Get Your First 100 Customers with These 17 Strategies

Acquiring your first customers is more art than science. You don’t have spreadsheets full of data to pull from, you don’t have existing segments, and you’re not even sure who specifically will buy your product. You’re just testing out different methods to “see what sticks” and what you should double down on.

The tactics you should be using to get your first 100 customers are a mix of both marketing and customer development. With each tactic, you should aim to not only get a new customer, but also find ways to dig deeper into who they are and what they’re interested in. You need to really know who these people are that are buying from you more than anything else, and then use that information to increase your ROI.

Most entrepreneurs reflexively turn to paid advertising when trying to get their first customers. But in reality, there are a variety of ways you can get initial traction, including leveraging other people’s audiences, using online communities, targeting the right social networks, and more.

Here’s a comprehensive list of tactics you can use to get your first 100 customers.

1. Ask Your Audience

A quick way to do some customer development is to reach out to your existing network and ask them specific questions about your product and market. If you’re creating a product for a specific niche, then chances are you know people who are in that niche already.

You can also run through your existing LinkedIn contacts, find people who are in your industry, and send them an e-mail like this one:

Image via GrooveHQ

You’d be surprised how many people are willing to help.

One of the biggest reasons new businesses fail is that founders don’t talk to customers. It’s easy to believe that you already know everything about your target market and convince yourself that they definitely need your product. But the best marketers are humble enough to talk to their market and validate their hypotheses, even if they know they’re correct.

For example, Hiten Shah did many hours of customer interviews for a project he was working on around helping startups raise money. As a prominent entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who has raised money from some of the biggest venture capitalists, he’s already talked to hundreds of people who have asked him for advice on the topic—but he still did customer interviews.

Though you don’t want to sell anything during your interviews, you can ask the people you talk to whether they would like to be added to a private email list where you send out updates every now and then on the progress of your venture. Down the road, they could turn into your first customers.

Additionally, take one step outside of your network, and step into the individual networks of your prospects. Make sure to ask the people you reach out to for introductions to others who might have an interest in what you are offering. Even if someone might not be a good fit for your product, there’s a good chance they will have a colleague who is.

One of the biggest reasons new businesses fail is that founders don’t talk to customers.
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2. Conduct Market Research on Twitter

A good way to find potential customers who are experiencing the pain you want to solve is by searching online complaints. Social networks like Twitter are an easy way to do this.

For example, if the product you’re looking to create competes with Salesforce, you could for search something like “Salesforce is complicated” in Twitter. Here are a couple of comments that come up:

You could reach out to those users directly, and ask them to chat more about why they think Salesforce is complicated so that you understand how to make your product better.

Other online forums can be good for this as well. If you search “Salesforce is too complicated” in Google, you’ll find a lot of forums and blog posts on which users discuss why it’s hard to use. You’ll get a better sense of the problems that your product will need to solve and the features that will have to come with it. You’ll have a clearer understanding of the words that your market is using to describe their problems, so you can write perfect high-converting sales copy when the the time comes.

When you do searches like these, you also can either confirm or disprove your hypothesis. For example, if people aren’t searching for solutions to Salesforce problems, or you’re seeing a small amount of search results in Twitter or Google, then there might not be a big enough pain point to solve.

Once you get on the phone to chat with these potential customers, be sure to ask them whether it would be okay for you to stay in touch and send updates every now and then on your future product. This way, you can both do your market research and build a list of potential beta customers.

3. Conduct Research on Quora

Another customer development tool at everyone’s disposal is Quora. Quora is a site where you can browse and post questions on a virtually any topic. It can be a great way to gather a large number of answers from people in your target demographic about the product you’re trying to sell.

(Editor’s Note: We recently did an interview with Sarah Smith from Quora on our popular Social Pros Podcast… check it out!)

Quora’s demographics consist mostly of college educated professionals. Because Quora got its first users through tech news sites like TechCrunch, many of its users work in technology. Some of the most followed topics include investing, computer programming, mobile, and software engineering. You can post questions about the pain points you’re trying to solve in some of these areas and see what answers you get.

For example, check out this question where a Quora user asks, “What are some significant pain points in the real estate market that could be solved with software?” There are over 10 in-depth answers to the question by real estate professionals and others with experience in the market. If you were trying to create a product to solve pain points around Hadoop, an answer like this would be invaluable. You can find similar, in-depth answers across topics like personal finance, CRM systems, sales, marketing, and more.

You can measure how much an answer resonates with people by the number of comments and upvotes it receives. For example, the answer to the Hadoop question above received over 100 upvotes and a few positive comments. That shows that other Hadoop users are likely facing the same problems.

If you find an insightful answer to a relevant question in your industry, you can message that user and ask to set up a phone call in order to uncover more details about their problems, then add them to your beta list.

4. Adopt a Customer Development Tool

Most marketers know that tools like Qualaroo and SurveyMonkey can help you understand your audience better. But did you know that they can also help you generate more leads and customers?

If you already know what your ideal customer profile looks like, then all you need to generate more leads is to create a survey that qualifies your prospects. For example, GoodBlogs used Qualaroo to boost registrations by 300 percent for one of their clients.

GoodBlogs helps businesses create user-generated content. One of their clients is the largest livestock trailer manufacturer in North America, and they launched a site for horse lovers through GoodBlogs. When visitors landed on their site, they were shown a Qualaroo pop-up that said, “Do you own a horse?” If they answered “yes,” they were asked to input their email address to receive special offers.

You can do the same thing for your niche. For example, here’s an example of how Qualaroo used its own service to generate leads:

Image via Qualaroo

For this process to work effectively, all you need is just one leading question that qualifies your prospects. It could be as simple as asking them, “Do you need [X solution] to [Y pain point]?” If they answer “yes,” immediately ask them for details like their name, email, and/or company name, and treat them like a lead. You’ll only have to set this up once. From there, you’ll have a steady stream of qualified leads coming in from your site directly.

5. Use Your Email List to Launch

One of the best ways to guarantee sales when you launch your product is to launch through an email list. There are many ways to build an email list from scratch. For instance, you could reach out to people one-on-one through social networks like Quora or Twitter to do your customer development and then add them to your launch e-mail list. We’ll get into some other tactics you can use to build your email list below. For now, let’s dig into how to craft your launch sequence to get as many sales as possible.

A profitable launch sequence usually consists of adding value to your subscribers in the first few emails, then persuading them to buy your product in the last one or two emails. Nathan Barry used the following launch sequence formula to get $16,000 in sales from just 1,200 subscribers:

• Educate your audience. Nathan’s first two emails were long-form, educational emails that are designed to build up authority among the audience and show them why they should listen to you. You can talk about your background, how you started what you’re doing now, and so on. You can also use these emails to build curiosity and get people excited to read the rest of your emails in the series.
• Describe your product. Once you build authority on your subject and build intrigue at the beginning of your funnel, you should start describing your product. The purpose of this email is to tell readers about your product and the hopes and dreams that it’ll help them accomplish, as well as the fears that it’ll help alleviate.
• The launch. Next, it’s time to actually launch the product. Keep this brief and to the point, telling your readers that you’ve opened your product to the public.
• The final educational email. After you open your product to the public, you want to reinforce confidence in the product and end it with a strong call to action to buy. You want to show your audience that your product will help them do something or achieve something that isn’t possible with their existing products. One way to do this is by documenting case studies and testimonials.
• The hard sell. The final email should be a hard sell that persuades readers to buy, and have elements of urgency baked into it. For example, maybe you limit registration to only 10 beta users or close registration at a specific time.

This outline covers all the basic elements of a profitable launch sequence—building anticipation, adding value through educational material, and providing a sales message asking readers to buy your product.

6. Pay for a Spot on Betalist

You’re probably aware of sites like Product Hunt or Reddit that feature products or posts that get a lot of upvotes from the community. But there are also sites like Betalist, where you can pay to be featured in front of a large technology audience.

Many startups have used sites like Betalist to rapidly generate a list of early bird signups. Take FrontApp, for example, a product that helps teams work more efficiently. They used Betalist to generate 400 high-quality signups in just a couple of days.

FrontApp wanted to get beta users for their product, so they decided to go directly to the source and test out some “beta user” communities. Sites like Erlibird and Startupli.st help startups get their first signups by featuring them in front of a targeted group of users, so FrontApp submitted their product to these sites.

FrontApp got the best results from Betalist: They paid $49 to get their product featured on the front page and received about 400 signups (from a total of 832 direct visits). And because many Betalist users are early adopters in the startup world, several of them wrote articles about FrontApp after seeing it featured on Betalist, which resulted in even more inbound links.

These sites typically work best for a consumer product audience. But if your product resonates with the community, you could get hundreds of qualified signups in a matter of days.

7. Get in Front of Someone Else’s Audience

One of the quickest ways to build an audience of your own is to find other brands that have an audience similar to what you’re trying to build and bring them over to your own platform. Trust is a big factor when persuading people to buy, and if you leverage someone else’s platform to build your own audience, you’ll be able to “borrow” the trust they’ve built with that audience as well.

Pipedrive is a sales management tool that helps sales teams close more deals.

They used these two tactics to get tens of thousands of paying customers:

• They applied to incubators. Pipedrive was initially growing at a rate of about 10 to 20 percent per month by the fourth month. They skyrocketed their growth by applying to startup incubators and accelerators like AngelPad, YCombinator, and Seedcamp. In this way, they were able to meet people who ran those organizations and get invited to events, which helped them interact with many other entrepreneurs. Eventually, Pipedrive got accepted into AngelPad, where they were able to pitch and talk to a lot of people over a span of three months. One of the biggest benefits of getting accepted to a well-known incubator is the credibility that comes along with it. Not only do investors take you more seriously, but you also get access to hundreds of other entrepreneurs through the incubator network—and many of them could turn into paying customers.
• They ran affiliate deals. Pipedrive knew that their audience consisted of price sensitive marketers and entrepreneurs, so they decided to promote a discounted deal on AppSumo, a company that promotes other tech-related products to a massive audience. AppSumo has promoted quite a few tech products in the past, including KISSinsights, Shopify, and ToutApp.

It takes a lot of work to build credibility and trust with an audience, so one of the most efficient ways to get sales is by leveraging other people’s audiences and borrow their credibility. You can do this by going to conferences and industry meetups like Pipedrive did or leveraging existing online communities (which we’ll talk more about later in this article).

Another great way to level up on this method is to find an influencer who has a problem that your product or service can fix and then fix it for them. Not only will you be able to leverage their platform in the future, but you will have gained a priceless early-adopter to spread the word about your business, furthering your credibility within your niche.

8. Start Guest Posting

At its core, guest posting is another way of leveraging other people’s audiences to build your own. It’s a tried and true approach that has worked for many businesses. For instance, Buffer, a social media automation tool, used a guest blogging strategy to get over 100,000 customers within nine months.

Here are a few key points to keep in mind in order to get the most success from guest blogging:

• Be patient. According to Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer, he wrote around 150 guest posts over a span of nine months. His early posts barely drove any traffic back to his site, and it took a bit of time until they started to get traction.
• Measure the right metrics. When asked about the amount of traffic his guest blog posts were generating, Widrich said that he focused more on signups than traffic, since that was the metric that was closer to the bottom line. It’s easy to get caught up in measuring things like page views, likes, and shares, but the real ROI of content is determined by the number of paying customers it helps you generate over time.
• Post on the right sites. When you’re guest posting, it’s important to find websites that cater to your target audience and post on those sites. The sites where Buffer found guest blogging opportunities were BloggerLinkUp and MyBlogGuest. You can also use websites Medium or Quora, where you can publish your content directly instead of pitching someone.

Here’s an example of an e-mail that Widrich used when pitching editors from large sites:

Hi guys,

As a guy just starting out with a few basic web design lessons, I found onextrapixel extremely helpful, so just a quick thank you on that note. 

I wanted to ask if you are interested in a guest post that I have drafted, which I titled “10 Tools to Make the Most of Twitter.” It covers the latest Twitter Tools, which help me a lot to stay productive. 

I hope you can let me know if you think the post could be interesting to you.

For reference on my writing style, I published recently on: [list links to other publications]

Best,

Leo

The first line is a personalized note to thank the editor for a recently published article. Next, instead of sending the entire guest post to the editor immediately (and overwhelming them), you should ask them whether they’d be interested in reviewing a draft. The last line helps the editor get a sense of what your writing style is like to see if it would be a good fit for the publication.

• Don’t overwhelm yourself. One of the biggest mistakes that new bloggers make is agreeing to huge blogging commitments immediately. For example, you might decide that you want to post one to two times per day, but that’s a bad idea if you’re just starting out. According to Widrich, he set the goal of writing one post per week to start off. Then he upped it to two per week, then he wrote three per week, and so on. Eventually, he was able to write two to three posts per day, but this takes a while to work up to.
• Notice the other benefits of guest blogging. The benefits of blogging aren’t just limited to traffic or lead generation. If you’re providing other businesses with writing, then you’re actually doing them a favor—and that helps build relationships. For example, Widrich was able to build relationships with sites like Treehouse, Social Media Examiner, and SocialMouths over time by providing them with free content. When you develop relationships with people at major platforms like this, it might turn into other opportunities down the line: You could potentially do an affiliate deal with their audience, a joint venture partnership, or something else that’s mutually beneficial and profitable. Remember that one of the ways to generate your first paying customers is by leveraging other people’s platforms; popular blogs in your niche that already have traction are great examples of audiences this. Once you develop a relationship with the blog owner or editor, ask them to promote your content to their email list or if you can run webinars for their audience with an opt-in link, etc.

If you make content marketing a priority, it can be incredibly profitable for your business. Buffer grew almost entirely through content marketing, as did KISSmetrics, HubSpot, and other similar companies.

9. Focus on SEO

Search engine traffic can also be a good, reliable source of paying customers. The problem is that, for many industries, it’s becoming harder and harder to rank high for competitive search terms because there’s growing competition. If you’re targeting marketers or entrepreneurs, you’ll be facing tough competition for search terms in your niche. In fact, influencers like Neil Patel, Noah Kagan, and companies like HubSpot and KISSmetrics already own the top spots for many relevant keywords in the industry.

So how can you still generate traffic and leads through search despite all these competitors? One way to do this is by focusing on long-tail keywords. Instead of trying to rank for “SEO tools,” try to rank for something more specific like “the best SEO tools for B2B startups.” If you consistently publish high-quality, long-tail content over time, you’ll generate a significant amount of..

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