.

You need to have infrastructure in place that lets you pay careful attention to how your product is actually being used by testers so you can learn from them even if they don’t explicitly give feedback.

Step #6: Close the Prospects

At this point, you should have at least a couple dozen prospective customers lined up. You’ve spent time getting to know them, you’ve listened to their needs, you’ve developed a product that solved their problems, and you’ve even let them test your product and continued to improve it until it clearly provides value. It’s time to ask for payment.

If you’ve made the right product for the right user, at least 10 of them will agree to start paying you. Congratulations, you’ve got your first 10 customers! It won’t always be this hard, but we’ve all got to start somewhere, right?

Similarly, if less than 10 prospects from your initial batch are willing to pay, don’t feel bad. That’s valuable information, too. It tells you that you either haven’t built the right product or haven’t found the right type of customer. Maybe it tells you both. Don’t give up. You’ve learned a ton, and you can apply all those lessons as you continue moving forward. As the proverb says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

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Aaron Dinin teaches entrepreneurship at Duke University. A version of this article originally appeared on Medium, where he frequently posts about startups, sales, and marketing. For more from Aaron, you can also follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his awesome podcast, Web Masters.