From Zero to 10 Paying Customers: The No-Code Blueprint for Brave Founders

Welcome to a new episode of no Code Wizardry. Today we're going to be discussing how to get your first 10 paying customers, how to go from idea to launching a product that actually has 10 people paying for it. And I share with you a little bit of the journey that we typically go through. A little bit of a roadmap. And hopefully you guys will, you know, you'll find some, some really cool insights from it.

Sure. And I think this is something that speaks to the true underlying problem that a lot of people face when they're contemplating creating a new something, especially in.

Bubble, especially in the bubble community.

In the bubble community or in the software community, there are in general smart.

People building some really cool things that are really struggling to actually get paying customers to use them.

And a lot of that comes from the lack of methodology that we're going to talk about in this episode that I think is really important. But I do want to start off saying that.

We'Re not talking now about founders that have a million dollars in the bank to finance their projects. That's a whole different ballgame. I'm not even sure it's a better ballgame, but it's definitely different.

I mean, if you've got a million bucks to spare, it doesn't hurt, right?

Well, it doesn't hurt, but maybe that's not the best use of your million buc if they're yours. And let's face it, most of us out there, we don't have, you know, strong connections in the VC world.

And we're not in Silicon Valley.

We're not in Silicon Valley, we're not tech bros. And that means that having those resources is probably not going to happen. And that's a real shame because probably 90% of the best ideas aren't Silicon Valley and they aren't had by tech bros. And they don't have connections that guarantee them access to, you know, funding and, you know, whatever it be, all the resources that some lucky, you know, people may have. And I think that's kind of speaks to the core of what we believe in here at ratio.dev, where we're always about the little guys, we're always about the, you know, this doesn't require that you have all that money, that you have all those connections, that you have all those, I don't know, a rich uncle or a dead grandma who had, you know, inherited gazillions. And I think that there is a pathway, and I think that what we're going to talk about is going to be sort of inspiring and I hope interesting to the people out there that have great ideas and they're one wondering, can I make it happen?

And just to follow up on you on what you just said, when you don't have that one million dollar budget to be able to market your app, the great application that you spent a couple weeks building or a month or a few months building, that means that you typically need to substitute ingenuity and bravery in for the lack of money that you have.

Definitely. You can't be bland, you can't be boring, you can't be just another voice in the crowd because you can't afford to or pay people to find out about you or create enough noise artificially through advertising to to be noticed. And so you have to get noticed another way.

Which is why when we typically sit down with clients as well, we just, we like meeting the founders and I am trying to see if we're a good fit for each other because there are instances in which we, we sort of, we can, we can kind of tell whether someone's going to make it or not just based off whether they're brave enough to, to put themselves out there and make some noise.

Exactly. And maybe, hey, maybe there's other formulas out there for the timid.

Right.

I hope so. I've seen too many of them fail. But I do know that if you don't have the resources to go it the big corporate way, you've got to come up with some other pathway. And the one that has always served us well in the past has been to be bold and to be brave and to say what you think and have your own personality and to hell with the rest of the world.

So one of the first things that we wanted to bring up as one of the main key points in today's episode is that we are strong believers in Alex Hormos idea of going for high ticket paying customers first.

First, definitely, yeah. I mean when you're putting every penny in the game out of your pocket, you need to think about where the next penny is coming from. And to be honest, making a sale is almost as difficult to make a $10,000 sale as it is to make a $10 sale. The mechanics of the process are very similar. Sure, maybe there's a slight impulse buy thing that can make a low ticket offer slightly easier to buy, but that isn't the, you can't rely on that. That's not going to, it's not going to get you out of the hole.

Why do we as entrepreneurs and to be honest, just as regular human beings, why are we prone to believing that hey, if I raise, if I lower my prices, I'm going to get more customers. And this is a mistake that we, you know, when we've launched our own products, this is something that I always fall victim of. And I always, almost always tell you, aren't we, aren't we putting up our prices a little too high maybe? And you always keep telling me, no, we're not.

No. Well, first of all, let's think about it. The world is a big place.

Yeah, it's big.

I mean, there's like what, 7 billion of us out there now. And if you go to China and you say, I want to just market to the top 10% of Chinese people, man, they're probably all filthy rich because there's so many. Okay? Because just by the numbers game. So there really isn't a reason why you can't just focus on the big ticket customers at the beginning. Then you can learn to scale and you can learn to adapt what you do really well for those big ticket customers to broaden your reach. But let's face it, most new businesses don't need, don't want, shouldn't try to get 10,000 customers. They're better off with 10 and doing a damn good job of satisfying them.

And do you know what I was just thinking of? I was being reminded of even how big corporations do this. If you take Apple for example, they put out those Apple vision pros at $3,500 knowing that, hey, there's only a limited amount of them that we can make. Why are we, why are we going to try to sell them to, you know, the, the middle class person in America if we can sell them to the filthy rich people in the world.

And we only have a limited supply.

Right.

And we don't know yet if there's going to be mass market appeal for this product. And it's probably not quite ready for mass market either. So it made a per. I mean, personally I think it's a brilliant business decision.

And I think it worked. I mean, you know, I don't, I doubt there's that many Apple Vision Pros in sitting on shelves, you know, waiting to be sold. I don't know how many they've made, but I'm pretty sure that they were.

Able to, oh, they sold out on day one. Right.

And even, you know, as they've been manufacturing more or whatever, they've probably, you know, they can't, the systems aren't there to scale that anyway to make like they make iPhones. Right.

So going back to this idea of, all right, we've got a product idea that we want to build, or we're in the process of building, or perhaps we've already built it. There are three different pillars that we'd like to concentrate on when we, when it comes to thinking about that roadmap of going from idea to paying customers. The first one is the product itself. You gotta have a great product.

Yeah. If you, if your product sucks, you can market the hell out of it. And hey, there have been cases that, that has worked. And hey, you know, Bill Gates did Microsoft Windows for a long time before it actually got to be something stable. Right. But let's face it, that wasn't. They had the money to do it. Right. They had the resources. They were a big corporation. If you're a small entrepreneur and your product sucks, you know, that's where you need to think about, you know, don't do it. It's not going to work. Because, you know, what are you going to get? 20 people that are going to be disgruntled customers in the end? You're not going to build an empire off that.

How do you know if you've got a good product?

For me, the only question that you have to answer is, am I solving a meaningful problem?

Define meaningful.

If somebody's willing to pay for it, the solution that means it means something to them. That is the definition. I mean, if it solves a problem that really hurts somebody and there hurts them enough that they're willing to sacrifice something to get it, which is putting their hand in their pocket and taking out that money that in the end they had to work to get right, that means it means something to them. And if you really solve the problem, then you have actually created a meaningful solution.

Right? So that's step one. You gotta have a good product. It needs to solve a real problem to. For real people out there. And the second thing that we like to concentrate on is community. I remember talking to Saeed Balki and he said, look, people are going to come for the product, but they're going to stay for the community. If you have a good product, they're going to come. If you have a great community, they will stay for a really long time.

But I also think it's just common sense. You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, then you're screwed again. I mean, that's, that's great. And that's unfortunately where a lot of founders flounder. If you, you know, pardon the almost pun there.

They spend so much effort on the product and they do nothing else. And then the product can be great, but nobody knows about it, and they burn out before they're able to create enough interest to make the sales. And so that's why when we talk about community, we don't talk about community being something that you do after you've launched your product. You start building the community.