James Sinclair explains how to find your first customers: people already trying to solve the problem you're solving, who have budget and will pay for an unfinished product. Find 5-10 of them, get on the phone, listen, and lock in paying commitments instead of chasing free testers.
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As you're entering the market and you're entering product market fit, you need to work out your first section of customers. And your first section of customers are your early adopters, early evangelists, EVGs, whatever you want to call them, the people that are currently experiencing this problem, that if your solution can meet their needs and can solve the problem for them, they will buy it. And in general, an early adopter, an evg, will know they have the problem, be hyper aware of the problem, is usually paying or in some way crafting some tools together to solve the problem, and therefore has some budget. And essentially what you're trying to identify is what is the Persona, what are the traits or the requirements or the functional aspects of that person's role that makes them an early adopter. Go find them, get on the phone with them, talk through what you're building, learn from them, listen to them to make sure your product can meet the requirements they have that will let them actually pay for it and use it. And I think it's important to quote, and I'm looking at it now because I pulled it up, a quote from Steve Blank, his book the Four Steps to Epiphany. And he says, if early evangelists are a special breed of customers willing to take a risk on your startup's product or service because they can actually envision its potential to solve a critical and immediate problem and they have the budget to purchase it, what you need to listen, that word is the potential. Your solution doesn't have to do everything today. The early vangers, the early adopter just has to see that it's on its way there, that they want to join, they want to get on the boat with you as you go, they want to be part of the conversation, conversation as you go. And this is different from kind of casual product lookers, maybe people in your network who were willing to have a peep at the solution, willing to kick the tires. That's not an early evangelist. And this is different from people who are like, well, I'm going to do a freemium model. A freemium model requires market awareness, requires a funnel of leads coming in of which some percentage might convert. No. Who are your five or ten people that you can go out to and show that you can solve this problem and they are willing to take that leap. They want to get on board. And if you listen to their feedback and if you find those people, that's your evg. And that's what you need to be thinking about right now. Who are those people and what do you have to do to get them to take the leap on your underfunded, no customer, early stage, high risk startup. And you've got to balance that with the amount of value you are delivering with them. Which is why your early evangelists have to already have this problem, be aware of this problem, already be trying to solve it. And they need to have budget because they need to pay for this solution. They need to be vested free. Doesn't work. You need a paying customer. Your early adopters are paying. So think about it. Who are they? What are they? How do you go find them? Get on the phone with them now, tell them what you're doing now, get the feedback now. But whenever you're talking or presenting anything regarding your strategy around sales, around go to market, you must talk about your first cluster of customers, the early adopters. Good luck.
