Getting (A Few) Customers

Okay, so we started this company, we had some money from accelerator. Everything is just magic then, right? No, now came the really hard part of going out and getting customers. John would go build. John was my co founder and I would go out, try to get customers. It took us about a year to get nine people using it. And that was with a lot of hard work. That was with if somebody said they were remotely interested, like John and I would go show up at their office and say, okay, you're going to install it now and we're not going to leave until it's installed. Sometimes this took a couple days. So the first year was incredibly hard. We were this new product in the new market that nobody had heard of. And if they had heard of it, they built it in house. The one thing that really kept us going was that the people who did use it seemed to like it. So after the first year we had nine customers. In the second year, we started charging. And this is a different metric. So I say nine customers the first year. What I really mean is users. So when I asked people to start paying, two of them said, we were actually only using this as a favor to you and John. And I said, well, can you pay like $5 so I could claim that we have customers? And they said no, but they had used it. So this is the hard line that you have to learn. If you're going to start a company between users and customers, it's sometimes better to ask for money because then you quickly figure out whether somebody is using it for a favor or for real. However, we did have five customers. This made me really happy. One of them was a company called Auction.com. we'd put up a lot of content, a landing page, and they were the first person that I didn't know who we got to use us. They signed up for more information. I gave the director of engineering a phone call. He said he wanted a system like he'd used at LinkedIn that would help him with releases that had some sort of AB testing and segmentation. I said, we have exactly that. He said, great. So one customer that we didn't know that was willing to pay us five figures at the time gave gave me a ton of hope. Startups are sometimes a slow slog of just like, you just look for these little tiny sparks of hope. I'm like, one person will pay us some money. Cool. Another customer I was really happy about was. So that happened in April, in September, we had about seven customers paying us. And I know it was seven because every month I had my spreadsheet where I would put down what customers started paying us. And every month I'm like, there better be another name or. Or I'm going to be very unhappy. And what made me extremely happy was that somebody signed up and paid that I never met. Like, I just got this automated email. Somebody put down their credit card and paid for it. Cool. So if you're starting a startup, but it's really hard, just always look for some flicker or cadence of stuff is happening and it's starting to move.