How to get First Customers
How to Get Your First Customers | Startup School (opens in a new tab)
Do Things that Don't Scale (opens in a new tab)
- Doing things that don’t use scalable growth channels
- How to do sales
- Sales funnel
- Charge for your product
- Working backwards from your goal
Timeline for startups
“Founders are the one to make the difference between success and failure”
Start-up Curve
How to do Sales?
- You need to know your customers (talking to customers and understanding customer demands)
- Learning Sales will give you full control over your destiny as a startup
- Founders are the ones to do the sales, don’t hire a sales team.
- Know the problem you are solving, your product & your market, you will be an expert.
- Love for solving customer problems
How to write a great email
- should be short (6-8 sentences) people don’t have time to read long emails
- use clear language (no jargon, and buzzwords)
- address the problem
- no HTML formatting
- say you’re the founder of the product & describe your success
- include your website or videos
- ask for a call (contact info)
The Sales Funnel
- Make a list of customers whom you plan to reach out to (using a spreadsheet), this is called prospecting/lead generation. (you can also use a CRM software)
Industry Company Title Name Email LinkedIn Software Airbnb Head of HR Full Name Email Address Profile URL - Contact customers by emailing them or messaging them on LinkedIn
- Schedule a meeting to demonstrate the demo, based on the feedback from the customer.
- Then talk about the pricing of you’re product
- After closing them, you need to onboard the customers, which assist them in using your product
These steps will lead to good customer retention.
Stages in Founder Speak
- List of potential customers
- Email / Message them
- Schedule meetings
- Disclose price / Close them
- Revenue
Stages in Sales speak
- Prospecting
- Qualification
- Sales Calls
- Proposal made
- Sales
Your first customer should be your easiest
- should have a big pipeline of potential customers - prioritize correctly
- sell to your network (much easier than selling to strangers)
- selling to startups (specifically software)
- 95% of people aren’t early adopters - avoid them (that is why you need to approach multiple people with your product)
Charging
“If you don’t charge your customers, they are not a customer.How%20to%20get%20First%20Customers%20603b8a00f5de4314a033ced3a54ca971 How%20to%20get%20First%20Customers%20603b8a00f5de4314a033ced3a54ca971 How%20to%20get%20First%20Customers%20603b8a00f5de4314a033ced3a54ca971 How%20to%20get%20First%20Customers%20603b8a00f5de4314a033ced3a54ca971 You don’t have a company”
- It is a sign that your product is providing value
- Don’t use free trials - Offer a money-back guarantee or opt-out from the annual contract option
- Increase your price until customers are complaining but still paying
Working backward from your goal
- To understand what you are not good at (like good at sending emails, but bad at closing customers), you need to keep track of the conversion rates
you can use a simple Sales CMR software
You need to have enough outreach to understand the proper conversion rate and analyze whether things are working out or not.
Tools for sales
Sales Intelligence and Engagement Platform | Apollo (opens in a new tab)
Close CRM | The All-In-One CRM for Growing Teams (opens in a new tab)
CRM Software (opens in a new tab)
Find email addresses in seconds • Hunter (Email Hunter) (opens in a new tab)
Good Resources for Sales
Lenny's Newsletter | Lenny Rachitsky | Substack (opens in a new tab)
Some Successful emails
