How to get your first 10 customers - July Pulse Episode - EP#109

I held an actual pizza party for the international students and I pitched them this product. I went to the taxi stand at the Atlanta airport and I literally went around handing out little flyers. I asked my uncle who managed a small office if he would use the phone system and buy the phone system. Literally no shame. You cannot outsource acquiring those first 10 customers. You can't do it. I've seen people try to do it and you can't do it. I mean, he didn't have a booth. He wasn't doing any presentation. He literally got a badge and was walking around and got his first 10 customers just from showing up at trade shows. It'll be exhausting, it'll be uncomfortable, it'll be hard, but it will get you there. I want to talk to you about how to find your first 10 customers. We live in a world now with AI where building product is easier than it's ever been before. You could build a production-ready product, something that you could put in front of customers in a matter of days, weeks maximum. But actually getting those first customers is really difficult. It always has been. But I would argue that we live in a world where it's harder than ever because now there's so much competition. Back to the point of how easy it is to build product, you're competing with not 1, 2, or 3 people in, in a space. You're competing with dozens And so I feel that this is a topic, and when I talk to founders, especially the earliest stage people just getting off the ground, this is the conversation they want to have. Tell me, David, how did you find your first customers? Honestly, for me, first company that I joined, we were doing essentially a reverse calling card service. This is more than 20 years ago, and we were looking for people from other countries living in the US who wanted their their friends and family to be able to call them on their cell phone for, for cheap prices. I literally went to get that first set of customers. I did crazy stuff. I went to Georgia State University. I was in Atlanta. I held an actual pizza party for the international students and I pitched them this product. I went to the taxi stand at the Atlanta airport where all the taxi drivers are from all over the world, and I literally went around handing out little flyers to get people to use the product. At BetterCloud, when we were selling to Google Apps administrators or Google Workspace administrators, IT people, I went to literally any Google event that I could find, Google I/O, Google Meetups, anything to get in front of these Google administrators. And I had to have no shame. I had to walk up to them, hey, I see you're a Google customer. I have a product that I built for Google admins. Can we talk about it? Can I get your feedback? At one point with the, the product from Vocalocity, which was, uh, the Cloud PBX product, I asked my best friend from college— him and his wife had a tutoring business— and I asked them if they would use the phone service. I asked my uncle who managed a small, a small office if he would use the phone system and buy the phone system. Literally no shame. That, that first set of customers, it— you, you need to approach it that way. And the challenge that I find is that a lot of times when I'm talking to founders. Maybe these founders are engineers or they're product people or they're researchers or whatever the case may be. They may be marketing people, but they've never actually had to do sales, and it could feel uncomfortable. It actually could feel— you feel kind of slimy asking for people to buy your product. You maybe you feel uncomfortable, especially I find, especially engineers when they know that their product is a V0.5 or even a V1, they feel uncomfortable. They feel uncomfortable going and pushing it to customers. And the reality is that it doesn't matter if no matter what role you are, if you are the founder of a company. And again, I'm going to say even more so today in the day, in the age of AI, if you are the founder of the company, you are in charge of sales, especially those first 10 customers. And it's, it's going to be hard. It's going to be uncomfortable. It feels desperate, but you have to do it. There is literally no other way. You cannot outsource acquiring those first 10 customers. You can't do it. I've seen people try to do it and you can't do it. And so I want to talk about 6 ways, the very tactical ways that you can go get those first 10 customers. But again, I— you need to You need to get over the fear of selling. You need to not fall into the what's comfortable to you. Go, oh, I need to write some more code. I need to go— no, it— you have to get to a place where you're focusing your energy on this. And, and the reality is a lot of what I'm going to talk about is going into your network, asking for favors, doing that. But, but again, you have to get comfortable doing that. And the reality is, in most cases, your network wants to help you. So I would say the first way— so 6 ways to find your first 10 customers. The first way that I see it works for almost everyone that I talk to is reconnecting with former employers or people who work at your former company, reaching out to those people and saying, hey, we used to work together in this department. You had this problem. I remember because I experienced it firsthand with you, and now I've gone out and built a product to solve that. Someone that you interacted with at that company, someone that you had a relationship with at that company, they're going to want to help you. They're going to want to at least give you feedback, go fight for you. I've seen this over and over. Even at BetterCloud, there were a number of people who left to start their own companies, and people on our team wanted to support them. Hey, let's give this person's product a chance. Let's, you know, it's going to be really cheap because we're one of the first customers getting on board, but I really want to give them a chance. They They clearly understand what we, what we were dealing with cuz they were here for X number of years. But reaching out to those people, and I don't wanna say it this way, but it's the truth, but essentially begging, hey, please, please, please, I need your support. You know me, you trust me. Reaching out to those former employers and team members that you worked with, that's the first. The second is your investor network. And you may not even have investors yet, or maybe you have angel investors, but you're definitely, if you're building a venture-backed company, which I would say 95% of AI companies are today, Reach out to those people that you're talking to, even if it's not yet an active investor in your company, but someone who you've talked to. Reach out to those angel investors, reach out to those people and make it super easy for them to help you. Identify the ideal customer profile that you want to go after. You may not know it. It's, it's day 1, day 10, day 50 of your company. You may not know a perfect one, but choose one. Be clear about why that's the ideal customer profile that you want them to help you get in front of. Give them a list of people that they can reach out to, the specific list that they're connected with on LinkedIn or they're in their portfolio. Ask them for help. Give them the actual email for them to send to those people. Make it literally as easy as possible for those people to make introductions. What I see all the time, especially with pre-seed investors, is when they're meeting with people and they're meeting with founders, they tell them, hey, let me know if I can be of any help, let me know. And most founders feel uncomfortable actually asking for that help. But if that investor really thinks what you're doing is interesting, they will make that introduction. In many cases for them, if you think about it from their perspective, it's essentially them doing diligence on you. They'll go into their portfolio and try to find a particular company that fits your ICP, and they'll make that introduction 'cause for them, they get to learn from that. What is, what do you, what does that company think of you after they meet? Do they use the product? What do they think of the product? But use that when people are offering you that help. Use that. Next is attending conferences, attending meetups, attending dinners, attending literally any kind of in-person events that you can where your buyers are. And it doesn't matter, like, this is going to be— it's exhausting because I, I think everyone, at least I'll speak for myself, I don't love going to all these conferences and flying all over the place and going to all these dinners and going to these meetups. And it's uncomfortable and you have to introduce yourself to someone you don't know and you have to walk around this room and basically cold call people, cold walk up to people and talk to them. But the reality is you need to do that. And in person makes a massive difference. I actually have a company I was working with, they got their first 10 customers, literally all of them came from trade shows. They figured out that at the trade shows they got a chance to get in front of the buyers who they could not reach over email or LinkedIn or whatever the case may be. And they did really, really well. They literally— the founder went to these things. He didn't present. I mean, he didn't have a booth. He wasn't doing any presentation. He literally got a badge and was walking around and got his first 10 customers just from showing up at trade shows for his market. I'm telling you, again, I did this early days going to all these Google Apps meetups. Actually, at one point we started hosting them even when we were still very, very small in our shitty office. We would host them just so that we could be the, the place where these people came together and we had a chance to interact with them in person. Next is sharing what you're building on social media. Put it out there on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on TikTok, whatever social media platform you use, Substack. Go out there and, and announce what you're working on. Talk about why you're building it. Start building that presence. And the reality is not a lot of people are going to interact with it in the beginning. Not a lot of people, even if people are seeing it, what I notice is a lot of people are not going to actually engage. They're not going to comment. They're not going to give you a like, but they're going to see it. And it starts to build just this, this presence for you online. And, and you'd be surprised. Again, we're talking about the first 10 customers. This doesn't need to scale and get you 100. You post once a day on LinkedIn for 3 weeks about what you're building, why you're building it, your opinion on the space. I guarantee you get 1 customer out of that. And again, we're just trying to get to our first 10. Think about how you can go out there and share what you know, why you're passionate about this subject. This is— it, it's— if again, I know this, it feels cringy, it feels hard to do, especially— I, I find this especially with the The most, like the operators that are in the weeds that why would I spend my time doing this? The reality is this is the game. You have to play it. Next seems pretty obvious, but sharing what you're doing, what your product is, all of that with your friends, with your family, with pretty much anyone that you're close with, you would be surprised, right? These are people, especially the people that you're closest with. They're gonna feel— they want to support you. They want to help you be successful. If you reach out to them, and they may not be in your industry, they may not even understand fully what you're building, but if you go out and tell those people— I, the way I did is actually put together an email, put everyone on BCC, and sent an email to all these people and said, here's what I'm doing, here's how I could use your help, here's what I'm looking for. And actually, I got one customer, but I got one really important hire, an employee that I ended up hiring from that email. But it's about how going out there and sharing that out with the world. You don't know who's gonna know who, who's gonna work at this company. People will start forwarding that around, especially if you urge them to do that. And then lastly is cold outreach and cold outreach. Yes, it is hard. It is hard actually today with all the AI slop and all the automation. It, it is really difficult to do cold outreach. But the way that you can break through on cold outreach is you reaching out to your buyer on the other side and authentically sharing with them, why you're reaching out to them, and not that you wanna sell them something, but that you actually want their feedback. So you're building a product for marketing teams, for let's say growth marketers, reaching out to growth marketers and saying, I'm a founder, CEO. I've decided to dedicate my life, essentially my career, to building a product to make you the growth marketer more successful. And I would love if you would give me literally 15 minutes of your time, 20 minutes, just to show you what I'm working on. I would, I would love the feedback. I am not going to sell you. I get those when I get those emails and they explicitly say, I'm not trying to sell you something. I just want to get your expertise and pick your brain. I'd say I take 90% of those meetings, but you have to be authentic. When you get on the call, you have to just show them what you're building. You have to explain it to them. You have to ask them for feedback. You have to listen to their feedback. And probably that's going to take you 2, 3, 4 meetings. Before that person actually becomes a customer. But what I found is that most people, most people who have not been on the founder journey themselves, when they get an outreach like that, asking them for their feedback, their advice, their help, and you're really sharing with them, like, you're the expert. I'm starting this company and I'm reaching out to you, the expert in this, and I want your help. People, when you're stroking their ego like that, people wanna be helpful. They wanna be the expert. They wanna help you. And so you'll see that people will respond to you and they'll come back to you and you'll have those conversations. And again, 1, 2 of those, they will become customers. And we're doing things right now. All the things I'm talking about, all 6 of these things to get you your first 10 customers, they don't scale, especially not with you doing them yourself. They do not scale, but, but that's okay. That's actually the point. That's how you go and go from a standing start to actually building momentum and getting those first set of customers. And all of this, it just assumes, you have to assume that the product that you're building is actually useful, that this thing is actually a painkiller, that it's not a vitamin, that people really do need this, especially today in the days of AI where people are feeling like, oh, I'll just code this myself, I'll build my own agent, I'll teach Claude a skill.— you have to have something that people really want. You have to have something that really solves their needs. But if you have that, what I just talked about will get you your first 10 customers. It'll be exhausting, it'll be uncomfortable, it'll be hard, but it will get you there. And it becomes easier after you get there, after you have a set of customers that you can point to, to— for investors, for other customers, for your team. You know, when you have zero customers it's hard. It's hard to, to, to— you don't have that confidence. Once you get 10 people and they're using it and they're giving you feedback and you're engaging with them and all that, you, you start to build that confidence. It's easier to tell the 11th, hey, I already have 10 customers using me, they're loving it, here's what they're saying, here's how they're using it. It all— but that first 10 is really, really, really hard. And so, um, I, I, I, I hope, I hope that this is helpful. I know this is something that all first-time founders, this is really, really difficult to do. Um, and, and I'm not pretending that it's going to be easy, but hopefully this is helpful. I've written articles on this on the Substack. I've written articles about how to identify that ICP I talked about before. So we'll link to those, and, and, and hopefully you find that helpful. Thank you very much, and we'll see you for the next episode of Not Another CEO Podcast.