
How to get your first ten customers (2013) - max0563
http://danshipper.com/nothing-happens-until-the-sale-is-made
======
DarwinMailApp
I loved the part where you mentioned we should ‘Shut up and listen to them’.

This worked exceptionally well for DarwinMail [1], which I built to replace
Google Inbox months before it was due to be shut down.

DarwinMail received initial traction from a Product Hunt release and a
submission to the Show HN section (on the same day).

1\. From day 1, I had a contact us option from which I received tremendous
amounts of feedback which was instrumental to DarwinMail's development. Many
requests & fixes were added to our Trello board via email feedback.

2\. I created a public Trello board, from which every single user could see
that I am adding their suggestions to the roadmap & working on them too. They
could also see the future features.

3\. For every user that joined our mailing list, I updated them every other
week with the latest updates/fixes and features to DarwinMail.

4\. I posted to Twitter regularly on various changes such as UI enhancements
and mini-feature releases. I also had a lot of correspondence with users via
this medium.

5\. I gave away free lifetime coupons to anyone who would share DarwinMail
with their friends. This generated a lot of momentum.

I hope this helps. While there is no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to
getting your first users, I have learned so much from the experiences of
others and so I hope I have provided the same kind of useful information for
you.

[1] [https://www.DarwinMail.app](https://www.DarwinMail.app)

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pimterry
This is both really interesting, and excellent advice.

I've been working on exactly this myself, and while I'm lucky enough to have
found an initial handful of customers from the classic blind selling of my
product, it's ridiculous how much I've learned & reevaluated things using the
actual feedback & conversations with those customers.

For other people wrestling with this, one thing I'd suggest is reading The Mom
Test: [http://momtestbook.com/](http://momtestbook.com/). Great intro into
exactly how to handle those feedback conversations, who to talk to, and how to
talk to them, even if you don't have any product at all.

~~~
Edmar
Mom Test is a great book, just finished it. A short but good one is "Talking
to Humans"

------
Edmar
This is really interesting.

I have been studying this for a while and there are other great HN posts on
this subject:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18490437](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18490437)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534034)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14797284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14797284)

------
Alir3z4
It's interesting that Ads basically never worked for me, Facebook Ads, seems
to be just bots tbh, they hit the website and bounce like less than a second.

Google Ads works good but only to get leads on information or offline service
business where customer have to leave a call back request, but for selling
SaaS, it's just people signing up and barely verifying their emails. For
[https://www.gonevis.com](https://www.gonevis.com), whenever I run Google Ads,
I just find a noticeable drop in pageviews, without Ads I'd get much better
signups that return and continue using the service, but anyone from the Ads
are just bouncing quick and even if signup, they won't come back.

I might be targeting wrong region or using wrong keywords, but after so many
combination, I found it to be just wasting money and time fine tuning
google/fb ads campaigns.

I simply let them grow organically, even though it's pretty slow to grow, but
so far it's fine and I get paying customers.

Good article and very useful information.

~~~
QuantumGood
Interesting. For our local events, we get tons of real people in our area from
Facebook ads. We optimize for event responses (basically people clicking
"interested" on an event). YMMV

~~~
Alir3z4
Good point.

Facebook seems to be useful when advertising to get things inside its own
platform.

Like page signups, event responses, post reach etc, but when it goes to
something outside of it, it will not be that useful as far as my experience
goes.

------
tc7
Woof, timely. I'm doing all of these bad-initial-traction-methods on my side
project right now, and feeling quite burnt out, thinking about moving on to
the next thing.

Perhaps especially when building on the side a couple hours a day, easy to get
wrapped up worrying about what the max return on my time could be, and just
default back to code... and writing these cold emails always takes me sooo
long :D.

~~~
dshipper
It's a pain in the ass, but worth it :)

------
petargyurov
An insightful article. On the flipside, I want to know how to apply this to
P2P platforms, such as marketplaces and freelance websites.

I've always wondered how the likes of PeoplePerHour, Fiverr, etc, first
started. Did they ensure they had a healthy user base of freelancers before
they launched?

~~~
antupis
You probably cannot copy Fiverr it was basically great timing
[https://podtail.com/en/podcast/startup-grind/the-future-
of-t...](https://podtail.com/en/podcast/startup-grind/the-future-of-the-gig-
economy-with-micha-kauffman-/)

------
natvod
Something that I found works well is just emailing influential people who you
think would really benefit from your product and asking them for feedback.
Since you're not selling your product, people (even busy ones) do reply. If
you built a good product, they will keep using it (and maybe even tell other
people about it) and if there are kinks that need to be ironed out, that's
great to know as well.

This is apparently how Ilya from Datanyze got his first customer. He cold
emailed Ben (then vice president at KISSmetrics) asking for feedback
([https://artofemails.com/cold-emails#feedback](https://artofemails.com/cold-
emails#feedback)).

~~~
yread
I do this and got some good feedback but also some "is great you're interested
in my services I charge 400 eur/h. Are you interested?"

------
JunaidBhai
Interesting article with excellent advice. I would've loved to read some
content around communities where you can validate your MVP, get feedback, and
even prospective customers.

When we started [https://draftss.com](https://draftss.com) we got our initial
10+ customers with showcasing our product on these communities that landed us
with $3000+ in revenues within the first month itself.

~~~
eloff
Which communities did you join?

~~~
JunaidBhai
Back in the day, we primarily showcased our productized service on
IndieHackers and ProductHunt. I have covered majority of the activities we did
during our launch here: [https://draftss.com/blog/zero-to-3325-mrr-
in-30-days/](https://draftss.com/blog/zero-to-3325-mrr-in-30-days/)

------
breadandcrumbel
I love this kind of articles.

My dad have his own company. I remember how he used to tell me that he will
never forget his first client and after that getting the 2nd client was
easier.

------
alphadevx
Great article, and while also relevant for B2C in some parts, I'd love to read
advice dedicated to B2C (SAAS in particular). Anyone got any nice links to
share?

~~~
dshipper
I don't personally, but a lot of this stuff is relevant for B2C. I would say,
though, using Google / Facebook ads to drive traffic to a landing page in B2C
is an excellent way to start (even though I recommend against it in this
article.)

You'll get a lot of the same benefits of cold calling (which is harder to do
with b2c products.)

------
auspex
Good Post. He has sort of confused 'sales' with 'marketing' though, since most
of what he talks about is marketing, but the main takeaways are sound!

------
superasn
This is very good advice. Regarding finding emails you can also use a service
like hunterio which can make your job easier compared to doing reverse dns
yourself.

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crispyporkbites
in summary, find people, talk to them

one on one

it's hard!

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ideasRgood
I have been quite passive with my customers, probably a flaw in my engineering
decision making.

But I have received little feedback from paid customers. They are quiet.

I also think the way you treat customers has a lot to do with the cost of the
product. Sell a 10$ book, at most you can hope they buy book 2.

