
Ask HN: How did you get your first paying customer? - mailarchis
We are building a web application targeted towards educational institutions. We have recently started the sales process and have begun with making cold calls/visits to potential customers. Will appreciate it if you can share your experience and learnings as you went out to get the first paying customer
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Mc_Big_G
I think you're doing the right thing by speaking with potential customers IRL.
I ran some campaigns for ForeverList.com on Facebook and Adwords without much
luck, though I'm admittedly not a pro at online marketing. My target market is
people with high ticket items that typically take a long time to sell like
classic cars, boats, real estate, etc... I happened to hear about a local boat
show and I scrambled to put together a booth in one night, signed up the next
morning and was working the show the next day.

The experience was awesome. Selling to people face to face is was so
rewarding, I can hardly describe it. It made me despise adwords and the like.
I know I still need to embrace online marketing, especially since my business
is entirely dependent upon traffic, but right now I'm pretending like online
ad networks don't exist.

I only picked up 3 customers from the boat show, but last weekend I went to an
auto swap meet 3 hours away that had hundreds of cars for sale and picked up
another 62 customers. We had a much better booth this time around with custom
T-shirts and excellent fliers etc... I hit the ground running and was selling
HARD all day. It was so awesome. There were people who would have spit in my
face if no one was around and other people who were falling over themselves to
buy a listing. I had one guy chasing me down because he lost my card and
wanted another one so he could send me a check.

My advice is sell in the real world if you can, don't let the haters bother
you (because you WILL have haters) and go far beyond your customers
expectations.

~~~
mailarchis
Thanks for your advice. We are trying to figure out what kind of
conference/places our target customers get together.

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byoung2
I own an outsourcing company with a team of 10 in the Philippines. I started
in August 2008 out of necessity when the company I was working for needed more
work done than we could handle with the few employees we had. Since the
company was based in Malibu, CA, it was difficult to find qualified employees
who were either nearby or willing to commute for the salary they were
offering.

I had been working with a web designer/developer in Cebu for over a year at
that point, so I mentioned that to my boss. After a few small paid projects,
they were impressed enough to sign a contract for ongoing projects. I asked my
guy in Cebu if he knew any more developers, and he found 3 more. I formed an
LLC and with one customer, we were in business.

2 months later, I got an email from a former classmate of my boss who heard
about our service, and he needed a website updated, and the original web
design company was too busy to get it done right away. In the course of doing
that project, we had to contact them to get the server login info, and when we
told them what our company did, they hired us to do web design for them.

It's been like that for the last few years, just getting more clients through
word of mouth. We now have 8 clients, mostly web design companies who
outsource projects to us, or clients they refer to us for content creation,
data mining, etc. The team is up to 10 now. We still have that first client,
though.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that in all this time, we never got around to building
our own website or placing ads. We really don't need to since we get as much
work as we can handle through word-of-mouth, and it will be difficult to scale
while maintaining high quality.

~~~
mobl
Hello, I am looking for the same thing in Phillipines, could you give me some
advice as to where to find good programmers? We are not in web, but in mobile
rather.

~~~
byoung2
I posted an ad on www.philweavers.net

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morisy
We're going through this right now, too, and we've finally found our first
paying* customer.

What I found helpful was introductions, and in this case, even introductions
made through a cold call.

I'd been pounding away for weeks, signing up free accounts and begging people
to actually use the service, or tell us why they weren't when they said it was
something they'd like. I was also sending a lot of e-mails and making a lot of
calls to hand-researched groups I thought would make good customers (like your
product, it's fairly niche).

I'd get blown off, blown off again, and then when I finally made the call,
they though the idea was dumb and we were doomed to failure (gulp). But they'd
make an introduction to somebody who was on our side of the country, and with
their name, good will and bad predictions, we ventured forward. That
introduction has proved invaluable, as that connection, which itself took 3
calls, 4 e-mails and showing up at their office, has been a relentless
cheerleader for us, going so far as to give us a shout out at an upcoming
panel they're moderating in front of our target customers.

So, personal introductions ... by any means necessary. Hope that's helpful.

* _We are, indeed, getting paid, but there's an asterisk for another day_

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jfi
With educational institutions, you might want to consider giving away your
application for free to a few clients first. These sales cycle can be so
bureaucratic it is often of more (unrealized) value to be able to say "we have
5 other very similar clients using this already" than trying to charge right
off the bat. Taking the factor of "I don't want to be first" out of the
equation could be a viable way to ultimately find paying customers.

Although, if you are solving a true, acknowledged pain point they will likely
offer to pay right then and there (these situations are very difficult to come
by!) so be mindful if / when you make an offer to let them use it gratis.

~~~
johnrob
If you aren't solving a true, acknowledged pain then you probably won't even
get people to use it for free. They may sign up - but they probably won't use
it.

~~~
jfi
Yeah - my point with that was that sometimes your solution can be to a problem
they do not realize they have or do not understand the value of what you are
providing, so adding additional barriers to adoption in the form of payments
should be avoided early on. If you think they need to get behind the wheel to
take it for a test drive in order to realize what you are selling, make it
easy for them to do just that.

At CollegeJobConnect, we help companies connect with undergraduates for
internships / full time jobs. When speaking with some HR departments that
"just didn't get it", we'd say: "ok, but why don't you try it for free for the
time being then" - after they jumped on and saw how they could tap into job-
seeking undegrads, it clicked.

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patio11
I wrote this page <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/dolch-sight-words-
bingo.htm> and Google started sending me people looking for [dolch sight words
bingo]. It was, at the time, the most obvious hole in the Internet which my
product filled, and was my single best source of sales for probably a year or
so.

I eventually got savvier about the strategy than "target one SERP at a time
using pages handwritten in notepad."

~~~
apu
I notice that that page has a lot of text on it. Did you start it out this
way, or did you start with minimal text and A/B it up to this?

Naively, I'd have thought that more text = less conversions.

Or is the text there to make it more SEOed?

~~~
patio11
_Naively, I'd have thought that more text = less conversions._

You are correct. If you ever get time travel, please tell 2006 me the news!

~~~
mkramlich
i have a startup that can send emails back in time to any year of your choice
(well, SMTP/POP has to exist in that particular era, but otherwise...)

patrick, check your inbox back in 2006, you have a message waiting

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rstocker99
If you're doing something enterprise-y (which it sounds like you are) then you
should take a look at the article, "Sean Murphy on the first dozen enterprise
customers" that was recently posted to HN here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671852>

It goes through the process of getting your first customers in detail. It
jives with my personnel experience and some others I see on this thread.

Key point: Go through your network and find a way to get introductions to
folks in your target market. Be creative on this. Once you've got an
introduction leverage it to get more e.g. "Do know other folks that you think
would be interested in a solution like this? Could you provide their contact
info?" etc. Repeat.

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toast76
Unless this is a $20 a month cheapie app, the Customer acquisition process
should begin before you've even started building. Otherwise, how do you know
if anyone even wants your product? By now you should've already talked to
potential clients about what it actually is that your product hopes to
achieve, and already have their indication that they'd be interested in buying
it.

How can you be building to a target that you haven't spoken to yet?

Cold calling is going to be a hit and miss affair at the best of times, it's
even harder when you're trying to pitch a product that no one's ever heard of.

The best thing I think you can do is pound the pavement. There'd be dozens of
schools in your immediate area; organise a meeting and see them personally for
a demo. It'll be time consuming, but at least you will have their undivided
attention.

------
jasonlotito
Cold calling. Lots of cold calling business. That and personalized emails. And
trade shows and conventions.

That first real customer, that first real transaction, was a beautiful thing.

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nicholasreed
We got our first paying customer by giving a presentation (using mockups) of
the product and how it would fit their needs, and why it was better than the
solution they were planning on implementing. We convinced them to try our
product by offering a discounted rate, compared to what we planned on charging
companies later. This first sale basically funded development and we used them
as a 'beta' client. Now they are our biggest cheerleader!

------
redsymbol
We used barter to get our first clients last year, which worked pretty well:

[http://ai.redsymbol.net/2010/09/boostrapping-your-
business-w...](http://ai.redsymbol.net/2010/09/boostrapping-your-business-
with-barter.html)

This may or may not be a great fit for you, but it's worth checking out.

------
yankeeracer73
Our first sell was a giveaway, but we absolutely made sure we could use their
name as a credential in exchange for it being free. They agreed and all we
talked about for 2 months was the fact we were working with these guys. Every
email, every call, we mentioned their name.

It lent us some credibility and gave us something to talk about. It always
makes businesses/institutions feel much better if they know someone else has
already taken the risk.

Our first PAYING client came a few weeks later. During the process, we were
pretty open about being early stage and surely got paid less than what we
probably should have, but the openness plus the credential made them
comfortable enough to pay a two person bootstrapped company and we were off
and running.

------
bugsy
How did I get my first paying customer?

One of many stories...

I had an application I had written for my own personal use. I was talking to a
guy who asked how I did something. I told him I had written this program. He
said "I'll pay you $200 for a copy of that." So I took a weekend to add copy
protection, and accepted his check. Pleased that I actually had a commercial
product, I then spent the next couple weeks putting together a web site
advertising it as a product and things went from there.

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sgoraya
We setup a presentation that included 8 different individual businesses (total
headcount in the meeting/presentation was about 20); My business partner knew
some of these folks and invited them to hear our offer. The others, we emailed
- not framed as a sale but to check out our technology and provide feedback.

After the presentation, we had 2 businesses ready to cut us a check and 3 that
later signed and the others provided us valuable feedback and references.

------
osopoderoso
A web application targeted toward educational institutions is not enough
information. Potential customers for one service or products are completely
different for another product. Think about books and sports. If you really
want some good advice then provide more information about your application.
That is a weak input is not a fountain for a great output.

